Senior Days are a lot of things.
They’re staples of every high school and college sports team’s late-season schedule, one that typically produces a week’s worth of content for social media. They’re occasions where families can converge around a set date on the calendar, creating something of a reunion for a program’s extended support system. They’re opportunities for often-guarded student-athletes to sit in front of a camera and tell their friends how much they’re loved. They’re celebrations of the careers of a widely-varying number of players, each of whom have made some sort of notable contribution to a team’s successes.
Cleveland State has enjoyed more than its share of success recently. As head coach Chris Kielsmeier is quick to point out, “There aren’t too many programs in the country that have had a three-year run like we’ve had.” Those three years began with a 30-win campaign, a Horizon League tournament title, and the program’s third-ever appearance in the NCAA Tournament in 2022-23. Last year, the Vikings added 29 more victories and a first-ever conference regular season championship.
After Saturday’s 85-53 rout of Robert Morris, a contest where CSU scored the first 15 points and never looked back, Kielsmeier’s team is off to “a pretty good start” at 22-7 overall.
To be sure, a repeat regular season crown is well out of reach at this point, and the Vikings will be underdogs to both Green Bay and Purdue Fort Wayne next month at the HL tournament. However, the coach believes they have as good of a shot at winning as anyone else, after what he called “about as complete of a basketball game as we’ve played.”
That sort of expectation of success owes largely to the seven seniors honored after the win, including Destiny Leo, Colbi Maples, Mickayla Perdue, Filippa Goula, Kali Howard, Sara Guerreiro, and Grace Ellis, and all seven received championship rings for Cleveland State’s 2023-24 campaign during a private event after leaving the court. Guerreiro and Leo now have two rings each, of course, as they were also on the 2022-23 squad.
“They’ve continued to push it forward,” Kielsmeier said. “When you win 30 games and go to the NCAA Tournament, you’ve got nowhere to go but down. This group stayed together as a core and said that there’s so much more to go do, and we’ve accomplished so much each year, and who knows what’s to come this year when we play our best.”
“I’m just incredibly proud of everyone in our program,” he added. “We’ve worked so hard for this. People don’t really see all of what goes on behind the scenes, and it’s an emotional day.”
There’s a good reason for that emotion, as Senior Days are also endings. They’re happenings met with large doses of trepidation, both from teams wondering how they will replace the departing talent, and from the talent itself, as it stares down the real world and all adulthood entails.
Cleveland State’s Senior Day was a not-so-subtle reminder that, just a few weeks from now, the specific collection of people known as the 2024-25 Vikings will never again compete together. Sure, most of CSU’s seven seniors have remaining eligibility, but not all of them. Furthermore, any projected returner could elect to transfer instead, and it’s rare for an offseason to pass without at least one member of the coaching staff finding a new job.
Senior Days are the culmination of a lot, yet the beginning to so much else – both good and bad.
None of that is lost on Macey Fegan, who knocked down three three-pointers and scored a career-high 14 points against RMU.
“It just sucks, because you make great relationships with them, and then they’re just gone,” she said. “But they’re great people, they’re fun to be around, and anytime somebody graduates or transfers, or whatever their decision is, it just sucks, because you’re great friends with them. And when they leave, or you leave, or whatever, the relationship is still there, but it’s never the same.”
That’s a surprising level of perspective for a college sophomore, but Fegan admitted to feeling the same way when she graduated from high school, then again when she transferred to CSU from Toledo last summer.
“When I left my last school I thought about it, and when I graduated high school, it’s the same thing,” she said. “You think about ‘wow, I could see this person less than ten times again in my life.’”
Anyone who’s ever watched groups of friends from high school, college, or work reduced to a collection of Instagram stories knows that Fegan is right.
There is, however, one bit of good news: It’s not over yet, and the present Vikings still have an opportunity to forge a legacy.
“When you put a team together, you’re guaranteed two things – a beginning and an ending,” Kielsmeier said, repeating one of his favorite lines. “The ending with this group is coming, but I want to challenge them.”
“The journey is a book. The book may not be exactly what you wanted to be, until the end is the biggest, most exciting climax ever, and you accomplish what you wanted. That’s what’s out there for us to go get.”
A mid-week loss to Green Bay demonstrated the scope of the trials ahead, but Kielsmeier’s desired outcome still seems possible after the Vikings downed a Robert Morris team that was 7-2 over their previous nine games, and presently sits fourth in the Horizon League standings. Either way, it will be written over the next three weeks, primarily during the HL tournament, where three victories will be enough to for a third straight ring-worthy season.
Senior Days are endings, but since they always precede conference championships, they can also be considered beginnings of endings.
Guerreiro put it a bit differently when she used the occasion to share a Portuguese expression, “hoje é o primeiro dia do resto de nossas vidas,” which translates to “today is the first day of the rest of our lives.”
Indeed, it is.
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