Celebrate Good Times, Come On?
I’m in my fourth season covering the Horizon League, and have found it to be an incredibly low-drama conference. Certainly, there’s no singular character like a Kim Mulkey, someone with the potential to write a headline every time they open their mouth, and while the circuit has a few solid rivalries that flare up from time to time, there isn’t the sort of blood feud that results in heated exchanges of words (or worse) with any regularity.
That’s not to say that everyone loves everyone else, though I do believe that there is a certain esprit de corps in mid-major conferences that doesn’t exist in behemoths like the SEC, since everyone’s engaging in something of a common struggle beyond the white lines.
With that in mind, it was a little jarring when Cleveland State head coach Chris Kielsmeier and his Purdue Fort Wayne counterpart, Maria Marchesano, indirectly exchanged pointed comments concerning the aftermath of the Mastodons’ 78-75 victory over CSU on Sunday.
As best as can be determined, the situation started when Kielsmeier did his usual postgame hit on the ESPN+ feed. In his closing remarks, while eulogizing the Vikings’ 29-game home winning streak that had just ended, he told play-by-play announcer Ed Daugherty that “another team got a win and celebrated like it was a championship, and we’ve gotta embrace that target more.”
On its face, that can certainly be taken as a criticism of the Mastodons’ on-court behavior. However, any interpretation of the comment should probably include the fact that Kielsmeier repeated a very similar thought – six days earlier, about Oakland, on his weekly radio show.
“It maybe woke our players up, to realize how much teams want to beat us,” he said of the Golden Grizzlies victory in Michigan on January 3rd. “We saw their celebration, we saw what they did afterwards. That’s…real. You feel it, experience it, and now you’re like ‘oh, well, maybe [the idea that CSU has a target on it] is really true.’”
It’s probably fair to assume that Marchesano didn’t have that context, however it may read, on Sunday evening when she posted on social media: “When you hit a go ahead 3, with 2.5 seconds to go on the road, and you win that game—YOU CELEBRATE. That’s just what you do! It doesn’t matter who the other team is — at that point every team in America is going to celebrate. That’s really all there is to it.”
When you hit a go ahead 3, with 2.5 seconds to go on the road, and you win that game—YOU CELEBRATE. That’s just what you do! It doesn’t matter who the other team is — at that point every team in America is going to celebrate. That’s really all there is to it. 🤷🏻♀️ https://t.co/Qqnq8h8E6R
— Maria A. Marchesano (@CoachMarchesano) January 12, 2025
Both coaches revisited the situation the next day. Marchesano went first, during an afternoon drive interview on Fort Wayne radio station 1380 The Fan, when she fielded an artfully-worded hypothetical concerning the idea of teams celebrating after beating the league-leading Mastodons.
“I think you take it as a sign of respect,” she said, before telling a story about being unbothered when that situation came up during one of her previous coaching stops. “If they’re not jumping around, it’s probably not that big of a win. I don’t know why anybody would be upset about that. Plus, it’s cool for our fans, it’s cool for our game.”
“Yesterday, it was less about being a big win, and more about how we won. We hit a shot with 2.5 seconds, of course you’re going to celebrate that, even if you’re playing a bad team.”
Just going to leave this here: pic.twitter.com/zD4uBblAyJ
— Kyle from HoriZone (@KyleHZRT) January 14, 2025
Kielsmeier typically arrives at his radio show straight from a team activity, and presumably wasn’t listening to Sports Rush with Brett Rump while reviewing the film of the PFW loss. Regardless, he did his best to throw dirt over the whole thing.
“I’ve said it time and time again, this group has gotta understand how much teams want to beat us, and how much they’re coming after us,” he said, rephrasing what was likely his intended point all along. “Quite honestly, that’s our focus, how we can find a way to do things better on the court.”
Shortly after that, Kielsmeier was asked another question about that ubiquitous bullseye.
“It’s kind of even gotten next level,” he began. “You make a comment about people celebrating, or winning the championship, or something that’s completely, 100 percent geared towards our team…I don’t care who, how, what anybody celebrates. That’s your business. Our business is to embrace the challenge, the target, and go out and produce. We’re not doing that at a high enough level.”
“We make comments like that, that’s geared towards Cleveland State. I’m not the type of guy that talks about another program, cares two licks about what others are doing. We’re focused on us, and we’re going to do what we do.”
With both teams moving forward in their respective schedules, it seems likely that the disagreement will fade from here, as tends to happen with such matters.
Incidentally, Cleveland State visits Purdue Fort Wayne on February 15th.
9 1/2 Days
Kielsmeier said something else on Monday, with respect to the Vikings’ recent fortunes: “When you lose two conference games in one week, it almost feels like you’re devastated. But the reality of it is, that happens all the time to teams.”
Turns out, he’s right.
CSU’s losses to Oakland and Purdue Fort Wayne came over spans of three games and nine days. Given that the Vikings have only lost five and six games total over the past two years, one might be inclined to think otherwise, but it hasn’t been a terribly long time since the team suffered through a similar stretch. Just last year, the Horizon League championship blowout against Green Bay, and the WBIT defeat at Toledo to close the campaign were consecutive games, and also nine days apart.
Even throwing out the postseason – it always ends in a loss, after all, sometimes two – and limiting things to conference games (the scope of Kielsmeier’s quote), it’s only been two years since Cleveland State suffered a pair of rapid-fire setbacks. On January 14, 2023, the Vikings fell at home to Green Bay then, after beating Wright State in the Nutter Center, dropped a clunker at Northern Kentucky on January 22nd.
The good news for CSU? That season ended up okay.
Destiny Fifth-o
When Destiny Leo tore her ACL back in November of 2023, her pursuit of Kailey Klein’s program scoring record fell out of mainstream consciousness. Even with Leo now healthy and again playing a central role for the Vikings, it doesn’t seem like it has fully returned.
However, her three-pointer with 20 seconds left on Sunday advanced the graduate student’s career point total to 1,750, good for fifth place in CSU history, just ahead of the 1,748 scored by Deb Taylor between 1987 and 1991. Audra Cook, who finished with 1,805 points around the turn of the century, is Leo’s next target.
Fittingly, one of the 322 fans who got to see Leo become one of the top five scorers in Vikings history was Dr. Michael Scarcella from the Cleveland Clinic, who performed her knee surgery just over a year ago.
Today I had the opportunity to play in front of Dr. Scarcella for the first time this season. For those who don’t know, he was my surgeon last winter and is a major reason why I get the opportunity to play this game I love everyday. Lots of gratitude! 🙏🏼 pic.twitter.com/MLWYUDIuyn
— Destiny Leo (@destinythreeo) January 13, 2025
While Klein’s record, 2,140 points, is out of reach this season on any realistic calculation, Leo does have another year of eligibility, should she choose to use it.
Air Gradwell
Cleveland State alumna Isabelle Gradwell, a Viking from 2018-22, recently signed with CAB Madeira in Portugal’s Liga Feminina. She’s off to a solid start with her new team, averaging 11.0 points and 9.0 rebounds over her first two games.
Gradwell’s professional journey to this point is worth a bit of a recap.
After playing a graduate season at Minnesota in 2022-23, where she developed into more of a three-point specialist than the all-around wing of her time at CSU, Gradwell signed with PAS Giannina in Greece, though she was quickly cut. By the fall, she was playing for Paraguay-based Felix Perez Cardozo in the annual WBL Americas tournament, a stint she parlayed into half of a season with Bembibre in the Spanish league. Last summer, she joined Freseras de Irapuato in Mexico (Freseras might be my favorite team on the list, as the name translates to “Irapuato Strawberry Growers”).
Now, she’s in Madeira, which is technically part of Portugal, but is actually an archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean, and closer to Morocco (320 miles) than anything on mainland Europe.
Not a bad way to live.
If you lost count, over the last two calendar years (and counting her training camp in Greece), Gradwell has played for six different teams in six different countries. Globetrotting like that for lesser-heralded pros isn’t abnormal – just ask another former Viking, recently-retired Cori Coleman, who played for nine teams in seven countries during her career – but that doesn’t make it any less remarkable.
Go to the gym and get some shots up, kids. If you’re lucky, that work will show you the world.
