After Cleveland State defeated Wright State 85-71 at the Nutter Center back on December 16th, the Vikings remained in the visiting locker room for about an hour.
Roughly 20 people in the world know with any specificity what happened, or what was said, in those close and closed quarters on an otherwise-unremarkable Monday night in the Dayton area, with Chris Kielsmeier offering only a terse “getting better” when asked what they were doing in there afterwards.
More than two months later, Kielsmeier still won’t say any more than that about the unusually-lengthy meeting. Neither will Sara Guerreiro, who echoed her coach by simply saying that “there was a lot of growing.”
However, after their CSU team battered the Raiders 81-46 in Wednesday night’s rematch at the Wolstein Center, one thing is clear: the Vikings have both grown and gotten better.
“Sometimes, you’ve gotta have those moments, tremendous growth happened that night,” Kielsmeier reiterated.
One probably doesn’t need to look any further than the three-point line to support that assertion. Since Kari Hoffman took over the Wright State program for the 2021-22 season, the Raiders have often lived and died with the deep ball. That’s never truer than in their games against CSU, whether on January 20, 2023, when WSU set a program record with 18 made threes, or in the December meeting, when they approached that number with 16 threes, eight by sniper Rylee Sagester.
Generally, Kielsmeier is just as concerned with Wright State’s high numbers of attempts – an attempted shot has a chance of going in, obviously – and the Raiders didn’t try fewer than 23 three-pointers in any of the first seven Kielsmeier-Hoffman matchups. That program-best 18 makes in 2023 came through a whopping 42 tries, literally 70 percent of WSU’s shots that night.
That entire track record was buried a few miles under Lake Erie on Monday, when the Raiders made only one three-pointer until the final two minutes of a well-settled contest, finishing just 3-for-16 from behind the arc.
It certainly wasn’t for a lack of trying, as WSU frequently tried to set up two and even three deep looks on numerous possessions, before the Vikings’ defense closed out quickly enough to force a reconsideration of the shot.
“I ain’t saying this because of the score, but that defense fired tonight,” Kielsmeier said. “The rotation was sharp, they threw a lot of different high-low looks, where the pickup was in different corners and rotations were tough. They threw some overload stuff that we hadn’t seen this year. Our players just were on it.”
“Our rotation today was quick, and there was great communication,” Guerreiro added. “We were really focused on what we had to do, and who we had to cover.”
While the three-point defense was rightly the evening’s focus, CSU’s interior did a more-than-adequate job as well, particularly Mya Moore. During Moore’s 17:33 on the floor, her primary assignment was frequently Amaya Staton. Staton, of course, was briefly a Viking herself, and her name is in the Wolstein Center rafters on the back of a 2021 WBI championship banner.
However, the Lorain native is presently putting together an all-conference season on the other end of the state, including an HL-best 8.7 rebounds per game, and she’s also WSU’s top scorer, with 11.5 points per outing.
Though Staton still posted her seventh consecutive double-double, leading the Raiders with 14 points and ten rebounds, she arrived there inefficiently, thanks largely to Moore’s six blocked shots and 13 deflections.
“We needed her tonight, and she was ready to play,” Kielsmeier said. “I thought she impacted the game as much as anybody on the floor.”
All of that led to Cleveland State exiting the locker room within a breezy 22 minutes after improving to 23-7 overall and 14-5 in the Horizon League (not all of which was spent listening to Kielsmeier, as he gives a lengthy interview on the ESPN+ stream after home games), although it also overshadowed a stellar offensive effort.
The Vikings shot 57.4 percent from the floor, led by Mickayla Perdue, who had one of her best all-around games of the season with 20 points, six rebounds, and four assists. Guerreiro’s 17 tallies made her the only other CSU player in double figures on a well-balanced 81-point night.
For Guerreiro, a graduate mechanical engineering student who was named to the Horizon League’s All-Academic Team earlier in the day, it was a third game in February with at least 16 points and six rebounds. However, Kielsmeier argued that her impact this month goes well beyond a stat sheet.
“She has led us down the stretch,” he said. “She’s really grown into a loud, vocal leader that says the things that need to be said, and her teammates hear them and respond to them. We haven’t always had that all year, and she’s kind of taken it on herself. She’s grown tremendously as a person and a leader.”
A lot of that leadership involves retaining the focus of a team that has, realistically (if not mathematically), been locked into third place in the conference standings since losing at Northern Kentucky on February 12th. With the Horizon League tournament now standing as the Vikings’ sole avenue to a championship this season, it’s become paramount that the team continue to improve and prepare, even during games that objectively don’t matter a whole lot in any external sense.
‘We’re focused on getting better,” Kielsmeier said. “We’ve gotta get to work. And we know that there’s so much more potential that needs to be turned into reality. That’s what we’ve done over the last week. We’re playing for something every single night we take the floor.”
“We play to dominate,” Guerrerio emphasized. “It’s CSU women’s basketball. We don’t care who we’re playing, we have to go in, and the mindset is to destroy. I know we’re locked third, but we don’t care.”
