Thanks to fast starts out of the locker room to begin both the first and third quarters, Cleveland State was never seriously threatened by Akron on Sunday in the Wolstein Center, winning 76-55 to improve to 4-0 for the first time since 2021-22.
Here are five things that stood out from the rivalry (?) victory.
1. Jada Leonard could stand as the first, second, and third observations for the Vikings, and it wouldn’t be hyperbole.
The former Saint Peter’s and Bryant player enjoyed a transcendent afternoon, including 27 points (on 10-for-18 shooting), as well as nine steals. Not only did both of those numbers set new career bests for Leonard, the steals count matched the highest total by any CSU hooper since Dominique Butler had ten against Milwaukee on February 5, 2009.
Dianne Foster holds the category’s school record, thanks to her 11 steals against Kent State during the 1982-83 season. Butler and Lori Johnson are tied for second place, while Leonard has now joined four others in a tie for fourth. Until Sunday, Mariah White was the most recent Cleveland Stater with nine thefts in a game, hitting the mark in the first round of the 2021 Women’s Basketball Invitational against Manhattan, and against Davis & Elkins early in the doomed 2019-20 season.
Leonard has averaged 5.5 steals per game across four contests so far, good for third place nationally, and has added a noticeable edge to the Vikings’ efforts on that end of the floor.
Where does that mentality originate? Necessity. And also, apparently, the support of her mother.
“When I started basketball in third grade, that’s all I could do,” Leonard says. “And my mom loves defense, so I just try to get my offense off of playing defense. Make the game easy.”
“It’s just like a dog mentality. Get the ball and everything else will fall into place.”
She was well complimented by backcourt partner Colbi Maples, who added four steals. In all, the Vikings had 16 takeaways and forced 28 Akron turnovers.
2. Cleveland State has sometimes struggled to start on time in the past. Last season, the Vikings “lost” the first quarter of games 13 times, and several of the “wins” were closer than the eventual final score. Typically, CSU contests often took something resembling their definitive shape, in either direction, during the second and third quarters.
That decidedly was not the case against the Zips. CSU went on an 11-0 run after Akron scored the game’s first two points to take the lead for good, and was up 22-5 by the end of the first quarter.
It seems like one data point in a deeper trend.
Outside of the tough start at Cal State Fullerton on November 9th – attributable mostly to the team’s offense and turnovers – the Vikings have done well early in games. Even including that matchup with the Titans, CSU has outscored its opponents 72-41 in the opening ten minutes so far.
Some of that might owe to defensive improvements. After all, defense travels, to borrow the old cliché; it’s an endeavor based on effort, and not subject to whatever dark sorcery causes players to hit every shot in one game, then miss every shot in the next.
“The game’s pretty simple,” head coach Chris Kielsmeier said. “If you can get stops, you’re going to find a way to get some timely buckets. And it was a great start.”
3. Of course, some extra motivation every so often doesn’t hurt, and Kielsmeier revealed one behind-the-scenes occurrence that might have contributed to his team’s strong opening quarter.
“We didn’t start shootaround very well this morning at all,” he recalled. “And it’s still just a young team learning how much they’ve got to bring to the gym, how much passion and excitement, every time we’re together. Meeting the expectations of the program all day, every day is hard.”
“We finished shootaround great,” he continued. “So I challenged them at the end of shootaround to make sure that we weren’t flat at the start of the game. We really jumped on them, and that was a huge part of us winning the game, just getting out to the start that we got.”
Outside of rebounding – Akron came back to win that category, 36-35 – CSU did well at most “effort” statistics throughout the contest. In addition to the turnover numbers, the Vikings drew 25 UA fouls, led by Leonard, who was fouled seven times.
4. As productive as the afternoon was in most ways, it was somewhat bizarre in others, as several of Cleveland State’s usual sources of offense ran dry.
Maples was part of that, as the Vikings’ leading scorer was held without a point in the first half, though she recovered to finish with ten, along with those four steals. Paula Pique, who has had a strong start to the season, bucketed just one point in 28 minutes.
Assisted shot rates aren’t always an accurate way to track CSU’s performance, given the team’s style of play, but that number finished at an abysmal 36 percent (9-for-25) on Sunday.
Most significant of all, though, the team often struggled to work through the low post. There were a few reasons for that, including an undisclosed injury to Laurel Rockwood that sidelined her for the game, as well as foul trouble that limited Izabella Zingaro to 13 minutes.
Akron’s top two centers, Ni’Rah Clark and Liisa Taponen, had their own issues, as each collected four fouls by the early part of the third quarter (Clark eventually fouled out), so it still felt like there was something of a missed opportunity for the home side.
“Our bigs [got] in foul trouble, which made it a little bit harder for us to get the continuity on the offensive end that we needed,” Kielsmeier said. “But with Laurel being out, Madison [Royal-Davis] had to step in and play some at the five, they hung in there and battled because Akron’s got a big front line. I mean [Clark] and [Taponen] for them are really good, physical posts, and they were wanting to go in there against us, and we hadn’t really seen that yet.”
Shay Magassa, playing primarily in the middle due to Rockwood’s absence, quietly logged a strong effort, a 13-point, ten-rebound double-double. Zingaro, when available, was perfect, managing eight points on 2-for-2 from the floor and 4-for-4 at the free throw line.
All in all, Kielsmeier felt that the Vikings “won the way we want to win it,” with one notable, and surprising, exception.
Cleveland State scored 34 of its 76 points off of Akron’s 28 turnovers. Thirty-four points, loosely speaking, means 17 made shots, and 17 divided by those 28 takeaways is 60.7 percent.
“We want that to be closer to 70 percent,” Kielsmeier said. “So we still feel like we’ve got room to grow with that.”
5. In the last few years, CSU hasn’t thrown up too many games that could truly be considered clunkers. One that clearly fell into that category, however, was last season’s meeting with Akron, played exactly 365 days before this year’s entry.
At the time, the Vikings were at the very beginning of confronting Maples’ season-ending ACL tear, and that afternoon in James A. Rhodes Arena was the first full game of Macey Fegan and Mickayla Perdue playing their new backcourt positions. Thanks, at least in part, to that, Akron surged late and took an 85-74 decision.
In some sense, Sunday was a chance to right a previous wrong, but Kielsmeier saw it as something broader than that.
“It’s a rivalry game,” he said. “We’re 30 minutes apart, and I don’t think there’s two schools in the country that wouldn’t say if you’re 30 minutes apart, that it’s important to beat each other.”
“They got us last year, they played really well. We didn’t feel like we played all that well, but they beat us. I mean, they scored 80-some points and took it from us, and we knew that we needed to be ready to play today.”
Rivalry game? Perhaps, to some degree. The Zips, of course, are archrivals with a school even nearer to them than CSU, Kent State. The Vikings, meanwhile, are chiefly concerned by a geographic rivalry with Youngstown State, and a competitive rivalry with Green Bay.
Still, Cleveland State did its best to lean into the idea of a feud, including specialty “216” t-shirts sold in the concourse.
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