In Cleveland State’s first overtime contest of the season, the Vikings received clutch points down the stretch from both Colbi Maples and Izabella Zingaro, along with some timely defense, to rally past Radford, 62-59.
Here are five observations from a scintillating afternoon in Woodling Gymnasium, as the hosts completed a sweep of the CSU Invitational field to improve to 7-1:
1. Cleveland State made enough important plays late in the game to win, but also misfired often enough to keep things plenty interesting.
With the Vikings trailing by two in the final three minutes of regulation, Maples rattled home a pair of extremely difficult twisting, driving layups to put her team ahead. However, after the second, the Highlanders quickly got the ball down the floor, where Anaiah Jenkins converted a three-point play, capped by a free throw that gave Radford a 51-50 lead with 91 seconds to go.
Cleveland State couldn’t generate a quality look on its subsequent possession and ate a shot clock violation, then Jenkins followed with another free throw, after an offensive rebound and Zingaro’s fourth foul. The play extended the margin to two, though crucially, Jenkins missed her second attempt from the line.
Then, with 21 seconds left, Maples drove once again, and popped home a one-hander from just to the right of the key, to level the score at 52. RU had that much time left to win the game, but – thanks in part to Jada Leonard’s disruptive efforts on the perimeter, which forced a re-start with 2.4 seconds remaining – the best the Highlanders could manage was a low-percentage heave by Cate Carlson.
The extra period proceeded in the opposite direction, with the Vikings in the driver’s seat most of the way, while attempting to do just enough to hang on.
A Maples three gave Cleveland State gave the Vikings the lead (for good, as it turned out) with 3:46 left in overtime. On two of the next three CSU possessions, Zingaro went through, then around, Jenkins for buckets to expand the advantage to 61-56 with 1:15 to go.
Along the way, the home defense forced six consecutive Radford misses.
Things became dicey once again shortly after the sixth miss, when Leonard overdribbled and turned over the rebound, handing Kirah Dandridge an easy two points. Maples successfully burned up as much clock as possible on the other end of the floor, but then missed both of her free throw attempts after being fouled, keeping the door open for the Highlanders.
Chris Kielsmeier answered a classic basketball hypothetical by having his team intentionally foul while up by three, 61-58, in the final seconds. The decision worked out well enough, when Joi Williams missed her second free throw attempt, and Macey Fegan came up with the rebound following a heart-stopping scramble.
As much as anything, the coach was worried about facing a postgame interrogation from his longtime partner, Christy Jensen.
“Christy’s going to talk to me about that later,” Kielsmeier joked. “Fouling up three, we never work on it, and I’m telling [Leonard] to do it. What kind of play call is that? They easily could have gotten that rebound and kicked it back out, hit a three and won the game off of it. So the coaching needs to be better.”
Fortunately for the coach, none of that happened. Cleveland State added a Leonard free throw after regaining possession, and managed to avoid a miracle Radford shot in the 0.6 seconds left on the clock after the guard’s trip to the line.
How intense was the game’s ending? With all appropriate respect for contests like the November 9th comeback at Cal State Fullerton, and the gutsy effort against St. Bonaventure on Wednesday, the consensus was that Saturday was CSU’s biggest bladder buster of the season.
“I’ve been holding this in since there were five minutes left in the fourth quarter,” remarked one patron in the Woodling Gymnasium men’s room, shortly after the final buzzer.
2. Call it whatever you want: a slugfest, a rock fight, a street brawl, or perhaps all of the above, it’s hard to do justice to a first half that ended 20-18 in the Vikings’ favor.
Cleveland State was 7-for-30 (23 percent) from the floor during the opening 20 minutes, and was somehow the better of the two teams, as Radford managed to shoot just 6-for-27 (22 percent). The three-point numbers, naturally, were even worse.
The highlight (?) of that offensive offense arrived during the first quarter, when the home team went 5:42 between points, yet still somehow led 4-2 late in the frame, after Laurel Rockwood hit a cutting Fegan with a nice feed down the middle.
“The good is really good, but the bad needs to stabilize out,” Kielsmeier said.
That wasn’t all.
CSU struggled in numerous areas that are sources of pride for the program. Though rebounding ended up perfectly even between the teams (on both the offensive and defensive ends), the Vikings only managed eight second-chance points on 11 offensive boards. A particular sore spot for Kielsmeier were the mere 11 points his team scored on 16 Radford turnovers.
His goal is for the team to make a basket in response to 70 percent of its forced turnovers. Eleven points, roughly five buckets, on 16 takeaways is 31 percent.
“The difference in the game could be in that stat alone right there,” Kielsmeier said. “[Radford] finished with 22 points [off of Cleveland State’s turnovers], we finished with 11, that’s minus 11. That’s us, baby. That’s how we’re supposed to play, and it’s been really inconsistent. We’ve just got to clean it up.”
A lot of those struggles, both early in the game and down the stretch, might have come down to the fatigue of playing three games in four days, two of which were extremely close.
“I mean I’m looking at myself, why are we not executing better?” the coach wondered. “And that’s a reflection of me. Why do they not understand what we need to do better than that? And so, I don’t put that on the kids.”
“But when you play 44 minutes out of 45,” he added, referring to Leonard’s time on the floor ahead of her ugly turnover in overtime, “how much is fatigue a factor, and [three games in] four days?”
3. Kielsmeier gave loads of credit to Radford’s coaching staff, led by Mike McGuire, for the way the Highlanders planned for his team.
“I’ve known [McGuire] for a long time, and I’ve always known that he’s really good, and their coaching staff is really good,” he said. “But it went to a whole ‘nother level of appreciation to see what they did to us. They deserved to win.”
Specifically, Kielsmeier cited RU’s physicality and effort level as reasons the game was close, with the understanding that Cleveland State needs to get better at working through those things.
“[Radford] came in here competitive as heck,” he added. “They fought, they’re passionate, well coached, had a great game plan on us, and gave us everything that we could handle and more.”
4. Throughout the game, the Vikings remained incredibly committed to getting the ball into the hands both Maples and Zingaro on offense, even if neither outlet bore much fruit early on.
Maples, in fact, looked on track for one of the worst games of her career for most of the afternoon. Deep into the fourth quarter, the star point guard’s stats included a 2-for-15 line on field goal attempts, 0-for-7 from three-point range. Zingaro didn’t fare much better, as she missed her first five shots, sometimes badly, and several attempted post entry passes from the perimeter were air mailed out of bounds.
Yet Kielsmeier remained persistent: “We’re going to be who we are.”
By the end of the affair, Maples had connected on her final four shot attempts – each during the late fourth quarter and overtime, and each crucial to the outcome – while Zingaro eventually recovered to finish with a game-high 21 points, including a 9-for-11 effort from the free throw line. The Canadian center possessing the ball in the paint also became a substantial-enough threat to set up the likes of Leonard and Sarah Hurley for four made triples.
“This team has showed a resiliency to themselves that is special, and something that you can’t coach,” Kielsmeier said. “That’s ultimately why we won the ballgame.”
5. Cleveland State has spent Thanksgiving week at home in most recent seasons, electing to host its own MTE instead of traveling to Florida, Mexico, or some other popular vacation spot, as many other teams do.
Mother Nature did its best to drive that contrast home, throwing a snowstorm at Northeast Ohio that began on Thanksgiving night and lingered into Friday, undoubtedly causing CSU Invitational guests St. Bonaventure, Radford, and Valparaiso to eyeball their rivals playing in warmer climates with a bit of envy.
Still, the event, which began during the 2022-23 season and has been contested three times in all (the Vikings are now 9-0 across those showcases), seems to be here to stay. One important reason? Kielsmeier wants to make sure he has home games on his non-conference schedule.
That’s a fair argument, because it can often be extremely tough for mid-major and low-major programs to consistently play on their own floors. Simply put, they don’t have the money to pay others to visit, and, particularly when it comes to an extremely-competitive team like Cleveland State, many won’t do it for free either.
There are 365 programs in NCAA Division I, each of which would love to play every single game at home, if it was practically and financially possible. They all can’t, obviously, and each season, a significant group of schools is greeted with a brutal slate that might only include one or two home contests before conference play commences.
With that in mind, grabbing three in one shot is a pretty decent idea, if it’s at all feasible. And, of course, Kielsmeier feels like there’s more to life than weather.
“I think that we run an event like this as well as anybody in the country,” he said. “It’s organized, it’s spot on, it’s fair. Shootarounds, practices. We treat everybody with the utmost respect. And I always want to build it in a way where everybody can come and win three games. Or everybody could lose three games.”
CSU does still manage to fit a couple destination trips into every schedule, with the present version including the contest at Fullerton earlier this month, and a return visit to Puerto Rico in December.
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