Postseason tournament games are, by their very nature, uncomfortable. Cleveland State’s 55-52 victory over Duquesne in the Super 16 round of the WNIT on Friday night was certainly no exception.
Most of that playoff crucible stems from the fact that everyone involved devotes each ounce of its capability towards preventing their seasons from ending. And, needless to say, anyone still playing basketball in the last week of March – regardless of the tournament – is capable of doing just that.
Adaptability, the willingness to do something less comfortable than expected, is paramount to living up to the “survive and advance” cliché. That can mean any number of things, depending on circumstances, but for CSU on Friday night, it meant turning Filippa Goula into a three-point specialist capable of hitting big-time shots.
Goula, of course, is always an important player for the Vikings as, typically, the first guard off of Chris Kielsmeier’s bench. But generally, the Greece native’s value can be found in her defensive prowess, and the way she seamlessly runs Cleveland State’s offensive sets and gets the ball where it needs to go, which is usually in someone else’s hands.
Entering the game, she had attempted exactly 85 three-pointers across three Division I seasons. Just twenty-nine of those occurred over two years at CSU, after playing at Saint Francis in 2022-23, before she hoisted ten against the Dukes.
Goula misfired on the first five of those tries, and her instincts tried to force her back to her more familiar style of play.
“At the beginning, I was in my head and I was just trying to find solutions, because I was seeing that my shot wouldn’t fall,” she said. “So I was trying to find solutions to how I could help without shooting and hurting the team.”
Kielsmeier, and the Cleveland State bench, weren’t having it, however.
“I’m going to believe in our players, always, no matter what,” the coach said. “I said probably five, ten times in that that second half, ‘Flip, hit that. Get the ball to Flip and hit it.’ I don’t care how many she missed earlier in the game, I know the kid can hit shots. Every player that’s out on the perimeter for us can hit shots.”
A payoff for that persistence came on attempt number six, when Goula outraced the third-quarter horn with a heave from the WNIT logo decal on the Wolstein Center floor, roughly eight feet behind the three-point arc.
The bomb – Goula called it the deepest buzzer-beater of her life – cut Duquesne’s lead, which peaked at 13 points earlier in the period, down to 42-37 and made a Vikings comeback seem not only possible, but likely. In fact, that single play chopped 11 percent from the Dukes’ victory odds according to ESPN, a staggering number for any event occurring before the final minutes of a contest.
Goula’s second made triple, a more-conventional effort with 32 seconds remaining, represented the game’s final, and decisive points.
“The whole team kept believing, the bench, my teammates throughout the game, they’d tell me to keep shooting, keep shooting,” the graduate guard reiterated. “The two shots fell, and it was great, oh my God.”
“We obviously needed every shot tonight,” Kielsmeier added. “Flip should remember tonight for the rest of her life. She should be telling stories about this 50 years from now. That’s what this can do for people. Hopefully I’m telling stories about it 50 years from now. Maybe not that long, but I’ll try.”
In a sense, those long-term memories and stories wouldn’t be possible without a putrid first half, one that would fit on any list of the worst 20-minute stretches any Vikings team has produced. After taking an early, but ill-fated, 9-7 lead, CSU didn’t score for the next 7:48, while Duquesne steadily built a 21-9 advantage. Thanks to the likes of Jerni Kiaku (a game-high 15 points and nine rebounds) and Mackenzie Blackford (12 points), that margin would essentially survive intact well into the third quarter.
Cleveland State managed only 18 first-half points, while shooting 8-for-29 overall and just 1-for-13 from three-point range. Additionally, star post player Jordana Reisma collected three early fouls, a reality that certainly contributed plenty to the Vikings’ struggles.
The good news? The CSU defense was firing well enough to facilitate a comeback. Duquesne shot 33.9 percent from the field for the game, while committing 15 turnovers. The Dukes often looked unsure with the ball in their hands, and were locked in a perpetual battle with an omnipresent sixth defender, the shot clock.
“We just seemed uptight,” Kielsmeier said. “I don’t really know how to describe it, but they weren’t themselves. The message at halftime was really simple: we just played probably about as bad as we’ve played in a half all year, and the game is still a game. So let’s go make a run at them right here at the start, and get the thing to a couple-possession game, and then it’s game on. And they went out and did it. They made that happen.”
There is never a shortage of heroes in any close contest, especially in the postseason, but Goula, Reisma, Sara Guerreiro, Destiny Leo, and Mickayla Perdue composed Cleveland State’s quintet on the floor for nearly the entire second half, and each contributed some sort of difference-making play.
Reisma, despite having only one field goal attempt and four points for the game, made a noticeable difference during the third and fourth quarters when her All-Horizon League defensive capabilities returned to the middle of the floor, and remained there for 20 foul-free minutes. Her points also arrived in big moments, including a pair of free throws midway through the fourth quarter that gave CSU its first lead since the early going.
Leo offered nine rebounds and 12 points, with one-third of those tallies coming on a four-point play late in the third quarter that represented a major strike in the comeback. Perdue struggled with her shot for a lot of the evening, but was locked in defensively as part of an effort that held DU superstar Megan McConnell, a national award candidate, to 11 points on 4-for-12 shooting.
“Boy our players defended down the stretch of that game, hoooof,” Kielsmeier exhaled. “We defended tonight, and I know this group has that kind of ability, you’ve just gotta have it in the moment when it matters.”
Guerreiro scored seven fourth-quarter points, largely down the middle of the floor, crucial production given the way that Duquesne successfully cut off the Vikings’ preferred offensive attack by parking an extra defender in the paint.
“It was definitely one of the most difficult games for me to call offensively my entire career because of the way they were guarding us,” Kielsmeier said. “But Sara had some success down the gut late, and that was huge, because it was just so hard to call anything when it’s so packed in.”
And then there was Goula, who scored eight points, four rebounds, and two core memories to help her team advance to the WNIT’s Great 8, and this season’s fourth meeting with HL rival Purdue Fort Wayne on Monday in the tournament quarterfinals.
“We’re excited, and we’re going to get ready for this opportunity, and hopefully we’re going to get the result we want,” she said.
