In the aftermath of Cleveland State’s 61-52 victory over Purdue Fort Wayne on Saturday afternoon at the Hilliard Gates Sports Center, Chris Kielsmeier searched behind the visiting bench for friendly hands to high five and fist bump.
His long-time partner, Christy Jensen, was first on the list. Immediately after that, he spotted Vikings women’s tennis head coach Frank Polito and his shorthanded traveling roster, which made a two-hour detour to the game before heading to a match at Western Michigan on Sunday. Kielsmeier then made a quick stop at the media tables before realizing that he had exhausted his options and following his team back to a celebratory locker room.
The Vikings’ boss is a heart-on-his-sleeve sort of guy who is always quick to acknowledge his supporters – before home games, he typically takes a lap around the Wolstein Center floor, essentially just to greet staff and fans – and his team had just defeated the Mastodons, who were unbeaten in Horizon League play and hadn’t lost since Thanksgiving. Number 10 in that school-record 17-game run was a 78-75 stunner in Cleveland on January 12th, a contest decided by a Lauren Ross three-pointer with two seconds left that snapped the Vikings’ 29-game home winning streak.
With all of that in mind, an eye for an eye, a streak for a streak, Saturday’s win was objectively massive, probably CSU’s most important of a season that has now entered its stretch run. That certainly could be enough to explain why tennis players Jenna Redmile and Tereze Vevere unexpectedly found themselves shaking a basketball coach’s hand at the end of a game.
🔁CROSSOVER🔁
— Cleveland State Women's Basketball (@CSU_WBasketball) February 15, 2025
Much love to @CSU_WTennis for making the trip to Fort Wayne 💚 pic.twitter.com/zlungEJiLZ
Of course, Kielsmeier has won loads of big games in his quarter-century of coaching. Plenty of those have carried much higher stakes than a regular-season contest that is ultimately unlikely to alter the Vikings’ collision course with a third-place standings finish.
For him, it was more about how the Vikings won: by finally coming out on top of a close result, and doing so with an oft-maligned defense that held the HL’s top-scoring offense to 52 points, shutting it out over the final 4:27 of the contest.
“How many games have we lost because of our defense?” Kielsmeier asked, rhetorically. “That was Cleveland State defense. It was something I knew that we’re capable of all year, the moment just had to come.”
The coach’s confidence aside, it was a shocking turn of events for a team that has often struggled mightily to defend three-pointers, including just three days earlier, when Northern Kentucky went 16-for-31 from deep in a Norse upset. That NKU loss was also the Vikings’ fourth (of their six total) decided in the final minute of play.
Midway through the fourth quarter on Saturday, it looked like that pattern could play out once again. After an 8-2 Cleveland State run briefly put the visitors in front, an Audra Emmerson three-pointer exploded the home crowd and put her team back on top of a game that it had led by one or two or three buckets most of the way.
However, with the Mastodons then ahead 52-50, CSU’s abruptly-impenetrable defense helped the Vikings close the afternoon on an 11-0 run. The Vikings 21st win of the year involved much less late drama than could have been anticipated even minutes earlier as a result.
“Credit to them, they flew around in that zone,” Purdue Fort Wayne head coach Maria Marchesano said. “We knew that they’d come in here with energy, especially coming off of a loss. Their zone looked really, really good tonight, and they made us uncomfortable all night long.”
That discomfort led to a 7-for-25 line from three-point range, a 28 percent mark seven ticks below PFW’s season-long 35.3 percent effort that ranks 36th nationally. The Mastodons’ leading scorer wasn’t one of the usual sharpshooters like Ross, Sydney Freeman, or Amellia Bromenschenkel, but athletic sparkplug Jordan Reid, who willed home 16 points.
Mickayla Perdue, labeled “a beast” by Marchesano afterwards, took over in the immediate aftermath of Emmerson’s trey, including four of her game-high 22 points on Cleveland State’s following two possessions. First, she hit a fadeaway from the paint late in the shot clock then, after Sara Guerreiro rebounded a missed Ross three on the other end of the court, she drove and scored over Freeman to give the Vikings the lead for good.
The Dons answered with another quick one-and-done, leaving Perdue to once again speed down the middle of the floor and hand off to Jordana Reisma for an uncontested bucket.
Purdue Fort Wayne called timeout at that point, as CSU had a 56-52 lead with 2:52 remaining, but it didn’t help much. Perdue nearly stole a pass from Freeman to Ross on the restart, then moments later, drew an offensive foul against Reid. The Vikings’ leading scorer finally missed on the next green and white possession, but Guerreiro converted the rebound into a putback bucket.
“We hit some big shots down the stretch,” Kielsmeier said. “Micky hit some really tough shots.”
After two more empty Mastodons possessions, one of which erased 37 seconds from the last two minutes on the clock, PFW resorted to fouling – that ubiquitous last, desperate resort of a team that knows it’s probably about to lose.
“We’ve been in [close game] situations before and we’ve failed at them,” Kielsmeier said. “As a coaching staff, we take tremendous pride in getting players ready for those situations, and for whatever reason, it just hadn’t gone our way, because we weren’t making it.”
“Tonight, we made it.”
Perdue’s offensive efforts were supported by Destiny Leo, who scored 13 times (alongside ten rebounds) to move her career total to 1,856 points, now good for second in program history. Reisma also notched a double-double with 14 points and ten rebounds.
The victory, for whatever it might lack in conference tournament seeding impact, reasserted Cleveland State’s place among the HL’s contenders. The Vikings could take another large step in that regard on Wednesday when they host Green Bay, another team with a long winning streak: presently 16 games, including one against CSU.
However, to Kielsmeier, Wednesday’s problems are Wednesday’s problems. For now, he’s just happy that his team might have found its defensive form after what has been a season-long struggle.
“I couldn’t be more proud of every single one of our players,” he said. “It was a complete, total team win from the top down.”
