Cleveland State spoiled Wright State’s Senior Night on Wednesday, clocking a dominant 81-55 victory inside the Nutter Center to stay on track to finish third in the Horizon League standings.
Here are five things that stood out, as CSU won its fifth game in a row to improve to 22-8 overall, and 12-7 in HL play.
1. The Vikings’ matchups with WSU, particularly the half that take place in the Dayton area, always seem to follow a couple specific patterns. One is that CSU is generally able to do whatever it wants down the middle of the floor.
That was certainly the case again on Wednesday, as Izabella Zingaro set a new career high with 29 points, exploiting a typical mismatch in the series.
“She got the ball in deep position, and we knew we had a mismatch in there, and we felt like they were going to have a hard time being able to keep her off the spots that she wants to work,” Chris Kielsmeier explained. “But yeah, I mean she played a heck of the game tonight. It’s great to see it all come together for her.”
What was a little bit different this time around is that the Raiders have some credible size, a sharp contrast to the days when Kari Hoffman was forced to park a 5-9 guard on Cleveland State’s centers. That uptick began last season when one-time Viking Amaya Staton used her final year of eligibility at Wright State, and earned all-league recognition while setting multiple rebounding records. Chloe Chard Peloquin, the current preferred starter at the position, remains out of action, but 6-2 Grace Okih has done some nice work with increased minutes, while helping resurgent WSU to four wins in six tries entering the contest.
She barely got the chance to do much of anything against Cleveland State. By midway through the second quarter, the Nigerian had accumulated three fouls, forcing undersized Maja Dilen – a club teammate of CSU’s Hanna Medina Kajevic in Sweden – to attempt bandaging things in the paint. English sophomore Florrie Cotterill, who is 6-2 but sparingly used, grabbed a few minutes as well.
None were able to slow down Zingaro, at least not without fouling her. Okih was eventually disqualified early in the fourth quarter, with her five infractions only half of the ten total drawn by the Vikings’ big. As a result, the Canadian graduate student scored 11 points through free throws, on 13 attempts.
2. Kielsmeier was quick to point out that Zingaro had plenty of help with bolstering her status as the Horizon League’s second-leading scorer and a serious conference player of the year candidate.
Enter Macey Fegan, Cleveland State’s queen of help.
Fegan had a game-high five assists, four of which were lobs over the top of the coverage from the high post that directly fed nearly half of Zingaro’s nine made field goals. She also had several unofficial dimes leading to free throw attempts, alongside her 14 points and nine rebounds.
“I don’t think people understand how hard that pass is,” Kielsmeier said of that lob. “She missed a couple that she probably could have hit, but she made a lot that she probably could have missed. That’s a hard pass to make, and for the system to really go the way we want it to go, that pass needs to be made.
“She probably made that pass zero times last year,” he added, refencing the fact that Fegan played an entirely different position in 2024-25. “So it’s a whole new learning curve for her, and she continues to get better with it.”
The junior even assisted with safety efforts, when she held up proceedings late in the third quarter to direct the Nutter Center staff to clean up some moisture she noticed on the floor during a defensive stop.
Tracking Cleveland State’s team-wide 13 assists in the game present something of a microcosm of the Vikings’ offense. Fegan’s other helper went to Rockwood, Zingaro’s backup, while Jada Leonard’s two assists were perimeter swings that ended up as three-pointers by Sarah Hurley and Paula Pique. Colbi Maples did a little bit of everything, including feeding Zingaro, setting up Leonard for a triple, and helping on a Fegan score.
That ball movement was a driver behind CSU shooting 52.9 percent from the floor, its third-best total against Division I competition this season.
Kielsmeier, however, was mostly impressed with his team’s 13 turnovers, the second straight game where the Vikings have lowered a middling season average of 17 giveaways. The coach credited what he called “controlled intensity.”
“We were really efficient offensively,” he said. “We really challenged our players, that turnover total has got to come down. I mean, we’ve been talking about that for months, and 13 turnovers tonight is outstanding.”
3. Another well-worn pattern of CSU-WSU games didn’t play out.
Hoffman’s Raiders teams have hosted the Vikings on three previous occasions since the former Cedarville coach took over in Fairborn, OH in 2021. One of those games, during the 2022-23 season, saw WSU set a new school record by making 18 three-pointers. Last year’s matchup came close, including 16 makes on 57 percent accuracy, an effort that got Kielsmeier to (more or less) treat a victory as if his team lost. That latter contest was something of an arrival moment for then-freshman Rylee Sagester, who hit eight of her 13 deep tries and scored 24 points, a figure that still stands as her career high.
On Wednesday, however, the Raiders went just 5-for-22 from behind the arc. Sagester (2-for-5) and Ellie Magrestro-Kennedy (2-for-6) provided most of that punch, but the likes of Breezie Williams, Lauren Scott, and Claire Henson were just 1-for-10 collectively.
“We know we’ve been lit up here in this place in the past,” Kielsmeier admitted. “They are as hot as any team in the league right now, and playing really well offensively, but I thought our defensive rotation was outstanding.”
There was a little bit of a wrinkle behind that success, as Cleveland State staggered its two guards defensively. One played the conventional top-of-the-zone spot, and the other shaded just behind to assist on the wings.
“Not playing a two-guard front, and getting our positioning better defensively up on the top side has been something that we’ve worked on extensively since we played them the last time,” Kielsmeier said. “Our guards have a much better understanding of what we’re trying to do with that.”
4. Despite missing both of her three-point attempts, Henson was far and away the Raiders’ best player. The Germantown, OH native, one of three WSU seniors honored prior to the opening tip, scored 20 points – just two short of her career high – on 10-for-16 shooting, while adding seven of her team’s 24 rebounds.
Henson is an archetype that tends to excel against Cleveland State’s zone: a versatile scorer who can connect from the midrange. Her preferred areas of the floor are a bit closer to the basket than those of Green Bay’s Maddy Skorupski, another player who fits the bill, but both are able to find space underneath the defense’s upper shell, without directly challenging CSU’s strength in the middle of the floor.
Of course, she came awfully close to the latter at times, frequently faking towards the basket, then hitting fadeaway jumpers over the long arms of Zingaro or Rockwood.
“She hit some tough shots,” Kielsmeier said. “She’s tough to guard. She’s got that little fade away that she can get off against anybody. We tried to crowd that, and make that a lower-percentage shot for her. I don’t think we did a very good job with it. But again, you got to give that kid a lot of credit, because she’s a heck of a player and she played really well tonight.”
5. Road games, almost by definition, tend to involve slow starts. Whether due to bus legs, hostile energy, or simply the unfamiliar surroundings, the broad mission for most visiting teams in most sports is to merely survive the early going, then hit the gas after settling in.
The Vikings, clearly, had a different idea against Wright State. CSU surrendered just four points in the opening quarter, and closed the frame on an 11-0 run to go ahead 20-4. The bookend to the surge was a four-point play by Maples with just 0.4 seconds remaining, when the star point guard hit a three-pointer while being undercut by Williams.
Cleveland State offered up another spectacular quarter-closing moment at the end of the third period, when Williams fouled Leonard during a desperate half-court heave that took place with even less time showing on the clock, 0.1 seconds. The Bryant transfer then scored two of her 15 points on the subsequent free throws.
All of that represented quite a shift from the Vikings’ usual results this season while wearing their green uniforms. CSU began the year just 2-6 in true road games, but have now won three of four away from the Wolstein Center, with the Wright State victory perhaps representing the most thorough effort yet.
Kielsmeier was surprisingly reflective on his team’s improved fortunes away from Northeast Ohio, crediting psychological growth.
“I think a lot of people forget that coming into our program is an adjustment with a lot of things, not just on the court in between the lines,” he began. “Getting them to have a better understanding of the focus and the intensity that you have to have on the road took some time to get this team to learn. It wasn’t like they were doing anything wrong before. They just didn’t know any different.”
“They’ve bought into some of the things that we do that that are unique to our program, and you got to give the kids credit for that because they didn’t have to listen. They didn’t have to want to make changes.”
Ironically, that road success has saved Cleveland State from needing to tap into that mentality much more this season. The Vikings have earned a home game in the first round of the Horizon League tournament, and the remaining rounds will be played at a neutral site, in Indianapolis.
Subscribe to our emails, and get our latest posts in your inbox, plus a weekly digest of everything we've published!
