After Rylee Sagester buried eight three-pointers on December 16th and made Cleveland State sweat out a tougher-than-anticipated victory over Wright State, Vikings head coach Chris Kielsmeier warned that his team’s perimeter defense was going to get them beat eventually.
He said it again on December 29th, when deep balls by Jada Donaldson, Anna Lutz and downtrodden Milwaukee forced CSU to squeak by in overtime.
On Friday, he finally found an opposing backcourt that made him look prophetic: Maddy Skorupski and Macy Smith, who led their Oakland team to a 71-68 victory over the Vikings in Rochester, MI by accounting for 47 of those 71 points on 18-for-35 shooting.
The duo combined to put the Golden Grizzlies ahead for good with 2:33 remaining, when Smith picked off an errant Mickayla Perdue pass and fed the ball ahead to Skorupski. The reigning Horizon League player of the week laid it in while being fouled, then converted the free throw for the final three of her 25 scores, and a 69-67 OU lead.
Before seeing its ten-game winning streak fall by the wayside while dropping to 12-3 (4-1 Horizon League), CSU had, essentially, four chances for an immediate response, but only managed one point. A pair of Sara Guerreiro misses produced offensive rebounds, leading to Jordana Reisma drawing a fifth foul against her counterpart, Oakland’s Lianna Baxter. Reisma made her first free throw, and Destiny Leo rebounded the second, but Perdue then misfired from behind the arc.
After Perdue’s runner went off of the back of the rim on the following Vikings possession, the visitors were forced to foul, and Kylie Buckley – Baxter’s replacement in the game – hit a pair of free throws that stood as the final margin, once Cleveland State couldn’t generate an open look for a tying three-pointer in the dying seconds.
“I think that we have been here so much, we always say that we’ve played so many close games that we’re always able to close it out,” Smith said after her team earned its third one-possession victory in its last four games. “I just think that we trust each other, we trust the plan, the trust that we have always helps us finish games like this.”
Prior to those decisive moments, there were several points of the evening where Cleveland State would build a modest lead of five, seven, or nine points and seem poised to assert control. Each time, OU had a quick answer on their way to winning to snapping a 13-game losing streak against the Vikings, dating back to December 28, 2017.
The last of those came midway through the third quarter, when a corner three-pointer by Grace Ellis gave the Vikings a 46-39 lead. A jumper by Skorupski and a three-pointer from Smith had that advantage down to two a couple minutes later, and though Perdue immediately hit a triple to push it back to five, Smith and Skorupski accounted for seven of the quarter’s final nine points. That push closed the affair to a one-point contest entering the fourth period.
CSU also had a lead of 15-6 late in the first quarter before Oakland went on a 9-0 run behind Smith, Skorupski, and Jasmine Dupree-Hebert. A pair of Leo threes gave the Vikings a 23-17 lead midway through the second quarter, but OU scored 11 of the game’s next 15 points, with back-to-back threes by Skorupski and Smith giving the Golden Grizzlies their first lead, just before halftime.
“We’ve been skating by for a long time, and the system’s just not firing,” Kielsmeier said. “There’s certain moments of it that seems to be able to take control of the game at some point, and then we give it back. It’s just all over the place. It’s just the same story, the same thing we’ve been dealing with all year.”
Of course, for all of those flaws, Cleveland State has managed to win far more often than not this season. On Friday, though, they ran into an OU team that was perhaps uniquely conditioned to persevere, given that the Golden Grizzlies endured the abrupt retirement of long-time head coach Jeff Tungate less than a month ago, on December 9th, and have only lost to Indiana since then.
“Right now, I just want to cry,” Oakland’s interim coach, Deanna Richard, said. “I have to give all of the credit to this team, they worked their tails off, they do it every single day. They’re buying in, it is a phenomenal group to work with, I can’t give the credit to anybody but these ladies.”
“They played together, they played hard, they were resilient. We got down, we got back up, it’s huge.”
The defeat overshadowed a monstrous game by Guerreiro, who paced the Vikings with 18 points – including CSU’s first eight of the evening – seven rebounds, and five assists. Perdue added 15 points and five assists. However, outside of defensive stalwart Macey Fegan and Kali Howard, who had a pair of steals during her brief time on the floor, Cleveland State struggled to offer much disruption on the defensive end.
“There was nothing that changed tonight that hasn’t been really vulnerable,” Kielsmeier said. “And the schedule doesn’t get any easier.”
He’s certainly right about that too. The Vikings will remain in southeast Michigan to take on surging Detroit Mercy, before returning home to play Purdue Fort Wayne next weekend. The Titans and Mastodons – along with Oakland – are the last remaining unbeaten teams in Horizon League competition, now that CSU has fallen off of the list.
