Home Articles Listless Vikings Fall to Youngstown State: Five Observations

Listless Vikings Fall to Youngstown State: Five Observations

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Photo: Youngstown State Athletics

On Monday afternoon, Cleveland State fell to Youngstown State 70-63, a contest that marked an extremely-productive return to the Wolstein Center for former Vikings center Paulina Hernandez.

Here are five things that stood out, as CSU fell to 12-3 overall, and 2-2 in Horizon League play:

1. Without a doubt, the lead story of the afternoon was Hernandez.

The Milwaukee-area native, who played for the Vikings from 2023-25, clearly still feels quite at home in Cleveland, as she set a new career high with 18 points, while adding six rebounds. Perhaps the most intriguing part of Hernandez’s big game was the unexpected way it transpired.

After Penguins starter Sarah Baker picked up a pair of first-half fouls, Hernandez received her first extended look during the second quarter. Then, after Baker collected a third foul in the first 90 seconds of the third quarter, the junior again received a substantial chunk of playing time. She eventually batted a bit of foul trouble herself, but managed to stay clean over most of the second half to save her team from a dire situation.

Baker’s limited playing time was very much a case of things going against YSU, but arguably working out for the best anyway, because her backup was certainly more than ready to go against her old team.

“The results are the results,” Chris Kielsmeier stated. “She played great.”

With Kielsmeier, Hernandez was generally used as a third center, and averaged roughly five minutes per game across each campaign. Now, in half of a season as a Penguin, she’s already played more total minutes than she did in either year at CSU.

2. In a contest that was relatively close throughout, it’s easy to point to the absence of Colbi Maples as a factor. The 2023-24 Horizon League Player of the Year injured her ankle in the Vikings’ win over College of Charleston in Puerto Rico on December 19th.

Kielsmeier initially said that his leading scorer was diagnosed with “something that said four to six weeks,” then immediately backed off that statement a bit.

“Maybe it’s going to be a while,” he said. “I don’t know. There’s no update. She’s out until she’s not.”

With Maples unavailable, Jada Leonard again ran the point for nearly the entire game. Though she scored Cleveland State’s first eight points on Monday, she only ended up with 12 total, on 4-for-19 shooting, including 0-for-4 from three-point range. Those stats were a microcosm of the Vikings’ struggles with half-court offense for large stretches of the contest.

Furthermore, CSU’s classic defense-into-offense posture, driven largely by Leonard most of the time, was MIA for most of the afternoon. Youngstown State only turned the ball over four times in the second half, and 15 times during the entire game, with the Vikings only converting five points off of those miscues.

“Well, it certainly affects things. She’s a pretty good player,” Kielsmeier said of Maples’ absence, with a healthy amount of friendly snark directed at his inquisitor.

“But nobody cares,” he continued. “I mean, there’s no asterisk beside this that we lost because Colbi didn’t play. This is a really, really tough business.”

How tough? Cleveland State’s next games are the Wisconsin trip, long considered the deadliest pair of matchups on any team’s HL schedule. Maples will still be out against conference favorite Green Bay and always-tough Milwaukee, and the Vikings run the risk of falling to 2-4 in league play if they don’t solve a few issues in the coming days.

“We had different lineups and rotations out there that haven’t been together a lot,” Kielsmeier said. “We certainly looked at times tonight like this was the first week of the season, like everybody was trying to figure everything out, and [there was] a lot of disarray. It’s a reflection of me, man. We’ve got a lot of things we’ve got to figure out.”

3. It wouldn’t be a Cleveland State-Youngstown State clash without some further discussion of the interior game. Young stars Baker and Sophia Gregory are the Penguins’ headliners down low, and they’re usually backed up very effectively by a pair of former Vikings, Hernandez and Faith Burch.

However, Burch didn’t make the trip northwest over reported “personal reasons,” while Baker, Gregory, and Hernandez each encountered moderate-to-heavy foul trouble.

In theory, that should have been a massive advantage for the Vikings, but it wasn’t.

Izabella Zingaro had a very respectable outing with 14 points and seven rebounds, but it never truly felt like she got going, save for the last three minutes of the third quarter, when she did half of her scoring. Most of the time, she was either battling her own whistle issues, or was defended very effectively by Baker and Hernandez, despite the inherent risk in getting too aggressive on the 6-4 Canadian.

Ultimately, between the points off turnovers count, Leonard’s struggles, and the post denial work, Youngstown State did an outstanding job taking away CSU’s three favorite forms of offense. The Vikings did get some effective work in the late going from Macey Fegan (14 points) and Paula Pique (nine points on three three-pointers), but it wasn’t enough to compensate.

4. The Penguins, to some extent, are custom-built to play against Cleveland State’s zone. They share the ball about as well as any team in the country – YSU had 24 assists on 28 made field goals against the Vikings – and always have a handful of capable three-point shooters on hand, when all else fails.

Casey Santoro (4-for-9 from deep, 18 total points) and Danielle Cameron (3-for-11, 11 points) did most of the long-range damage this time out. Akron native Erica King also buried a massive fourth-quarter three to help seal the result.

Of course, there’s another element to the matchup: Penguins head coach Melissa Jackson, who was an assistant at CSU during the 2023-24 season, before moving down to Youngstown.

Sure, every team scouts each of their opponents, and there’s obviously plenty of added familiarity between conference opponents, but the Jackson-Cleveland State connection takes things a few levels beyond that.

“She got the inner workings of every single thing that went on in this program for a full year,” Kielsmeier stated.

That definitely didn’t hurt her efforts, as Jackson improved to 2-1 against Kielsmeier since taking over YSU’s program. The result was also the first time the Penguins won in Cleveland since February 11, 2022.

5. Ultimately, whether it was the Christmas layoff, Hernandez’s revenge heater, the snow outside, Jackson’s familiarity with the matchup zone, or a listless crowd, the bottom line was that Cleveland State wasn’t ready to compete in a rivalry game – one that arguably is treated as much more of one from the red-and-black side of things.

For all of CSU’s shortcomings on Monday, Kielsmeier frequently returned to the theme of his team’s effort.

“This group’s got to grow up and show a lot of fight because it can get a lot worse,” he said. “I mean, this stings and is not what we wanted, but life happens, and we didn’t play well. And in the history of games, there’s always been a winner and always been a loser, and we lost. And it can keep happening if we don’t play better.”

It certainly can keep happening. After the Vikings return from America’s Dairyland, four of their next five games involve preseason HL favorites Purdue Fort Wayne and Robert Morris, as well as rematches with the two league teams that have beaten Cleveland State so far, YSU and Detroit Mercy.

“We’ve got to play better and we’ve got to show more fight than this,” Kielsmeier said. “I’m disappointed with our fight. I’m disappointed with our toughness. You look at how we fought against Charleston, that was a team that fought. We showed a tremendous amount of grit, urgency, and we didn’t show that tonight at all. And I don’t know why.”

“Go home, look in the mirror, figure out how much the game means to you, and how much you want to win. Because we looked a lot like, at times tonight, we didn’t care if we won. And I haven’t said that very often in my career.”

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