In Cleveland State’s much-anticipated opening night with a largely-rebuilt roster, the Vikings clocked a dominant 71-49 win over Chicago State on Monday to begin the 2025-26 season on a positive note.
Here’s what stood out from an encouraging couple of hours at the Wolstein Center.
1. If there was any trepidation remaining concerning Colbi Maples and her left knee, there shouldn’t be.
Maples was sublime against the Cougars while firing home 29 points, and looking every bit like the player named the Horizon League’s best two years ago. She did a little of everything, including two of the Vikings’ five made three-pointers and, of course, several of her signature explosive, foul-drawing drives to the basket.
Maples certainly welcomed that return to normalcy after months of rehab and measured workouts, before finally being cleared for action in late September.
“It feels really, honestly, really good just having the ball in my hands again, going up and down the court,” she said. “You don’t understand how much you really miss it until something is taken away from you. So being out there, it gave me a calm that I didn’t even know I needed, for real.”
The scoring total just missed Maples’ career high, a 32-point effort while at Grambling during the 2022-23 season. Her CSU best remains the 31 tallies she dropped on Northern Kentucky during the HL quarterfinals in 2023-24. Still, given the circumstances, it’s probably fair to say that Monday night was her most significant big game.
If there is a modest concern, it’s that the Vikings’ offense might have been a bit too dependent on Maples, given that nobody else reached double figures. It was a balanced effort, at least, with Jada Leonard, Izabella Zingaro, Macey Fegan, Shay Magassa, and Paula Pique each scoring between seven and nine points.
“We had to be carried way too much by Colbi,” head coach Chris Kielsmeier admitted. “We’ve got to get a lot more offensive balance than one player scoring that many points.”
2. Outside of Maples, perhaps the most encouraging thing about the opener was the play of Leonard. The Bryant transfer was a tour de force defensively all evening, highlighted by seven steals, and numerous other disruptive plays that aren’t captured by statistics.
She’s also developed fantastic chemistry with her backcourt partner.
“Me and Jada, that’s like my pea in a pod right there,” Maples said. “I tell her all the time, our defense is really going to help us win games, when we have the defense that gets our transition going easy. So just her being there to bring back that pressure, even though I’m not fully there yet with my defense, but I’m getting there. But yeah, I just think it’s a great thing to have.”
It might sound a bit like coachspeak, but defense truly is the centerpiece of everything in the Vikings’ system, and it begins with the perimeter. The instruction manual for beating any zone defense involves shooting over it so, first and foremost, CSU’s guards need to limit the quality of three-point attempts, or (ideally) shut down the play before it even leads to a shot.
Though the 2024-25 Vikings defense presented as solid in some superficial ways – its 61.2 points allowed per game ranked among the top 100 teams nationally – several of the underlying numbers were alarming. Cleveland State was among the bottom 100 nationally in both turnovers forced and three-point percentage allowed.
The belief is that the tandem of Leonard and Maples can help CSU’s defense re-grow its teeth. So far, so good in that regard, given that the Vikings limited Chicago State to just 4-for-26 from three-point range (and 26.7 percent from the floor overall).
“I hope it’s got elite teeth in it,” Kielsmeier said. “I hope it’s really sharp and chews a lot of things up. I really felt like when I started watching this thing kind of fly around in August and September, that we’ve got a chance to be an elite defense. There’s a lot of things we got to get fixed for that to happen, but we certainly have a chance.”
3. One second-order consequence of Maples’ injury last season was Fegan moving from wing to guard, forming a makeshift backcourt with Mickayla Perdue (who was also playing out of position as a first-time point guard). Fegan handled the adversity well and had a productive year, but it wasn’t an ideal situation for anyone involved.
Now, with everyone healthy, Fegan is back in the frontcourt, and thriving in a role where she can crash the boards, distribute out of the high post, and deliver an infectious enthusiasm that’s a bit harder to produce without a certain comfort level.
“What you guys see isn’t a game day thing,” Kielsmeier said. “Some players really elevate that rebounding and chasing the ball effort on game days. Macey, that’s just who she is, and her teammates know it. I think she’s a great example for how to go about things at a high level and find a way to get it done. Maybe you’re shot, or this or that’s, not working that night, but how much can you impact the game in ways that may show up on the stat line?”
Regardless, Fegan still showed up on the stat line plenty on Monday, including a game and career-high 13 rebounds, along with an efficient seven points on 3-for-5 shooting.
4. Cleveland State’s post rotation appeared relatively straightforward entering the season, as veteran transfers Zingaro and Laurel Rockwood looked slated to carry most of the load at the ever-important center position.
However, Shay Magassa has done plenty to throw a wrench into that assumption.
Magassa played center at her previous stop, LaSalle, though the Explorers’ positionless system varied widely from the Vikings’ more-structured preferences. Superficially, the 6-1 Frenchwoman presents more as a power forward, while also boasting the athleticism to move around the floor a bit.
Accordingly, it seemed like she would serve as Kielsmeier’s utility knife, with “third center” being just one of those tools. But then, Zingaro sat out the Vikings’ exhibition win over Findlay, leaving Magassa to rotate with Rockwood at the position, and she wound up having one of the better nights on the roster.
That seemed to play out again on Monday. Rockwood was the first substitution for Zingaro, the starter. But the Las Vegas native is also a novice at playing as a classic back-to-the-basket center, and has noticeably struggled with her footwork to this point. It manifested in a pair of traveling violations during her first turn on the floor and, from there, it seemed as if Magassa took over as the second option.
Kielsmeier did his best to throw cold water on the situation, emphasizing that his roster, as with anyone’s early in the season, is a work in progress.
“There’s not a 1, 2, 3 in any rotation,” he said. “There’s really not. I mean, we have 14 really good players, and rotations and lineups and all those things are going to evolve and change.”
“I don’t think any team I’ve ever coached in November really has much of a defined rotation, but this team certainly doesn’t, and we won a dominant game tonight. We know that we’ve got a lot of players that can play a lot better, but maybe they played the best they can in the system tonight.”
5. The only true black mark on the affair was an apparent right knee injury to Queen Ruffin.
Midway through the second quarter, Ruffin intercepted an entry pass and took off the other way. Then, while executing a jump stop ahead of a layup attempt, she went down in pain, subsequently receiving attention for several minutes on the baseline in front of Cleveland State’s band. After halftime, Ruffin returned to the floor with crutches and a giant bag of ice.
The scene was certainly a chilling callback to the ACL tears suffered by Maples and Destiny Leo in each of the last two seasons, though Kielsmeier was cautiously positive about the reserve point guard’s status after the game.
“Certainly she’ll get some imaging, but it sounded like there was real optimism,” he said. “It seemed like there was a possibility of it coming out in a good way.”
Should Ruffin miss significant time, it would put a lot of pressure on a backcourt that already didn’t have a ton of veteran depth. When resting Maples for the remainder of the game, Leonard slid over to the point guard spot, while Pique played as the off-ball guard and delivered an impressive 29 minutes – the third-most playing time on the team, behind Maples and Leonard – that included seven points and five rebounds.
On the other side of things, both Zingaro and freshman Hanna Medina Kajevic appear to be recovered from minor injuries that kept them out for a portion of the preseason. Kajevic made her Vikings debut, as did classmate Sur Lozano and Suffolk transfer Colby Guinta, in the final 90 seconds of the game.
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