It’s quite possible that there were only two things out of the ordinary about Cleveland State’s 72-55 victory over Detroit Mercy on Thursday at the Wolstein Center, and neither of them involved anything that happened on the court during regulation time.
Firstly, it was the Vikings’ annual kids day game, billed as Health + Hoops by the university, meaning that a season-high and youth-saturated crowd of 3,094 showed up to the contest in a caravan of school buses.
After navigating the health portion of Health + Hoops, a series of activity stations set up in the concourse, they packed the lower bowl of the spacious arena. Once seated, they provided a high-pitched soundtrack to CSU’s 19th win of the season, then had the opportunity to interact with the victorious squad afterwards.
“The feeling is great because you’re impacting these kids in a positive way,” Vikings graduate student Destiny Leo said. “It was really, really fun for us, just having the Wolstein packed and being able to have all of those kids there enjoying it and having fun, it made us have even more fun, so it was really nice.”
“I just challenged our players, you have the opportunity today to inspire and impact others,” said head coach Chris Kielsmeier, who grabbed a microphone after the final buzzer and left the throng with some parting encouragement. “Hopefully we inspired a lot of kids to keep playing the game, or start playing the game, because the future of the game is in the hands of little kids.”
The other unusual thing about Thursday’s event was the fact that the Titans had a 1-0 lead before the opening tipoff. That scoreline owed to an administrative technical foul assessed to the Vikings in the final pregame moments, thanks to a malfunction with the red lights around the backboard that illuminate when the game clock expires.
“They were working this morning,” Kielsmeier protested. “They were working an hour before the game, and for some reason they stopped. I guess I don’t know the rule, but the rule needs to be changed. You can’t penalize a team [for a light] that stopped minutes before the game. If you’re going to penalize a team, then give us ten minutes to fix it.”
Ten minutes would have been more than enough, it was a quick repair, but nevertheless, Emaia O’Brien’s technical free throw gave UDM a 1-0 lead before the game officially started.
Kielsmeier was still fuming – at the rule itself, not the people tasked with enforcing it, he reiterated – causing Leo some amusement as she later tried to do her best imitation of the coach’s anguished expression.
Not that the point really mattered a ton, because other than the crowd and the infraction, the game followed Cleveland State’s well-worn script.
Those moments of aggravation quickly became a fun side story after Jordana Reisma produced the first points of regulation time to give Cleveland State the lead for good. The star post player, who was close to automatic whenever the Vikings needed a bucket, scored eight of her team-high 21 points in the first quarter. Reisma also had eight rebounds, three assists, and a 7-for-8 mark from the free throw line.
That last number continued a charity stripe hot streak for the junior, as she has now hit 18 of her last 19 attempts over CSU’s three most recent games to pull her season mark above 70 percent.
Mickayla Perdue, another heavy contributor to the Vikings’ 22nd-ranked team free throw average, also went 7-for-8 at the line on the way to a sturdy 18-point, five-assist, three-steal effort. She scored eight first quarter points, and her four consecutive tallies were central to a 9-2 second quarter run that provided the home team its first significant bit of separation.
Though Reisma and Perdue did a disproportionate amount of early scoring – they had 27 of CSU’s 33 points at halftime – it was Leo who put the game away. The program’s all-time leader in made three-pointers knocked down the 285th triple of her career 48 seconds into the second half to give her team a 38-26 lead. She then buried three more during a 2:34 stretch of the fourth quarter to help balloon the Vikings’ lead to 20 by the late going.
After not scoring at all in the first half, Leo wound up with 13 points on just five field goal attempts, moving her career scoring total to 1,814 points and past late-1990s star Audra Cook for fourth place in school history. It was an extremely efficient outing, but also a departure for someone whose position prior to this season generally afforded much more opportunity to find a rhythm, ten or 15 shot attempts per game.
“I’ve really tried to make the adjustment this year of making every shot count,” she said. “I know that we have a lot of players that do different things and can score, so I really have tried to focus on [the fact that] when I get that opportunity, I have to take advantage of it.”
Detroit Mercy was held afloat almost singlehandedly by O’Brien. Her one-point head start ultimately led to a career-best scoring day, 25 points, driven largely by a 6-for-10 effort from three-point range.
Another of the Titans’ stars, Aaliyah McQueen, was limited to ten points thanks partly to a bit of first-half foul trouble, though the total package led to another familiar beat this season: Kielsmeier grumbling about his defense before reluctantly accepting that, all in all, it’s doing the job.
“I think we need to do a better job with personnel,” he said. “Overall, a lot of positives, we’ve still gotta turn teams over more, that’s been a work in progress all year. We let them play to their strengths at certain times, and we could do a better job with that.”
“But overall, to hold a really good offensive team to 55 points says a lot about how we’re playing. We’re still battling a lot of sickness in our program. Kids don’t feel great, but boy they’re tough.”
