Cleveland State snapped its three-game losing streak on Wednesday night, earning a solid 87-75 home victory over Wright State to close out an arduous four games in ten days stretch, while improving to 13-5 overall and 3-4 in Horizon League play.
Here are five things that stood out from the effort.
1. There’s really no debate: the Vikings needed a win, badly.
After returning from Christmas with those consecutive HL defeats, CSU abruptly found itself (likely) out of the running for the conference’s regular season title. They’re now right in the thick of what’s sure to be an ultra-competitive race to finish in the top five of the standings, and secure a home game in the league tournament.
A contest against Wright State in the Wolstein Center, then, was about as must-win as it gets on January 7th.
The Vikings responded by scoring the first nine points of the game in a wire-to-wire victory, withstanding several Raiders pushes to eventually take a solid result. Macey Fegan was at her gritty best with 16 points, ten rebounds, six assists, and a plus-14 rating – the latter three numbers were all game highs – while Izabella Zingaro and Jada Leonard added 19 and 16 points, respectively.
Behind 20 tallies from Breezie Williams, who played with Leonard at Bryant last year, WSU trimmed Cleveland State’s lead to 33-29 late in the second quarter. A Sarah Hurley three then gave the Vikings a seven-point edge at the half.
Shortly after the break, an 8-0 Raiders run pulled the visitors within 40-39 early in the third quarter, but CSU responded with an immediate 9-2 surge to regain control. By the end of the period, the Vikings led 63-50 and, more or less, had enough padding to get to the finish line.
That margin was possible thanks to a Leonard half-court buzzer-bearter – sort of. The Bronx native’s heave was well off the mark, but she drew a foul from Claire Henson during the shot. Despite the vehement protests of WSU coach Kari Hoffman and a video review, Leonard ultimately headed to the free throw line and knocked down all three tries.
“I know how to sell a foul,” she admitted. “[Chris Kielsmeier] told me go, and I knew that [Henson] was going to jump, so I just went through my shoulder and through her.”
2. Within recent history, most Cleveland State-Wright State games have followed a similar pattern. Specifically, the Vikings have done just about whatever they wanted down the middle of the floor against the perpetually-undersized Raiders, while WSU would try to stay in the game by firing a ton of threes, sometimes while playing a five-out offense.
Back in 2023, Hoffman’s team set a school record by knocking down 18 triples against CSU. Last December, the Raiders went 16-for-28 from deep, prompting Kielsmeier to conduct a staggeringly-long postgame locker room meeting, despite the Vikings winning the game.
Those trends played out in some areas on Wednesday, including a dominating 45-21 rebounding advantage for the home side, which spilled over into other statistics, like a 20-3 edge in second-chance points, and a 34-20 advantage in paint scoring. Wright State played its part by shooting another 28 threes, led by Ellie Magestro-Kennedy (4-for-8, 18 total points) and Lauren Scott (4-for-9, 14 points).
Unexpectedly, though, the Vikings were just as active behind the arc as WSU – actually, more so for most of the game, until the last couple minutes of the contest skewed things – and hit a good share of those tries.
Hurley (3-for-6), Ella Van Weelden (3-for-8), and Leonard (2-for-4) put most of the work into CSU’s team-wide 10-for-27 line, a good sign for a roster that’s had a love-hate relationship with three-pointers this season. That connection hit a low point with a 4-for-21 effort against Milwaukee on Sunday, after which Kielsmeier criticized his players’ reluctance to shoot.
There was no such issue three days later.
“My confidence is good,” Leonard said. “I feel like I need to make my shots, and it’s been told to me that I have the green light to shoot the ball and if I’m going to shoot it, shoot it with confidence. So yeah, I feel very confident. I just have to make them.”
3. Those threes were and are important, because opponents have recently taken to playing a zone against the Vikings, while also doubling Zingaro.
“The last two games we’ve seen as much zone as we’ve seen probably the entire time I’ve been here,” Kielsmeier said. “A lot of teams don’t play a zone. I would like to think [for a] good reason, because we go up against a pretty good zone every day in practice, and we know how to attack a zone.”
The Panthers played zone on Sunday, and Cleveland State’s inability to find consistent offense from the outside was a major factor in the defeat. Against Wright State, however, effective shooting and ball movement eventually cleared a little bit of space for the starting center.
Zingaro’s 19 points came on a respectable 7-for-12 effort. She also attempted six free throws, making five, one piece of CSU’s 23-for-30 effort from the charity stripe, following just 21 total free throw attempts during the two games in Wisconsin.
“We did a better job of being able to handle their doubles tonight and creating better shots,” Kielsmeier observed. “We’ve got to get higher percentage shots and that’s what we did tonight. A lot of those shots, even some of our misses were wide open looks, and we hit 10 [threes], which was a huge part of the game.”
Even on the program’s best days, Cleveland State’s system doesn’t put up staggering assist numbers – the Vikings’ two recent HL championship outfits had 50.9 and 51.0 percent assisted shot rates – but Wednesday night provided evidence that the team’s ball sharing has hit a different level. CSU logged 21 assists on 27 made field goals, numbers that improved this season’s assisted shot rate to 56.6 percent.
That still won’t be confused with Youngstown State (63.2 percent) or Green Bay (68.5 percent, the tenth-best number nationally), but it is a notable uptick, regardless.
“We can’t just rely on one player to take us to get a win,” Leonard said. “So I feel like we’re a very unselfish basketball team, sometimes too unselfish, which causes turnovers. But we know that everybody could have a night. Everybody’s moment’s going to come, and you just have to be ready to hit a shot. And assist is a nice thing to have in the stat sheets.”
4. Hurley earned her fourth career start against Wright State, and responded with nine points and nine rebounds.
Both of those numbers set or equaled her bests against Division I competition (officially, the Canadian’s highest point total is 11, against Puerto Rico-Bayamon last month).
The production was well-timed too. She had six rebounds in the first quarter alone, when both teams got off to a bit of a slow start. Two of Hurley’s three-pointers arrived in the final 102 seconds of the first half, allowing the Vikings to withstand a Wright State push and take a seven-point lead into the break.
Kielsmeier doesn’t do a ton of tinkering with his starting lineup, except in cases of injury, so swapping in Hurley is a notable development on its face. The Vikings’ usual starter in that spot, Paula Pique, is an outstanding all-around player, though she hasn’t been terribly productive offensively, with 3.8 points per game in roughly 24 minutes.
Ultimately, Hurley (22:10), Pique (21:35), and Van Weelden (17:50) each received comparable amounts of playing time, lending to the idea that the position is still a work in progress.
“We had a lot of players play really well tonight, and it’s great to see that for them personally, but most importantly, what we need from them as a team,” Kielsmeier said. “Hurley played hard. She hit timely shots. Ella played hard, hit timely shots. We got a lot of production from that three spot, which we know we’re capable of getting, and we just need to continue to coach them, and they need to continue to work at it and show that they can be that type of player consistently, because they can.”
5. There’s probably a bit of space for concern about the Vikings’ defense, particularly after allowing 75 points to a Wright State team that is decent, but not spectacular, offensively.
CSU has forced 19 turnovers per game this season. That’s a very good number, though it’s a bit frontloaded; the Vikings’ counts over the last four contests were 15, 11, 13, and then 11 again versus the Raiders. For context, last season’s Cleveland State team forced 14.1 giveaways per game, the worst number ever for a Kielsmeier-coached squad, and among the bottom 100 schools nationally.
For just about the only time in his life, thanks to a travel-heavy four-in-ten schedule, Kielsmeier was willing to give his team a pass on those details.
“Our kids are running on fumes,” he said. “Giving up 46 points in the second half is frustrating, but I’m also proud of their fight and proud of what they had to go through.”
“We need to look at this schedule. I don’t want to get on a huge soapbox with it again, but what you ask of these kids, and what you asked of our opponent in return, there’s no equity there. Your job [when putting] a schedule together is to assure that there’s some sort of reason why. Like what was the reason for this?”
Specifically, the coach was bothered that Wright State’s previous game was on Friday, at home against Detroit Mercy. Following their trip to Cleveland, the Raiders have another three full days before playing at IU Indianapolis on Sunday.
CSU, of course, was in Green Bay on Friday, then Milwaukee on Sunday, before Wednesday night’s affair.
“Why would we have to be forced to travel back from Milwaukee, get here on Monday at 3:00 in the morning, and have two days of prep for a home game? It feels like a damn road game,” an exasperated Kielsmeier added. “Again, it sounds again like it’s excuses or whatnot, but we need to look at this thing. It’s not right. It’s emotional to me because I know how I feel, and I feel for these kids and what we ask of them, and I don’t think it’s fair.”
Leonard, of course, is one of the Vikings’ most important defensive catalysts. She managed a pair of steals against Wright State, though that still dropped her season average of 3.2 thefts, a number that ranks 23rd in Division I.
“We just have to go back to dictating,” she said. “I think sometimes fatigue shows a little bit, but yeah, we just have to capitalize and dictate, and really pressure people the way we were doing early on.”
The good news for both Kielsmeier and Leonard? Cleveland State’s next game isn’t for another week, at home against UDM next Wednesday.
“You can’t take any win for granted,” the guard said. “So yeah, I like the feeling of winning. We have to keep it going.”
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