On some level, Youngstown State’s 73-70 stunner over Cleveland State in the Zidian Family Arena on Saturday afternoon didn’t matter a whole lot.
After all, the Vikings were firmly locked into third place in the Horizon League standings entering the final day of the regular season, regardless of the result. YSU’s position was a bit murkier, though nearly every possible permutation of the HL’s five schedule-capping games resulted in the Penguins placing ninth or tenth, and then traveling to play a first-round conference tournament game as an underdog.
On another, further-reaching level, YSU’s Senior Day efforts felt indicative of trends encompassing the late stages of the 2024-25 season and, Penguins head coach Melissa Jackson hopes, seasons to follow.
It hasn’t always been pretty, or even passable, for the Guins. Early this year, YSU managed just 113 points during a three-game stretch against the likes of Bucknell, Xavier, and Southern Indiana. A couple weeks later, YSU began a skid of 13 losses in 15 tries, including a 67-53 defeat at Cleveland State in the Wolstein Center half of the season series.
However, things began to click in February for the first-year coach and her extraordinarily young and banged-up roster. Saturday’s victory was YSU’s third in four contests – though plainly, the most significant of the group.
“This was huge, a great confidence and momentum booster,” said Jewel Watkins, who led the Penguins with a game-high and season-high 29 points. “We knew we were capable of this, but we had to put all of the pieces together, and they came together when they did.”
One of Watkins’ trio of three-pointers capped a 12-0 Youngstown State run early in the third quarter. The surge transformed the Vikings’ uneasy 36-26 lead late in the second quarter into YSU’s first advantage of the contest, just 2:05 after exiting the halftime locker room.
Watkins, a Columbus native, missed her first six field goal attempts of the afternoon before finishing on a 9-for-14 tear. That bounceback helped her team rally from a dismal offensive start to score 63 points over the final three quarters, a number that exceeds YSU’s season game average.
“Our coaches told us to keep shooting, those were great shots,” Watkins said. “So that’s what we kept doing, and they started falling.”
“For her to end senior night with 29 points and hitting big, big-time shots, that’s why I brought her here,” Jackson added, before praising the diversity of an assault that featured several flawlessly-executed drives to the basket against a spread-out floor, and a healthy dose of conventional post play.
It also included a sprinkling of timely three-pointers, including one by Bella Samz that gave Youngstown State the lead for good at 71-70, with 55 seconds to play.
Meanwhile, Watkins’ exploits were well-complemented by Haley Thierry, a high-energy, high-effort player who was on the floor for all 40 minutes of the contest, and ended up with nine points, 12 rebounds, and several key defensive plays.
Thierry’s steal after getting a hand on Cleveland State’s last-ditch inbound pass with four seconds left sealed the result.
“I love having Haley on the floor,” Watkins said. “She is fearless, and she is go, go, go. It doesn’t matter if you block her shot ten times, she’s going to keep going at you. That’s exactly what we need, that dog, that fight on the floor, and I’m so happy that she brings that to this team.”
“We weren’t ready to play today, and they went out and played great,” CSU head coach Chris Kielsmeier admitted. “They played with a ton of emotion, they fed off their fans, they hit tough shots too. They were ready to play and we weren’t.”
Watkins and Theirry also played outsized roles in another important area: drawing fouls. Each was responsible for seven of their opponent’s infractions, forcing the Vikings into an uncomfortable amount of foul trouble to a pair of their best players, Mickayla Perdue and Jordana Reisma.
Though Reisma still managed 18 points – including the 1,000th of her career – seven rebounds, and four blocked shots, while Perdue added 11 tallies, both players spent significant chunks of the game on the bench, including much of the pivotal third quarter. Reisma ended up fouling out in the late going, while Perdue finished with four whistles.
Going directly at Cleveland State’s stars was an important part of Jackson’s strategy.
“We saw Micky, we knew she was in foul trouble, so we wanted to attack her and try to get her out of the game because she’s such an amazing player,” she said.
“We fouled way too much,” Kielsmeier countered. “It’s not who we are, we just have to be better.”
The Watkins-Theirry duo won’t be around to see how the Penguins develop over the coming years, as both, along with Malia Magestro, represent the senior class that YSU honored before the opening tip. One standout who could be, however, is Sophia Gregory, a post player who has developed into what Jackson called “hands-down, the best freshman in the league.”
Gregory earned her sixth double-double of the season with 20 points and 11 rebounds, and did it against, possibly, the best competition the Horizon League has to offer at her position.
“What a growth process we have seen right through our eyes,” Jackson said. “To come in, get a couple minutes, to starting, to now, putting finishing touches on a great regular season, against what I think is a really good post player in Jordana. To go at her, to score on her, get her in foul trouble at times. It just shows how much growth she’s had, and how much of a ceiling we have with her.”
For Cleveland State, the game also contributed to a pattern. Or, more specifically, the lack of one for a team that has occasionally looked like the championship contender most predicted before the season, but has also been remarkably inconsistent.
“How we’ve played the last ten days is really indicative of how we’ve played all year,” Kielsmeier said, referencing recent decisive wins over Robert Morris and Wright State that made it appear as if the Vikings had figured things out in time for conference tournament season. Those results, however, preceded the profoundly-different YSU contest.
“We’ve had moments where we’ve been really, really good. I really felt like we were gonna build off of the last two games and hopefully take off. We weren’t ready to play today. It’s hard to explain why.”
Kielsmeier will have four more days to search for an answer before the Vikings host an HL quarterfinal game on Thursday, an occasion that marks a point where losses begin to mean far more than frustration and brutal practices during the following week.
It’s possible, though unlikely, that the game will be a rematch with ninth-seeded Youngstown State, which will play a first-round game at Wright State on Tuesday. Much more realistically, sixth-seeded Detroit Mercy or seventh-seeded IU Indianapolis will be CSU’s opponent.
Not that it really matters to Kielsmeier.
“We’ll focus on us,” he said. “We’ve been talking about the same stuff all year: What’s our defensive rotation like? How did we guard today? We’ve gotta focus on us, and we’ve gotta find some sort of level of consistency from here on out, or it’s over.”
