Cleveland State Grits Out Victory Over St. Bonaventure: Five Observations

Led by Colbi Maples’ team-high 23 points, Cleveland State opened the CSU Invitational with a 75-71 win over a persistent St. Bonaventure squad on Wednesday evening in Woodling Gymnasium.

Here are five things that stood out, as the Vikings improved to 5-1 overall:

1. The second half of the game was, quite literally, a basket-for-basket affair, as neither team was able to earn more than four points of separation until a couple of key plays by Jada Leonard in the final quarter. First, the redshirt junior grabbed one of her five steals in the chaos following the rebound of a missed free throw by St. Bonaventure’s Aaliyah Parker, and took it the other way for a runout layup.

Just over a minute later, Leonard’s lunging bucket on an iso drive gave Cleveland State a 64-58 advantage – the Vikings’ largest lead of the night – with 3:54 remaining.

Leonard wound up with 17 points on 7-for-10 shooting, along with those five takeaways.

The work was hardly complete from there, as the Bonnies forced CSU to continue scoring to maintain their hard-earned edge. Izabella Zingaro and Macey Fegan hit important shots late on, before Zingaro left a spectacular feed over her shoulder to a driving Shay Magassa, which gave CSU a 70-66 lead with 35 seconds left. A sequence of free throws got the result over the finish line.

“I feel like we just stuck together really well as a team, and we fought, and we held good composure at the end when it was really close, and then pulled it out,” guard Sarah Hurley offered.

After five days of lament concerning a stretch run that doomed a winnable game at Northwestern on Friday, the SBU victory provided the opposite feeling.

“There’s no way you can question the amount of fight that this team has,” Chris Kielsmeier said. “They’ve proven it time and time again, and when the moment came, we had to make some big-time plays down the stretch, and do some things that are hard to score on, and we finished it. It’s really tough to do that against a really good basketball team.”

2. On the very first possession of the game, the Vikings surrendered a steal and subsequent fast break bucket to SBU’s Laycee Drake. Drake finished with five takeaways in the first half alone, and ended up with six total, alongside 23 points, which equaled Maples for the game high (“she’s tough as heck,” Kielsmeier marveled).

Quick start for the Brown and White 🟤⚪️#Unfurl pic.twitter.com/cGTIBO8QAO

— Bonnies Women's Basketball (@BonniesWBB) November 26, 2025

Drake’s 2-0 play was just the beginning of CSU’s troubles taking care of the ball, an epidemic that resulted in six turnovers during the first six minutes of the opening quarter, and eight total in the frame. Largely as a result, the Bonnies attempted 20 field goals in those first ten minutes, to just 12 for Cleveland State.

Later on, back-to-back turnovers helped fuel a 10-0 SBU run in the second quarter that gave the visitors their largest lead of the evening, 29-22.

“I don’t know what it is, how you have nine turnovers against Northwestern and their athleticism, and all that stuff, and then we turn around tonight and we’re just throwing the ball all over the place,” Kielsmeier said. “I take significant pride in our coaching staff being able to teach these kids how to play the game smart. You may beat us, but we don’t want to give it to you.”

Eventually, CSU stabilized things, finishing with a somewhat-respectable 18 turnovers, including just five after halftime. The green and white also managed to turn the tables immediately following the St. Bonaventure surge.

Out of a Vikings timeout with 5:59 remaining in the second quarter, Zingaro collected steals in the paint on consecutive possessions, leading to runout layups, first by Leonard, then by Maples (off of a gorgeous pass by Leonard). Zingaro did the honors herself on the next trip down the floor, and that was closely followed by a Maples three-pointer to tie the score back up at 31.

“Anybody that knows our program knows that I don’t want to call those timeouts,” Kielsmeier said. “I mean, we were one minute away from the media timeout, and what am I going to tell ’em? Stop turning it over and start playing harder defensively, which is pretty much what I did. They responded to it, and that was pretty significant, because that was a real rough stretch of the game for us.”

3. Beyond Cleveland State’s improved ball protection and defensive aggression, it’s fair to say that fouls played a significant role in the outcome.

St. Bonaventure spent a lot of the game managing foul trouble to a spate of players, including Parker, Ivona Djikanovic, Kylie Buckley (a former Oakland forward), and Brianna Barr-Buday.

All told, the Vikings made 29 trips to the free throw line, scoring 21 of their 75 points there. Maples led the way with her 10-for-14 effort from the stripe, and she and Leonard combined to salt the game away by going 5-for-6 in the final 20 seconds.

Cleveland State’s 27.6 free throw rate (the percentage of scoring attempts resulting in a trip to the line) ranks second nationally. Additionally, CSU scores 27.7 percent of its points from free throws, the tenth-highest figure in the country.

“We’re shooting and making as many free throws as anybody in the country,” Kielsmeier said. “It’s another year doing it. It’s who we are. It’s how we operate, it’s what we do.”

The coach, however, was once again more concerned with the whistles against his own team. Despite appearing to substitute Zingaro with the specific goal of keeping her out of foul trouble, the starting center ended the evening with four infractions, while Fegan fouled out. CSU’s 17 total fouls produced 18 Bonnies free throw attempts.

“The disparity [between free throw attempts by each team] isn’t where we want it to be, because we’re fouling too much,” he said. “And we have kids in foul trouble, which is making it harder to run some sets for some certain people that you want when they’re on the bench.”

4. It was impossible to overlook the role that Hurley played in the win. The sophomore was on the floor for a career-high 24 minutes, serving as Kielsmeier’s choice to hold down the three position for most of the game.

The crazy part? Hurley didn’t score a single point, after missing all three of her shot attempts, each from three-point range.

Well, all three of her official shot attempts, anyway.

With 63 seconds remaining in the fourth quarter, the Pelham, Ontario native appeared to knock down a triple that would have given the Vikings a 71-65 lead, all but clinching the outcome. However, the points were washed out after a review determined that Hurley didn’t get the ball off before the shot clock expired.

“Honestly, I knew it was late in the shot clock, but I was open and [Maples] passed it, so I just shot it,” she said.

“Well, we should have sped it up,” Kielsmeier added. “It’s got to get in her hands quicker so that she’s not in that position. You shouldn’t hit a shot like that, and it not count because of the execution. The execution’s got to be better. That goes back to coaching.”

woodling game won. pic.twitter.com/ST8gMNSRk2

— Cleveland State Women's Basketball (@CSU_WBasketball) November 27, 2025

Denied hero turn aside, Hurley was clearly doing something well enough to stay on the floor for essentially every important moment of a close game. What was it?

“She battles on the boards and she plays physical,” Kielsmeier said. “She’s a tough kid. She’s just got to keep believing and trusting the process, and I hope that she understands that all the work that she’s put in it was validated tonight.”

“She doesn’t know when her moment’s coming,” he added, an obvious reference to Hurley’s often-inconsistent playing time. “That’s a fair statement, and that’s hard on players. But when the moment does come, have you put the work in, and prepared for it, and then can you stabilize the game and go make plays?”

Hurley certainly did stabilize the game, as evidenced by her plus-11 rating on a night where no other Viking was better than plus-seven. Her seven rebounds and one steal helped produce that impressive scoring differential.

5. Kielsmeier brands himself as a historian, and consistently demonstrates an appreciation for the past exploits of both his program, and Cleveland State generally.

Often, that includes Woodling Gymnasium, particularly around the Vikings’ now-annual return to its primary home between the program’s 1973 establishment (in fact, the building’s construction that year enabled CSU’s addition of women’s basketball) and 1991, when the Wolstein Center opened.

Outside of a brief period in the early 1980s, the Vikings’ women’s team never experienced a ton of success inside of Woodling. The gym, though, is strongly associated with the men’s program’s best days, particularly during the tenure of the late Kevin Mackey, and including the famous 1986 Sweet Sixteen run.

That nostalgia is fun, but it also masks a lot of the building’s shortcomings. Two years ago, during the previous iteration of CSU’s MTE, then-men’s coach Daniyal Robinson was lobbed a softball “what’s it like playing in Woodling” question after a game, and proceeded to list reasons why he’d never want to do it full time.

All in all, that’s a valid response. The locker rooms are downstairs from the court, the amenities – particularly when compared with the Wolstein Center – are lacking, and everyone, from the fans, to the media, to the teams themselves, has to do their best to navigate a cramped venue in various ways.

“We don’t focus on stuff like that,” Kielsmeier said. “We had an opportunity to coach and play, and that’s what we’ve chosen to do, and a week of gratitude, Thanksgiving week, should put at the forefront. If we need to play here, then let’s go. Let’s go hoop. That’s simple.”

Hoop, they have. Cleveland State is now 5-0 in Woodling Gymnasium since launching its modern series of games there in 2023-24.

“Yeah, we haven’t lost. So how much do we dislike playing here? I think that tells the answer, right?”