On Wednesday evening in Purdue Fort Wayne’s Hilliard Gates Sports Center, Cleveland State fell to 15-6 overall and 5-5 in Horizon League play, courtest of an 80-70 loss to the Mastodons.
Here are five things that stood out from the Vikings’ latest consistently inconsistent effort:
1. On the very first possession of the game, heavily-defended Purdue Fort Wayne center Lili Krasovec found a much-less-bothered Alana Nelson cutting down the baseline for the first two of her eventual game-high 23 points.
That breakdown was alarming enough for Chris Kielsmeier to send Ella Van Weelden sprinting to the scorer’s table to replace starter Sarah Hurley, just 19 seconds after the opening tip.
However neither Van Weelden, nor anyone else, could do much to stop the Mastodons, who went on to convert their first seven field goal attempts, with Jordan Reid, Rylee Bess, and Ella Riggs adding to the output of Nelson and Krasovec.
“We clearly weren’t ready to play,” Kielsmeier lamented. “I mean, they start the game, what, 7-for-7 from the field. How hard is it to hit those seven shots if there was no defense out there? If they had to stand there and hit those seven for seven with no defense, that’s hard to do. But they did it against us and we executed like we had no idea what was coming, no idea who was a good player.”
By the end of that opening heater, PFW led 16-5, and the Mastodons would eventually finish the first quarter with a whopping 27 points. It’s probably a bit of a reach to say that the contest was decided in those early moments, but it’s also a factual statement that the Vikings outscored their hosts 65-64 over the last 36 minutes of the evening.
2. It’s hard to pinpoint any one thing that went wrong for CSU defensively – most things did, teams don’t win very often when allowing an opponent to shoot 51.8 percent over an entire game – but a reasonable place to start is Purdue Fort Wayne’s 11-for-28 effort from three-point range.
The Mastodons have tried to move away from their reputation as unquestioning bombers a bit this season. Last year, with a bevy of sharpshooters like Lauren Ross, Amellia Bromenschenkel, Audra Emmerson, and Sydney Freeman around, PFW scored 37.1 percent of its points on threes, 23rd-most in the nation. In 2025-26, that number has taken a slight dip to 33.4 percent, which ranks 62nd.
However, when facing Cleveland State’s zone, those numbers tend to creep back upwards, wherever they may sit entering play.
In all, the ‘Dons scored 33 of their 80 points (41.3 percent) on Wednesday through triples, thanks to an 11-for-28 line from deep, led by Nelson’s 4-for-5.
Reid and Riggs each connected during that game-opening salvo, while the later efforts of Bess and Destiny Macharia expanded Cleveland State’s deficit to 43-22 midway through the second quarter. Macharia and Lauren Lee helped brush off a significant third quarter push by the Vikings, restoring their team’s lead to 15 points midway through the fourth quarter, and essentially closing the door on the proceedings.
“We didn’t play hard,” Kielsmeier reiterated. “We didn’t know simple stuff that they were going to do against us. We didn’t know personnel. It looked like we did very little prep for this game. But again, give them credit because you’ve got to hit the shots and make the plays, and they are a really good basketball team.”
That long-range output continued a pretty clear trend. Since taking over as Purdue Fort Wayne’s coach in 2021, Maria Marchesano is 3-8 against the Vikings. Each of those victories involved the Mastodons making at least 11 threes, at a 39 percent or better success rate. In the eight losses, neither of those conditions were met six times, while one was reached in the other two.
3. If there were two bright spots for the Vikings, they were Macey Fegan and Izabella Zingaro.
Fegan offered up 16 points, seven rebounds, and two steals in her usual understated manner, while Zingaro fell just short of her career scoring high with 22 points.
Six of those 22 came during a 10-1 third quarter run that shaved Purdue Fort Wayne’s 17-point halftime lead down to 54-47 with 13:57 of regulation time remaining, offering brief hope of a stunning comeback.
A lot of that was possible because Zingaro drew a staggering nine fouls, infractions that kept Krasovec and Avery Wagner stapled to the bench for large chunks of the evening. Players like Hillary Offing and, occasionally, Nelson did a respectable job in the middle for the Mastodons, but couldn’t offer up a ton of defensive resistance.
Zingaro ended the game with three fouls, though she was conspicuously on the bench during a large chunk of PFW’s game-opening surge, after being whistled for the first time midway through the first quarter.
That’s been Kielsmeier’s modus operandi with his starting post this season: shield a foul-prone player as much as possible early on, ensuring that she’s available in the fourth quarter when needed.
It works well most of the time, but backfired a bit on Wednesday when the Vikings were in a nearly-unsalvageable position by the time Zingaro reclaimed her usual participation level.
“I was trying to condense the game with how much she’s been in foul trouble,” Kielsmeier explained. “So I mean, yeah, you can hindsight it, but [hypothetically you could] put her in there, and she picks up her second foul. They were calling a lot on the post. Yeah, you can second guess it, but it’s making decisions based off of past examples, and trying to shrink the game.”
That’s a good counter-argument, of course. Laurel Rockwood was the first to try replacing Zingaro and quickly picked up two fouls of her own, leading to Shey Magassa spending time at the five.
Some situations, apparently, are just unwinnable.
4. It probably should be remembered that Cleveland State scored a respectable 70 points in the game, despite starting guards Colbi Maples and Jada Leonard combining to go 5-for-20 from the floor, while CSU went just 2-for-12 from three-point range.
How? Largely because the Vikings wrangled 35 trips to the free throw line, hitting 28 of those tries.
Zingaro was a healthy share of that, of course. The center went 6-for-8 from the stripe, though an always-active Leonard paced everyone with a 10-for-11 effort.
Led by Paula Pique (five steals) and Leonard (three), CSU also managed a whopping 12 thefts, most of Purdue Fort Wayne’s 15 turnovers.
Kielsmeier wasn’t really in the mood to grab a metal detector and scour the beach for a few shiny pennies though.
“That sounds like a loser’s mentality,” he said, before breaking into a bit of sarcasm related to the idea of extracting good news from the setback. “We lost the game, let’s find some silver linings. We’ve lost five conference games now and we’re going to learn a lot from this one that we didn’t learn from the first few.”
“It’s just becoming a redundant pattern,” he continued, returning to his usual tone. “And until our kids look from within and make some changes, we’re going to continue to play this kind of inconsistent type of basketball, and it’s not going to lead anywhere really successful.”
Regardless, a couple elements of Cleveland State’s system did click against the Mastodons. Whether that’s cause for optimism, or simply another difficult-to-process data point, is a subjective assessment.
5. With the defeat, the Vikings are now just 2-5 in true road games this season (and 4-5 in all games away from the CSU campus, when counting the two neutral site affairs in Puerto Rico). Meanwhile, the team is 11-1 at home, and has lost just four times in the Wolstein Center over the last four seasons.
It’s an odd discrepancy in some sense. While schools like Green Bay and Youngstown State always offer strong home crowds, there isn’t truly a Horizon League home environment that would register much of anything on the Stadium Pulse meter in EA’s college football video games. The announced attendance at Hilliard Gates on Wednesday was 535 mostly-polite fans, with roughly ten students (and the PFW band’s tuba player, who frequently offered a “womp womp” sound after Vikings misses) providing just about all of the hostility.
Travel can be tough, and it probably is a tangible advantage for Green Bay and Milwaukee when playing at home (and their opponents, when the Phoenix and Panthers are on the road), but the drive from Cleveland to Fort Wayne is a relatively stress-free three hours. Visiting teams typically go through multiple shootarounds at each venue, largely to get acclimated to any quirks the building may throw at guests.
There’s not an easy-to-pin-down reason why Cleveland State, or any team, should be significantly worse on the road. And yet, the numbers are the numbers.
“You’ve got to have some moxie to win on the road, no matter where you’re at,” Kielsmeier said. “And you’ve got to have some alphas out there and we struggle with that. Our focus is not where it needs to be, and I don’t think our kids know that.”
Whatever specifically may require that moxie, Kielsmeier and his team will have to solve it relatively quickly. Three of the Vikings’ next four games involve tough opponents on the road, beginning with YSU on Sunday. Without some measure of success in those contests, the team’s regular season fortunes in the dense HL standings might end up beyond the point of repair.
So can things turn around? That’s a hard “maybe” at this stage.
“We have to toughen up,” Kielsmeier said. “We have to become mentally tougher. We have to become physically tougher. We got outplayed tonight. And those aren’t my words, the kids said it.”
“I challenge our kids on the road: if you get back on that bus, you better know that you deserve to win based off of what you put into it. And if you don’t know it, you don’t deserve to win. And that’s the reality of how we’re feeling.”
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