CSU Courtside (February 10th)

Practice How You Play?

During his weekly radio show on Monday, Chris Kielsmeier expressed that he wasn’t happy with how Cleveland State practiced that day.

“We didn’t have our best day of prep today,” he offered, as something of an aside in reply to a question related to roster turnover. “Which is disappointing, because of what’s at stake for the week.”

What’s at stake for the week? The Vikings host Green Bay, which just clinched the top seed in next month’s Horizon League tournament, on Wednesday, followed by a quick road trip to face a strong Robert Morris team on Saturday.

In one sense, losing to the Phoenix probably wouldn’t be a disaster. After all, GB is 15-0 in conference play, and the other ten HL teams would end up on equal footing with each other if they all end up losing twice to Kayla Karius’ team this year. However, CSU, as a team that needs to make up ground with precious few games left in the regular season, doesn’t really have the luxury of saying “oh well, everyone loses to Green Bay.”

The Colonials, of course, are one of those teams that the Vikings are pursuing. A victory in Moon Township would, obviously, make up ground in the standings, and also give Cleveland State tiebreaker privileges over the Colonials.

If there’s some consolation for the coach, it might be that one week earlier, he was thrilled with his team’s prep.

“We got off the court 25 minutes before I got on the radio, and we had a phenomenal practice today,” Kielsmeier said on his February 2nd show. “We lifted, we showed them film from this past week, we got heavy in the [IU Indianapolis] scout, and then we practiced hard against a team that’s going to play a different way than a lot of other teams in the league.”

“We might’ve had our best day of focus and prep all year.”

CSU then went out to Indy and dropped an ugly 78-70 decision to the Jaguars roughly 48 hours after that “phenomenal practice.” So, at least superficially, those assessments of the Vikings’ training sessions might not carry a ton of predictive value.

Mean Green

Jada Leonard was the show’s player guest, and the former Saint Peter’s and Bryant guard related an interesting detail about how Kielsmeier handled her transfer recruitment last spring.

“In the office, they didn’t show me any good clips of myself,” she said. “It was just mistakes I was making, and areas of my game where they showed me they could help. Every other program, it was selling me a dream like ‘You can do this, this and this for us.’ [Cleveland State was] like ‘No, we’re going to make you better so that you can do this, this and this.’ So I just feel like they were pretty real from the start, and I kind of knew what I was getting with them.”

Apparently, there was something to that argument. Leonard was Saint Peters’ leading scorer during both of her seasons with the Peacocks (wait, not “Peahens?”) but her 12.9 points per game this year is the best average of her career. Her 3.3 assists per game are also a new personal best, as are her 3.0 steals per game.

That last number has driven the bulk of the attention around Leonard, as it is presently the 19th-best average nationally, and tops among Horizon League players. However, at least some of that lofty ranking belongs to Leonard’s mom.

“I have to give my mom the credit,” she said. “She used to make me do defensive slides on the way to school. So yeah, I got that from her. She loves defense, and I’m just learning to be more disciplined in the system, trying to find ways to get steals through the system.”

“Jada has brought so much to our program, and she turned down a lot of other really, really good programs to come here and play at Cleveland State,” Kielsmeier added. “And we’re forever thankful for her belief in us. Hopefully we’ve been able to give her the experience and the opportunity that she’s wanted, and put her in a position to be successful, because she’s really stinking good on and off the court, and I’m a proud coach.”

Defend, Rebound, Runway

Kielsmeier couldn’t resist tossing one more compliment in the direction of both Leonard and her defense-obsessed mother.

“Jada’s a top five fashion girl of anyone I’ve ever coached,” he began. “She’s wearing all kinds of things that I don’t even know what they are. She’s got sweatshirts and things that just look like, wow, I didn’t even know that a sweatshirt could cost that much. She brings it, and her mom brings it. So she got that from her mom.”

Leonard hails from New York City, one of the world’s fashion capitals, and Kielsmeier is from Iowa, a place decidedly more Carhartt than Cartier, so his judgment on such matters might lack credibility with some. Nevertheless, the coach has probably been in contact with enough people from places all over the globe during his long career to deliver a valid assessment.

Hitting the Mark

Cleveland State’s program – along with most across women’s basketball – presents remarkably little off-court drama, particularly compared to some other corners of the college sports landscape.

Part of that, of course, includes classroom performance, as the Vikings routinely check in with strong team-wide grades.

At the end of the 2024-25 season, CSU placed 17th among Division I outfits in the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association’s annual Academic Top 25 Team Honor Roll ranking, with a 3.685 GPA. Two weeks ago, Macey Fegan, Colbi Maples, and Sarah Hurley were named to the Horizon League’s Fall 2025 Academic Honor Roll.

One requirement for that latter distinction is three semesters of attendance at an institution, so that trio’s inclusion meant that CSU went 3-for-3 with its eligible student-athletes. Then again, the other 11 were clearly pulling their weight too, as evidenced by the team’s 3.69 fall semester GPA.

“The women’s team always does very well academically,” Jessica Livermore, the academic coach for both of the Vikings’ basketball programs, said. “I think they’re always above like a 3.6 team GPA. So they’re always doing really well, [with] lots of them making the president’s list, dean’s list, some perfect 4.0s. Always a good team.”

In some ways, those standards have been hard to maintain through the perpetual player churn brought on by the transfer portal, though Livermore believes that it helps that basketball begins its workouts during the summer.

“You kind of get that extra semester to get them acclimated to CSU,” she said. “They’re only in one or two classes. They’re getting acclimated to the university, to Cleveland, and they get a little bit extra time rather than throwing them right into 15 or 18 credit hours for the fall semester.”