Thanks to the efforts of Izabella Zingaro, Colbi Maples, and Macey Fegan, who combined for 70 points, Cleveland State shocked Green Bay in overtime on Wednesday night in the Wolstein Center by an 83-82 count and continued building late-season momentum.
Here are five things that stood out, as the Vikings improved to 19-8 overall, and 9-7 in Horizon League play:
1. To fully appreciate the victory, it’s helpful to take a look back at CSU’s previous game against the Phoenix, on January 2nd.
With two seconds left in that affair, and CSU trailing 56-55, Zingaro stepped to the free throw line in front of the Kress Center student section and misfired on a pair of attempts that could have given the Vikings a lead (and probably, a win), or at least forced overtime.
Chris Kielsmeier, both that night and on the infrequent occasions it’s come up since then, has made it clear that those foul shot misses didn’t lose the game for his team. After all, every play counts equally, and over the course of a tight 40 minutes, any one of them could be considered a culprit. One obvious example came at the end of the third quarter that night, when Cleveland State turned the ball over while trying to hold for a final shot, a mistake that ended in a Maddy Skorupski buzzer beater and two vital points in GB’s direction.
“We all had to deal with the disappointment of not making one more play the first time,” Kielsmeier said. “It wasn’t the free throws that lost the game. It was 40 minutes of not good enough Cleveland State women’s basketball.”
The coach is right, of course, but it’s still hard to avoid placing a heightened importance on end-of-game events. At the very least, doing so helps create a compelling redemption arc, given that Zingaro buried 14 of her 16 free throw attempts on Wednesday night, most of her 23 points. To state the obvious about a one-point overtime victory, even a still-very-good 13-for-16 line wouldn’t have been enough to get it done.
“I didn’t know I shot that much,” Zingaro said of her prolific night from 15 feet away. “It feels good. I knew going to the line at the end there, I was like, okay, this is like my time to kind of…it hurt so bad last time, and I knew that I should have made those, and so it felt good going to the line. I felt confident.”
Her pair of foul shots with 1:26 left in overtime represented CSU’s final scoring and, ultimately, the difference in the game. However, they weren’t the only big shots she hit during the extra period.
On of a baseline out-of-bounds play with three minutes remaining, Zingaro stepped back into the left-side corner and knocked down a three-pointer to give the Vikings the lead for good, 81-78.
Even though Zingaro attempted four triples in the game prior to her decisive bomb, the sequence took the Phoenix by surprise, as the visiting coaching staff pulled forward Jenna Guyer away from the perimeter at the last moment.
“We knew where we wanted to go with it, and Green Bay was down there on the other side saying, ‘Jenna, get in, Jenna get in,’” Kielsmeier recalled. “I was like ‘oh yeah, we got this.’ And we made the read. We had practiced that, we prepped it, we knew where we wanted to go with it, we knew that Colbi was going to get a lot of attention, but players got to make plays. You’ve got to hit the shot.”
Cleveland State is now 3-1 in games involving a made three-pointer from the 6-3 post player, a record that includes three of the Vikings’ biggest wins this season; previous victories over College of Charleston and Northern Kentucky also included Zingaro deep balls in fulcrum situations.
The Canadian also starred defensively, including 11 rebounds to secure her fifth consecutive double-double. She did most of the work in limiting Guyer, a Horizon League Player of the Year frontrunner, to 5-for-15 shooting, and starting center Meghan Schultz to a 2-for-7 effort. The pair of GB bigs are the top two Phoenix scorers, averaging a combined 26.6 points per game, but they managed only 17 on Wednesday.
The most visible of those misses came on the final play of overtime, as CSU clung to an 83-82 lead with five seconds remaining. Green Bay’s Lily Hansford inbounded from the sideline directly to a well-guarded Guyer, who missed a one-handed try, clinching the outcome.
2. Just how close was the game?
The only moment of the affair where either team had anything resembling separation came early in the third quarter, when Cleveland State scored the first five points of the second half to transform a four-point edge at the break into a nine-point lead. However, almost immediately, the Phoenix went on a 12-0 run to wipe it out, and then some. Overall, the game witnessed 14 ties and 16 lead changes, with more than half of those counts taking place during the fourth quarter and overtime.
That’s what made most of Shey Magassa’s 8:19 of game time so compelling.
Early in the fourth quarter, Zingaro picked up her third and fourth fouls in quick succession and headed to the bench with 8:00 remaining, with the score sitting at 55-54 Green Bay following a Schultz free throw on the latter infraction. Magassa entered the game to play in the middle of the floor.
The La Salle transfer stands 6-1 and, despite a relentless motor, is a clear mismatch against true centers like the 6-4 Schultz. Green Bay tried to exploit that discrepancy a bit, but ultimately only managed six points in the paint during the five minutes after Zingaro’s exit, and found the road a bit smoother from behind the arc.
CSU’s starting center returned for good with 2:57 to go. The score at that moment? 72-70 Vikings.
Of course, as nobly as Magassa handled a tough assignment, she didn’t do any scoring herself. That largely fell to Maples and Fegan.
The former finished with a game-high 26 points. Much of that scoring came in two bursts, one early in the game when she scored seven of Cleveland State’s first 11 points, and didn’t miss a shot of any sort until midway through the second quarter.
The more prominent surge came during those pivotal five minutes of the fourth quarter, when she fired in 12 points on a 5-for-5 line to keep the Vikings afloat. As has been the case of late, the MBA student offered a little bit of everything to the fray. She was 4-for-8 from three-point range, and consistently provided a disruptive threat on iso plays and other instances that involved putting the ball on the floor.
Maples felt as if her offense was a case of one thing facilitating others.
“They plug gaps really well,” she said. “So attacking lanes, it looks like they’re there for a second. Then when you get there, it’s closed. So it’s kind of like a pick me game that you play. But when you’re able to hit shots, I feel like that’s kind of what opened things up a little bit.”
Like Zingaro, her performance was also a fitting bounceback from the first game of the season series against GB. In that January contest, Maples made a surprisingly-quick return from an ankle injury suffered on December 19th, but was held to 14 points on 5-for-14 shooting.
Fegan scored the other six of CSU’s 18 points during that Zingaro-free fourth-quarter stretch, part of an effort that saw the power forward bucket 12 of her 21 tallies during the last 15 minutes of play.
“Some of it’s being in the right place at the right time, and some of it is coming from all the attention [Zingaro and Maples] are getting, and it gives me easy looks and they’re just dishing it to me,” Fegan said. “I think there’s probably like three or four layups coming off of their passes where they’re getting doubled with my girl, and it’s just the easiest layup just because of all the work they’ve done.”
The humility of that statement was a bit much for Kielsmeier.
“That’s her being a little bit too humble for herself,” he objected. “She’s developed her game, and she’s getting what she deserves, because she works as hard year round.”
Of course, it wasn’t solely about the layups, easy or otherwise. Fegan added four rebounds, four assists, and a pair of steals to the victory. The second of those thefts came with 1:08 to go in overtime, when she anticipated a Guyer pass to the wing and picked it off. Cleveland State ultimately committed a shot clock violation on the ensuing possession, but the turnover was still enough to bleed 30 seconds off of the clock – a crucial detail that helped limit Green Bay to two remaining chances to hack at what was then an 83-79 Vikings lead.
3. The heroics of Maples, Fegan, and Zingaro were entirely necessary largely because star Phoenix guard Skorupski couldn’t miss in the second half.
That’s very nearly a literal statement. After a pretty unremarkable five points on 1-for-3 shooting over the first two quarters, the Oakland transfer exploded for 20 over the final 25 minutes of the evening, connecting on nine of her 13 field goal tries during that time. Many weren’t routine looks but Skorupski, like GB great Natalie McNeal before her, presents a tough matchup for Cleveland State’s zone as someone who can exploit mid-range soft spots.
One needn’t look any further than the 2024-25 season for additional evidence, when Skorupski scored 25 points to drive a costly OU upset of the Vikings in Michigan.
“She’s a great player,” Kielsmeier said. “I mean, great players make plays and she hit a lot of tough shots, so she had a heck of a game, but she earned a lot of those.”
Skorupski scored five straight points in the heart of GB’s 12-0 third-quarter run. She kept going from there, including ten straight Phoenix tallies during one span bridging the third and fourth quarters – all from between ten and 17 feet from the basket.
Kristina Ouimette was Green Bay’s second-leading scorer, as she bucketed 18 points, entirely on a 6-for-13 rate from three-point range. The freshman’s sixth connection came with 35 seconds remaining in overtime and shaved CSU’s lead to just one, though she and Guyer each misfired on shots during the final possession of regulation that could have prevented things from progressing that far.
“If you’d have told me at the beginning of the day that they were going to hit ten threes on us, I don’t know if I’d like our chances,” Kielsmeier said. “So you slice this up, they scored 82 points, and we had to outscore them to win. That’s not our game right there. So it shows a lot of some of the mistakes we made defensively, but hey, give them credit because they hit some big-time tough shots.”
4. Though she’s come off the bench of late, Paula Pique ended up playing starter minutes (32 of them, to be exact) against the Phoenix.
She only scored six points, on a pair of three-pointers, though they were both vital. The first arrived at the end of the opening quarter and ended a 10-2 Green Bay run that washed away an early 13-8 Vikings lead, tying things up at 18-18 through ten minutes. The second also leveled the game and stopped a GB run, specifically, that 12-0 Phoenix surge in the third quarter.
Kielsmeier, as is his wont, preferred to steer things towards the Spaniard’s defense.
“Paula played great,” he said. “I mean, she hit two big shots, but what she does for us defensively, just the reads that she makes. She’s just a smart basketball player. She’s got a huge upside, and she continues to learn the system. She’s another player that, if you look at her stat sheet, nothing on it sticks out huge other than those two threes, but she impacted that game defensively as much as anybody on the floor.”
5. Entering the game, Green Bay was 15-0 in Horizon League play this year – five wins from a perfect conference regular season – and enjoyed a 36-game winning streak against HL foes overall, including last season’s tournament title.
Not only did Cleveland State snap that streak in earning its first win over the Phoenix since the 2023-24 season, the victory was the Vikings’ sixth in their last 14 tries against the dairylanders. That’s an objectively impressive run, given that GB is 106-18 against conference opponents during those five seasons.
In the present moment, the result pulled CSU up to fifth place in the standings, the final position that will earn a home game in the first round of the HL playoffs. As of now, and thanks partly to beating the Phoenix, the green and white also owns tiebreakers against Purdue Fort Wayne, Robert Morris, and Northern Kentucky, the other schools in the heart of the tightly-packed chase for third through sixth places.
Beyond any of that though, beating GB, stacked with a decisive victory over the Mastodons on Saturday, has offered the Vikings some intangible benefits that they perhaps lacked earlier in the season.
“I think it shows that we’re the only ones that can kind of step in our own way,” Maples said. “When we play like we know how to play, and go out there, and give it all we got, we know we can beat anybody that we play against.”
“We’re fighting and the fight’s not over,” Fegan added. “It just started for us.”
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