It’s a cliché to say that sports reveal character, but few situations divulge quite as much as a late deficit in a WNIT game.
So it’s fair to say that when Coppin State scored the first eight points of the fourth quarter to open up a 52-43 advantage over Cleveland State in the second round of the tournament at the Wolstein Center on Tuesday night – a low-scoring affair that neither team led by more than five points prior to that point – the Vikings’ immediate future was a bit murky from the outside.
After all, the WNIT is the frozen burrito of postseason tournaments. Sure, it’s better than nothing, but certainly nobody’s first choice. Adversity in a third-cut postseason event is a convenient time to subconsciously drift in a different direction, to think “eh, this doesn’t matter anyway,” and pack it in. Many don’t even wait that long, given that players from WNIT participants entered the transfer portal, which formally opened on Tuesday, before their teams were even done competing.
However, none of that happened when Chris Kielsmeier called timeout to regroup with 8:19 to go.
“I challenged them, point blank, we’ve gotta go put together the best eight minutes of the night, or we’re done.” the head coach said. “I don’t like to bring that into the huddle, because I never want it to be about that.”
“They could be like ‘oh no,’” he continued, mimicking an imaginary, but rattled player. “The players aren’t ever going to put the uniform on again, it can become about some of those things.”
However, Kielsmeier didn’t see another option, and his instincts about his team’s desire to keep playing in the WNIT proved correct. CSU responded to the threat of oblivion with an immediate 8-0 run to pull back into the game, a necessary surge in a 72-70 overtime victory over the Eagles.
After the stoppage, Jordana Reisma went to work. The starting post, who kept Coppin State frontcourt players Laila Lawrence and Arielle-Vadrelle Belinga stapled to the bench with foul trouble for large chunks of the evening, scored six of her 21 points during the surge. She had help, of course, from the likes of Filippa Goula and Mickayla Perdue. The point guard duo frequently got the ball inside during the fourth quarter, allowing the Vikings to shake off the rust of a two-week layoff with some high-percentage shots.
Even following the vital bounceback, Coppin State’s Angel Jones, who led all scorers with 27 points, and Tiffany Hammond each hit important shots, and the green and white still found itself down 58-53 with 4:19 to go. Once again, there was a reckoning, followed by a response: holding the Eagles scoreless for the rest of regulation time.
“We were different defensively,” Kielsmeier said. “That ball pressure cranked up, [Perdue] was gassed and she didn’t look like it. She put more pressure on the ball down the stretch of the game than she had all game. That’s just through will and desire, how much she bleeds it, how much this kid cares about it.”
Every one of those six stops (ten, if including chances extended by offensive rebounds) mattered, as it turned out. At times, CSU seemed to make the designers at Nike, who chose to print the words “nothing easy” on the warmup tops worn by both teams, appear prophetic. The Vikings committed four turnovers, of 21 total, down the stretch to negate a lot of that shutdown work and make the final comeback more difficult than it could have been.
“It was a defense we haven’t seen before,” Perdue said. “It was a lot of pressure, probably more pressure than we actually prepared for. But we stuck together, and that’s ultimately how we won the game.”
Finally, Perdue broke through with a three-pointer, one of two she hit on the way to a team-high 25 points, to pull the Vikings within a point, 58-57, as the game clock began its final minute. With the score unchanged, Cleveland State had the ball with 11 seconds remaining and a chance to win, but instead settled for a single Reisma free throw to force overtime.
The extra period pivoted in the Vikings’ favor thanks largely to Sara Guerreiro. With her career teetering on the edge of conclusion – it’s over after her next loss – Guerreiro swirled home a three-pointer from the wing off a smooth find by Destiny Leo, then powered to the hole on the next possession to give the home team a 67-64 lead with 1:08 remaining.
In all, the Portugal native delivered her usual multi-category performance with 14 scores, eight rebounds, five assists, and a pair of steals.
Thirty-six seconds later, Perdue drove and found a wide-open Reisma with a no-look pass for an easy bucket, and a 69-65 lead that forced the Eagles to begin heaving low-percentage threes and fouling.
“[Kielsmeier] doesn’t like no-look passes, but sometimes they work, because they think I’m about to lay it up,” Perdue said, while re-enacting the play with her head and hands. “But then I see Jay, and the help-side comes over [to me]. I’ve made those reads a lot.”
“That was a play where we had to have it,” Kielsmeier added. “It was just a tremendous read.”
The victory was Cleveland State’s first ever in the WNIT, following a 2015 first-round loss at Michigan in the program’s only other appearance, and marked Kielsmeier’s 150th since arriving in Northeast Ohio in 2018.
“There aren’t too many times in life where you wake up and possibly do something that you’ve never done before,” Kielsmeier said. “That’s what we did tonight. We won the first WNIT game in program history. That’s a really big deal, and I’m just so proud of our players.”
The Vikings, who are already playing later in the season than they ever have before (the previous record was March 22nd, in the 2007-08 NCAA Tournament season), will host Duquesne on Friday in the WNIT’s Super 16 round.
With another win, Cleveland State could potentially face Horizon League foe Purdue Fort Wayne for a fourth time this season in the tournament quarterfinals. The Mastodons, of course, ended CSU’s plans of being somewhere other than the WNIT in the HL semifinals on March 10th, and represent a tantalizing opportunity for revenge.
“Duquesne’s next. You knew the answer to that,” Perdue said.
