On February 15th, Cleveland State snapped Purdue Fort Wayne’s program-record 17-game winning streak with what was perhaps the Vikings’ best top-to-bottom defensive effort of the season. In that contest, CSU limited the Mastodons to a 7-for-25 effort from three-point range and held the hosting Mastodons scoreless for the final 4:27 of the fourth quarter.
On Monday in Indianapolis’ Corteva Coliseum, Purdue Fort Wayne eliminated Cleveland State from the Horizon League semifinals with an 85-63 result that tracked as the polar opposite in most significant ways.
For one thing, the Dons carved up CSU perimeter for 15 threes on 28 attempts, a number that fell only one shy of the tournament record for made triples.
Lauren Ross, who boasts a 47.5 percent accuracy rate from deep to stand as one of the nation’s best shooters, led that effort by connecting on six of her ten tries, representing all of her 18 points. Of course, as the graduate student pointed out, Purdue Fort Wayne’s offense wouldn’t be nearly as effective without a fair bit of diversity.
“Our starting lineup has four great shooters on it, so they can’t just lock in on one person, and someone’s going to be open at all times,” she said. “So it makes it really easy for the shooters to be open, and you’ve just gotta knock them down when you get the ball.”
“We’ve got a team full of three-point shooters,” PFW head coach Maria Marchesano agreed. “They know that I’m a green-light coach, if it’s a good shot, and it’s in rhythm, and their feet are set, I want them to shoot it.”
The opinions of Ross and Marchesano were well supported by the fact that all five Mastodons starters wound up scoring ten points or more. Amellia Bromenschenkel hit three triples on the way to a team-high 23 points, while Sydney Freeman and Audra Emmerson accounted for Purdue Fort Wayne’s other six made threes.
Two Ross bombs early in the first quarter transformed Cleveland State’s only lead of the game into a 10-5 Dons lead, and Emmerson’s first trey made the score 15-5 three possessions later.
“We started the game at Fort Wayne really well, I think that stunned them and put them back on their heels a little bit,” Vikings head coach Chris Kielsmeier said. “Then the exact opposite happened today. They got some open looks, we made some really big mistakes right at the beginning of the game that allowed them to hit some shots. You just have to be better than what we were today.”
From that opening salvo, the tournament’s second seed rarely needed to look behind them. CSU briefly cut the Mastodons 18-point second quarter lead down to ten at a couple moments of the third quarter, but PFW always had a quick answer, whether it was a Bromenschenkel three, or a driving Freeman bucket.
“We just didn’t have it today, in large part because Purdue Fort Wayne played great,” Kielsmeier said. “We knew how they could beat us: overpower us and beat us up in the paint, which happened, and from the three-point line, which happened.”
“The game is amazing, but boy, it can be so cruel. It’ll chew you up if you’re not ready to go.”
Jazzlyn Linbo – the down-low force that Kielsmeier was referencing – added ten points and eight rebounds, while her defensive efforts helped PFW outscore the Vikings 30-18 in the paint, flipping a category that Cleveland State typically dominates on its head.
Mickayla Perdue led the Vikings with a career-high 33 points, including six three-pointers of her own, though those numbers offered little solace for this season’s Horizon League Player of the Year.
“Obviously, it’s a tough loss,” she said. It’s not what we expected to come and do or show. I’m proud of my teammates. We got [back to Indianapolis] for another year, but it wasn’t the outcome we wanted.”
Cleveland State is now 24-9 overall, and entering Monday’s contest , the Vikings ranked 108th in the NCAA Evaluation Tool, more commonly known as the NET. Those numbers, along with some key victories throughout the course of the season – including that win over the Mastodons on February 15 – might afford CSU a postseason bid, likely in the WNIT.
The WNIT field will be announced late on Sunday night, after the NCAA Tournament and WBIT have shared their lists of participants.
Should Cleveland State earn a place in a postseason tournament, it would be the fifth consecutive season that the Vikings have played beyond the Horizon League Tournament. CSU had four total postseason bids in program history prior to that run, which includes the 2021 WBI championship and an appearance in the 2023 NCAA Tournament.
For the Vikings, it’s simply a matter of resetting as quickly as possible, and trying to maximize whatever might still be in front of them.
“We have a high chance of getting another opportunity to play another game this year, so that’s what we’re going to be focused on now,” Perdue stated.
