On Tuesday morning in the Wolstein Center, Cleveland State built a double-digit lead in the first quarter, then managed to nurse it all the way past the finish line for a 74-56 victory over Northern Kentucky.
Here are five things that stood out, as CSU improved to 10-2 overall, and 2-1 in Horizon League play:
1. In several ways, the game’s first quarter was a glimpse of the Vikings’ offense at its best. During those opening ten minutes, the home team went 11-for-18 from the floor, including 4-for-7 from three-point range. That was enough to build a lead that grew to 26-10 at one juncture, before settling at 27-15 by the end of the frame.
Izabella Zingaro made her only field goal attempt during the period, but the threat of more than that from the 6-4 Canadian was enough to open lanes for drives by Colbi Maples and Jada Leonard (who finished with 17 and 14 points, respectively), as well as clean looks from three.
In fact, Zingaro directly assisted on two of those four made triples, a count that included a pair by Ella Van Weelden, as well as one each by Maples and Macey Fegan. For a CSU team that was a bit over-reliant on Maples, its star point guard, for three-point production early in the season, the increased involvement of others is a welcome sign.
“It takes time to figure this offense out, when you can’t just throw it inside and score, or drive it down the paint and get downhill pretty easy,” Chris Kielsmeier said. That’s how we teach ’em in June, July, and August. But then it obviously is always going to evolve once you get into conference play and teams know what you’re doing, and they want to make it hard on your better offensive players, trying to kind of dictate how they’re going to play.”
Cleveland State cooled off a bit as the afternoon went along, but nevertheless, their 9-for-23 effort from behind the arc stands next to a 6-for-15 line against Niagara on Saturday as the season’s two most efficient deep-shooting games.
“We did a lot of things tonight offensively that we’re supposed to do, and things I wanted them to do, so they’re certainly getting better,” Kielsmeier said.
On top of that, the Vikings didn’t turn the ball over once in the first quarter, and only offered up eight giveaways during the whole game. That season-best ball protection number – which Kielsmeier said resulted in ten additional shot attempts beyond his team’s average – came in spite of the fact that Northern Kentucky occasionally deployed some full-court ball pressure, mostly early in the game.
2. Of course, the fulcrum that makes it all work is Zingaro.
Facing constant double teams, the graduate student nevertheless pushed her way to 17 points and ten rebounds, along with her role in opening up shots for others.
“As a post player, it’s always like a physical game and so I’m kind of used to having people around me all the time,” she said. “We do a lot of practicing being physical, and jumping after rebounds, and stuff like that with contact. So it could be hard sometimes, but I’m kind of used to it, and just kind of try to power through it whenever I can.”
Both Zingaro and Laurel Rockwood, with help from Fegan and Shay Magassa, did an admirable job defending what can be a tough NKU inside game, led by Maddie Moody and Mia Jordan, along with reserves like Abby Wolterman and Jamaya Thomas. Cleveland State outscored the Norse 36-20 in the paint.
For a lot of the season, Kielsmeier has carefully managed his starting post’s playing time to circumvent foul trouble. Though the training wheels now seem to be all the way off, that almost led to disaster when she picked up her fourth foul with 3:26 remaining in the contest. At the time, the Vikings were holding a 63-53 lead, though a somewhat tenuous one that may have disintegrated quickly without Zingaro on the floor.
“I’m trying to figure out the foul thing,” she said. “I tend to get a couple of them early on and stuff, but I think just in moments like that I just have to keep my mind together like, hey, it’s close game, it’s at the end. Just watch the contact and just keep defending how I defend, and try not to get too much in my head.”
Kielsmeier rolled the dice and left her in the game. That decision couldn’t have worked out much better, as CSU closed the affair on a 12-3 run, all of it helped along by Zingaro.
“It’s always a gut feeling,” he explained. “Our players know that most of the time if they get two fouls in the first half they’re going to sit. We try to condense the game that way, we’re pretty consistent with that. But what you handle in the third and the fourth quarter, there’s no set rule with it.”
3. Somewhat awkwardly, one of the keys to the win might have been the way CSU managed to survive a brutal offensive start to the second half.
Despite the progress made early in the contest, the Vikings shot just 2-for-17 in the third quarter. And yet, somehow, they only lost one bucket off of an advantage that sat at 11 points through halftime.
“I thought we settled in that third quarter for some shots that were good shots, but we had some better opportunities there,” Kielsmeier said. “We got their foul count up, and we didn’t exploit that the way we should have. So we’re progressing, we’re getting better, there’s no doubt about it, but there’s still a lot of things we can do better.”
There isn’t really a singular answer to how the green and white made it through relatively unscathed, though a lot of it falls to the defense in one way or another. NKU committed six turnovers during the quarter, didn’t make any trips to the free throw line, and shot 6-for-15 overall (certainly better than Cleveland State, but hardly enough to trigger an avalanche), on the way to a relatively tame 13 points.
Star Norse freshman Karina Bystry led off the fourth quarter with a three to trim the Vikings lead to 53-47, but that’s as close as NKU ever came to erasing the margin built up early in the game. Maples immediately replied to Bystry with a trey of her own, unofficially signaling that CSU had rediscovered its shooting touch.
Regardless, it was a high-wire act that Kielsmeier would prefer to avoid in the future.
“You’re not going to win many games when you have a quarter like that unless you’re really defending,” he said. “We did that, and still got to the free throw line a little bit, which saved us somewhat, but we won the game because we played pretty well offensively and pretty consistent defensively.”
4. Naturally, bad quarters don’t happen in a vacuum, and plenty of CSU’s struggles were generated by a tough Northern Kentucky squad. Though the Norse fell to 3-10 overall with the loss, two of those defeats came against ranked Ohio State and Louisville teams – and both matchups were close in the second half.
“I said they were the best…whatever their record was, they were the best team in the country with that kind of record,” Kielsmeier said. “They’re in every game, and they’ve had some of those teams where they could have beat ’em, but they’re young and inexperienced. But they’re extremely well-coached, and they’ve got really good players. So that team is going to be really dangerous at some point.”
One of those young, and good, players is Bystry, who led the visitors with 20 points and six rebounds. Classmate Moody was NKU’s other double-digit scorer, with ten points, alongside nine boards.
The Norse especially exceled in some of the “effort” areas like rebounding (41-34 in their favor) and trips to the free throw line (18-16), stats that will undoubtedly draw plenty of scrutiny in the belly of the Wolstein Center over the coming days.
5. Tuesday was Cleveland State’s annual Health + Hoops kids’ day game, which presented a crowd of 2,504, made up primarily of schoolchildren who offered a high-pitched din to the proceedings.
“It was so exciting, so fun,” Zingaro said. “There was never a quiet moment in the gym, so it just brought a bunch of energy for us and [it was] just a really good environment to have a lot of people there.”
The only downside? The Vikings never landed on 67 points, mirroring the meme numbers that would have brought the building’s decibel level to an entirely new peak. A crucial fourth-quarter three by Maples moved CSU’s score from 63 to 66. Then, after a timeout, a rebound from a missed three by NKU’s Noelle Hubert led to a long rebound and a runout bucket by Leonard to skip the total ahead to 68.
Nevertheless, everyone involved still did their best to push that magic button.
“I think I heard 6-7 by the announcer five times before the game was tipped,” said Kielsmeier, who got in on the act himself while briefly addressing the kids after the final buzzer.
“I think you still saw it during moments in the game. If you looked at the crowd, you could hear them still saying it,” Zingaro added. “It didn’t matter what the score was, everybody was still kind of…even the mascot was up there getting everybody doing it.”
Like life, 6-7 always finds a way.
Subscribe to our emails, and get our latest posts in your inbox, plus a weekly digest of everything we've published!
