If nothing else, Kate Peterson Abiad is certain that she won’t accidentally sit on the wrong bench when her Green Bay team visits the Wolstein Center on Wednesday night.
Of course, that’s mostly because the home and away benches have switched ends since the Phoenix assistant coach was amassing a program-best 206 wins as Cleveland State’s head coach from 2003 through 2018. Essentially, she’ll just be a couple chairs over from where she sat while leading the Vikings.
Anything beyond finding her courtside seat might be a little bit questionable.
Peterson Abiad admits to feeling a jolt of recognition during film sessions when the clips involve games at CSU, as well as in any of the numerous other places she might encounter the glaring eyes of Magnus, the school’s mascot, in her new role as a conference rival.
“That was my home for 15 years,” she said. “That was my home, and I poured my heart and soul in there.”
“When I see the Cleveland State logo flash up, when it shows our upcoming games and stuff, I see it and I think that’s me still. And then I realize, no, you’re at Green Bay. You’re at Green Bay.”
She remains inseparable from Cleveland State in several ways outside of her brain, heart, and soul. For example, one gathering space tucked within the labyrinth behind the Wolstein Center tunnels is wallpapered with images from throughout the histories of the Vikings women’s and men’s basketball programs.
Glance up, and there’s Peterson Abiad, triumphantly grinning from the top of a ladder with a severed net around her neck. Just above the floor, she’s sitting next to Robyn Hoying and Dominique Butler at an NCAA Tournament press conference table in Stanford’s Maples Pavilion. Somewhere in between those two pictures, or on the opposite wall, she might be in a celebratory team photo, or in the background of a shot of players embracing, looking for her own hugging partner.
Most of those photos are from the 2007-08 and 2009-10 seasons, which ended with CSU’s first-ever Horizon League championships. And, disproportionately, they were taken in the Kress Center, where the road to a conference title nearly always ran through the powerhouse Phoenix at a tournament their home venue hosted from 2007 through 2016.
“This is just surreal coming to work here,” Peterson Abiad remembered thinking during her first days at Green Bay. “I used to walk in here and be like, we can win it all right here. We can win it all. Or, during the [regular] season, like, oh God, there’s going to be 4,000 screaming fans and all of that. They were the rival for so long that it did feel awkward walking in.”
Winning it all was likely the last thing on her mind in 2003, when she accepted her first head coaching job. After all, that was something that Cleveland State had never done before, in any of its conference homes. Peterson Abiad’s predecessor, Duffy Burns, enjoyed some qualified successes, including the program’s first league championship game appearance, in 2000, but was perpetually at or near .500 otherwise. Before Burns, the Vikings were thoroughly miserable, managing to win ten games just once in the previous 11 seasons.
For a while, it was far from certain that Peterson Abiad would do much to reverse CSU’s mediocre-or-worse history. Despite a star-studded coaching staff – current Milwaukee head coach Kyle Rechlicz was around from 2003-07, while the 2003-04 season saw former Tennessee and WNBA great Semeka Randall on the bench – the Vikings were just 28-87 during her first four seasons.
“She was somebody who obviously came in and was trying to change Cleveland State to be a better program,” said current CSU assistant coach Chenara Wilson, who also played for Peterson Abiad during a couple of those lean years.
“It was the build,” said Omega Tandy (Harrington), a guard who joined the program in 2004 after transferring from Duquesne. “We were honored to be a part of that journey, to turn Cleveland State women’s basketball to where it should be.”
Tandy was a bright spot despite the subpar win-loss records, as she led the team in scoring while shooting 38.3 percent from three-point range in 2005-06, underappreciated work that helped the Vikings tread water until a few players who would change the trajectory of the program showed up.
One was Butler, who arrived from Milwaukee during Tandy’s senior year and immediately led the nation’s freshmen in steals per game, before going on to become a two-time Horizon League Defensive Player of the Year. Another was Kailey Klein, a 2006-07 freshman from tiny Cherry, Illinois, who won just about every other award the conference offers, winding up with the program’s all-time scoring record, and her number 23 in the Wolstein Center rafters.
“Obviously, we had some seasons where we weren’t so good, but then we had some seasons where we were really good,” Wilson said. “I was happy to be a part of both times, and we started the trend of winning.”
That, they did. The breakthrough came in 2007-08, with Peterson Abiad’s first winning campaign, a modest 16-13 regular season that became memorialized in decorative photography when the Vikings swept through the HL tournament. The run included a 90-66 rout of Green Bay in the semifinals, a result that still stands as the Phoenix’s worst-ever Kress Center loss, a title game victory against Wright State two days later, and a meeting with Tara VanDerveer’s powerhouse Cardinal in the Vikings’ first-ever NCAA Tournament game.
Cleveland State essentially duplicated the feat two years later after another 16-13 regular season and another semifinal win over UWGB (this one requiring overtime), followed by a championship against Butler and another NCAA Tournament bid, at Notre Dame.
The Vikings never again reached those heights during Peterson Abiad’s tenure. However, after Klein and Butler graduated, she managed to reload with the likes of Shalonda Winton, Imani Gordon, and Cori Coleman, focal points of solid teams like the 2010-11 squad, which won 20 games and collected CSU’s first postseason victory, at the Women’s Basketball Invitational. In 2014-15, a strong close to the schedule produced what remains Cleveland State’s only trip to the WNIT.
Peterson Abiad is a Wisconsinite at her core, after growing up in River Falls and going on to star at NCAA Division III’s UW-Stevens Point, where she was later inducted into the school’s hall of fame. After graduation, she began her coaching career with stops at Indiana and Eastern Illinois, before six seasons at Wisconsin that were ultimately the springboard to Cleveland State.
Nevertheless, she did an awful lot of living in Northeast Ohio, a place she ended up considering a second home. She started her family there, beginning with her husband, Phil Abiad, a CSU graduate and an 18-year assistant coach for the Vikings’ women’s volleyball team. The couple’s two daughters, Mea and Remi, arrived in 2009 and 2016.
However, Peterson Abiad’s priorities quickly shifted after Remi’s birth, and she stepped down as Cleveland State’s coach after the 2017-18 season.
“At this point in my life, I have decided that it is time for me to shift my focus to my own children, and the lifestyle necessary to be a successful college basketball coach does not allow me to do that in a manner that I desire,” she said in the school’s announcement. “I am making the difficult decision to leave this profession that I love, so that I may experience more normalcy in my family life and be more involved as I watch my children grow.”
And that was that. The Abiads moved back to Stevens Point, where Phil began coaching club volleyball, before eventually taking over as the men’s head coach at his wife’s alma mater last year. The former basketball head coach became an assistant director with the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association, the organization that oversees high school competition in the state.
It was an ideal arrangement that allowed both parents to stay involved with sports, without the extensive travel of the NCAA Division I level.
Still, Peterson Abiad explained, “when you are a coach at heart, it’s really hard to not coach.”
For a while, she was able to satiate herself as perhaps the most overqualified coach in youth sports history with her daughters’ teams, though that avenue dried up as they got older.
There were other opportunities to get on the court that worked with the context of her job and family situations. One of those was a season coaching the Oshkosh-based Wisconsin GLO in the professional Global Women’s Basketball League.
That 2022 campaign reunited Peterson Abiad with one of her most accomplished former players, Coleman, as well as several former Green Bay rivals, like Laken James and Julie Wojta.
Realistically, though, she assumed that she was done with high-level college coaching.
“When you leave the profession, you make a decision that you probably are never going to get back in,” she explained. “After you’re out for a few years, you realize that you’re not really relevant anymore. You don’t know the players. You don’t know the recruits. You don’t know all of that.”
Then, last spring, another of those old Green Bay rivals called: Kayla Karius, who was known as Kayla Tetschlag during her playing career between 2007 and 2011, but had just taken over the head coaching job for retiring legend Kevin Borseth at her alma mater.
Peterson Abiad assumed Karius was another in a string of coaches over the years who had gotten in touch to, essentially, check references on a former Cleveland State player or assistant coach.
Nope. Karius wanted her former nemesis on her staff.
“Kate is a dynamic recruiter and successful former Horizon League head coach of 15 years,” she said. “I first met Kate as a player when, on the opposing bench, she knocked our teams out of the conference tournament twice in my career! She has 27 years of college coaching experience and knows our recruiting region and our league extremely well.”
The misunderstanding was quickly resolved, but Peterson Abiad’s family situation remained. And given her husband’s job and her kids’ desire to stay in their Stevens Point schools, she wasn’t willing to move.
That led to what Peterson Abiad remembered as “probably three straight days of long conversations.” But ultimately, she couldn’t say no to the opportunity to return to coaching, even if that meant a grueling commute – it’s 95 minutes between Stevens Point and Green Bay – to maintain the work-family balance that was paramount to her.
“So far, the roads have been cooperative, knock on wood,” she said.
Entering Wednesday’s visit to Cleveland State, Green Bay has won 16 consecutive games and boasts a 23-5 overall record. Thanks largely to some help from Peterson Abiad’s old team, which upset previously-unbeaten Purdue Fort Wayne on Saturday, UWGB now controls its destiny in terms of the Horizon League regular season championship with a 16-1 conference mark.
In other words, there’s a distinct possibility that the former Vikings boss’ return to coaching will produce a third HL championship year.
Those outcomes, however, take a back seat to the gratitude Peterson Abiad feels to have a second chance at her first love.
“I’m just really, really fortunate to be a part of this staff, which is very collaborative,” she said. “And just, really, we work so well together to try to find the best way to prepare our student athletes, and help them achieve their goals and stuff.”
“The opportunity that Kayla gave me here is a chance to be back where I feel like I belong. And that is in coaching.”
