Chris Kielsmeier and the never-ending chase

Back in May of 2021, I received an unexpected invitation to attend a Cleveland Indians game with Chris Kielsmeier, Shelby Zoeckler, then Cleveland State’s video coordinator, and Vikings assistant athletic director Brandon Longmeier.

I don’t remember much about that afternoon – the soon-to-be-renamed Indians won, though I had to look the result up – but two things stuck with me. The first was the way Kielsmeier, a Chicago Cubs fan, teased the assembled Clevelanders about Jose Ramirez’s approaching free agency and his team’s deep pockets.

The other, more pertinent, memory is my telling Kielsmeier about my new gig covering his team for HoriZone Roundtable, a promotion from “random guy who talks about the Vikings on social media.” He was familiar with the site; in fact, an interview he did on the podcast that spring played a role in my ending up here. Regardless, I’m not sure that either of us fully grasped the implications the move would have for our relationship over the subsequent four years.   

As we were leaving the game, the conversation turned to Wright State’s vacant head coaching position and the difficulty the Raiders would have defending their Horizon League championship after hiring someone so late in the offseason. Somehow, in the middle of chatting, Kielsmeier hit up a couple contacts, then let me know that WSU was probably about to give the job to Cedarville University’s Kari Hoffman.

Sure enough, about a week later, Hoffman was introduced as WSU’s coach.

I’ve always considered that a twin-purpose nugget. On one hand, it was a way for Kielsmeier to feed a guy he didn’t know very well something juicy, but ultimately harmless to CSU if leaked. Hopefully, the way I handled it earned some small measure of trust. Concurrently, it made me, the only person in the quartet not employed by the university, part of the group.

Kielsmeier doesn’t necessarily let people in easily, particularly those who deal in the spread of information. But once you’re in, you’re all the way in, on a level uncommon (if not unique) in college athletics.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Ask any number of support staffers or fans that he’s treated as members of the team wherever possible, up to and including championship rings, that universal avatar for team success in a sport. Or, if you prefer, ask the off-court officials he individually greets before each game at the Wolstein Center. Failing that, there are always his thank you handshakes and off-the-record chats with media members once the recorders have been shut off for the night.

After Vikings wins, it’s common to see a parade of family members and sundry other supporters – CSU’s women’s tennis team, the Cavaliers victory frog, and the Greenie Sports Card guys were among them this past season – file into the celebratory locker room for a few jubilant moments alongside the likes of Destiny Leo and Mickayla Perdue.  

Cleveland State, notoriously, has always struggled to find enough people who care about the university or its sports teams, but Kielsmeier gives off the sense that he’s willing to build a loyal community one individual at a time. A lot of that has to do with the way he’s willing to lift the velvet ropes that traditionally separate those inside a program from the paying customers.

He’ll start off with his usual pitch: “Come to one game, and if you don’t like it, you never have to come back.” Then, seamlessly, that one game turns into two, two turns into five, five turns into all of them, and all of them turns into locker room trips, and a piece of net after the Vikings’ next championship.

The process isn’t entirely different from the way social media apps or slot machines strategically trigger dopamine release, but it’s one Kielsmeier understands intuitively as well as any marketing professional. Sure enough, before you can even pause and take stock of things, you find yourself re-organizing your life around Cleveland State women’s basketball.

Those sorts of relationships are central to the program. Of course, it helps to have a team worth the investment.

Most know the headlining on-court accomplishments, including 86 wins, two Horizon League championships, and three unique conference players of the year over the last three seasons.

Less discussed is how Cleveland State has tracked some of the gains women’s basketball has made nationally. For one thing, according to U.S. Department of Education data reported by Crain’s Cleveland Business, CSU spends just over $1.7 million per year on women’s basketball. That number trails only Toledo, Ohio, and Miami (schools with football-sized athletic departments) among the state’s nine Horizon League and Mid-American Conference schools, but it also represents 39.5 percent of the school’s total basketball spending, an “equality” number only bested by the RedHawks and Rockets.

A lot of that has been a relatively recent development, as have measures reflected in that budget, like the size of Kielsmeier’s staff salary pool, and the establishment of a weekly radio show this season, matching the longer-running men’s version.

Of course, money isn’t the end-all and, broadly speaking, that’s a good thing for a school like Cleveland State, which can’t win a financial drag race against most others, even in the best of times.

Spend a few minutes talking with Kielsmeier about something like scheduling, and it quickly becomes clear that the experiences he can offer student-athletes are a top-of-mind consideration when choosing where and when the Vikings play. The Puerto Rico Clasico back in December, for example, wasn’t particularly valuable in any sort of basketball sense. But Kielsmeier didn’t seem to care a ton about Morgan State’s NET when he rushed out of the arena after beating the Bears so the team could make its dinner reservation in Viejo San Juan.

Hey, if you can get to Puerto Rico while playing a basketball season, go enjoy Puerto Rico. Or New Orleans. Or South Florida. Or Chicago. Or even Iowa, as in 2022, when CSU engaged the kids at Kielsmeier’s old elementary school prior to playing Iowa State.

That’s to say nothing of the lower-key efforts at home, from Funky Fridays, to guest speakers and life skills instruction, and even the perpetual competition of the team’s high-intensity practices.

Once, out of story ideas, I asked Perdue what I don’t talk or write about enough, and her usual Southern Ohio conviviality flashed in the quick answer: “How much fun we really do be having!”

With all of that in mind, it’s not hard to understand what makes something like the transfer portal so difficult for Kielsmeier. Essentially, it’s an instant deconstruction of what he’s spent months, or years, trying to build with each individual connected to his program in some way.

Coaches are often cast as villains in debates about the nature of the portal. They can leave whenever they want, the logic goes, so why can’t student-athletes? That’s always stuck me as disingenuous on a few levels, particularly in Kielsmeier’s case. He’s certainly no program-hopping charlatan, full of big promises and bigger ambition, ready for the next challenge after one or two better-than-expected seasons. 

He’s has been at Cleveland State for seven years, and spent a full decade each at Howard Payne and Wayne State (NE) prior to becoming a Viking in 2018. The Iowa State graduate is the winningest head coach ever at each of his first two stops, and is a couple more good seasons away from claiming that distinction at CSU as well.

In other words, he’s certainly accomplished enough to have far more opportunity to change addresses than he’s taken. Look no further than the school’s similarly-successful men’s program, which has seen Dennis Gates and Daniyal Robinson leave for bigger jobs, in both salary and profile, within Kielsmeier’s time in Northeast Ohio.

Instead, Vikings women’s basketball has become a model of consistency at the top of the athletic department, in terms of winning and stability. 

Nevertheless, each March, the portal re-appears. It’s an unrelenting test of Kielsmeier’s ideals, and the meticulous way he’s assembled his program, against the cynicism of modern college athletics. Can relationships and experiences beat playing time, conference prestige, and money?

He wins more of those battles than most might expect. The 2024 offseason, for example, was exceptional for its retention, particularly given that the team had just won a Horizon League regular season championship. Additionally, 11 of the 14 Vikings who have won a major HL award during Kielsmeier’s tenure either finished their career at Cleveland State or are on the current roster. That list includes Perdue, who recently announced her return for 2025-26.

There are some notable losses, of course, now including all-conference second-teamer Jordana Reisma, who entered the portal last week.  

By all accounts, Reisma’s departure was a surprise, though I got the impression that Kielsmeier had at least some sense of the future back on December 4th. After the junior helped the Vikings past Northern Kentucky that evening with 18 points and eight rebounds, her coach sidetracked a question about CSU’s persistence working the ball inside with a big-picture appeal to Reisma’s long-term development and loyalty.

“In a world of transfers, and everthing going on with college athletics…I guess you could call her old school now?” Kielsmeier wondered. “She’s been here for three years, and has stuck with this program, stuck by my side, and I’m incredibly blessed to be able to coach her.”

Now, three years will probably not become four. If Kielsmeier, a guy who tries his honest best to cultivate ride-or-dies both on and off the court, feels a little betrayed by that fact, it only shows that he’s human.

It’s possible that the idea of this year’s portal, or some concern about Reisma, was on his mind after Cleveland State’s WNIT Fab 4 loss to Buffalo last Wednesday, when a guy who typically has an unfair amount of energy for a 50-year-old was as spent as I’ve ever seen him. Perhaps that was simply because the Vikings’ season had just ended, though his demeanor was noticeably different following other terminal defeats, including the NCAA Tournament in 2023, when he cracked jokes about how Maddy Siegrist’s next opponent should choose to stay in the hotel instead.

Kielsmeier also spoke like a guy who had come to question some fundamental things about himself, up to and including his chosen career.

“You’ve been doing it for so long, that you get to the point where you really ask yourself how much you’re putting into it, and the chase that just never ends for us coaches – it just never ends,” he said, slowing over those final, repeated words for emphasis.

“I get they’re trying to find a balance between what the players need and what the programs need,” he added later. “But, I mean, does anybody ever check on coaches’ mental well-being?”

He quickly pivoted to crediting his 2024-25 squad for pulling him away from those intrusive thoughts with its focused tournament run, though undoubtedly, a few returned when Filippa Goula became the first of Cleveland State’s seven portal entries within hours of the team’s bus returning from Western New York.

As unappealing as the whole thing may be, it is worth noting that the first HL award winner Kielsmeier lost to another school was Mariah White, the star of the Vikings’ 2021 WBI championship, who played her final season at Missouri State. However, that summer, Amele Ngwafang, Gabriella Smith, Brittni Moore, and Deja Williams were the Vikings inbound transfer class.

The first three of those additions wound up as every-game starters for CSU’s 2022-23 Horizon League championship squad, while Williams was the conference’s sixth player of the year. Just as importantly, Ngwafang became one of those heart-and-soul alumnae who remains connected to the program after graduation.

That’s proof that there is life on the other side of the portal. There are always more relationships to cultivate, more banners to hang, and more experiences to share.

Reisma may be gone, but the vision isn’t, even if executing it requires a single-mindedness most will never understand.

“[Coaches] are a product of ourselves, we can’t get out of our own way,” Kielsmeier said. “We’re going to work as hard as we can, and hopefully get enough sleep to get up and not fall over the next day.”

“But it’s so incredibly difficult, and I couldn’t be more proud of our staff. It’s hard to do this physically and mentally, but they sign up for it, and they come to work, and they do it with a smile on their face.”