Cleveland State honored its eight seniors in style on Saturday afternoon, by downing Oakland 73-59 in the Wolstein Center to close the 2025-26 regular season as the Horizon League’s third place team.
Here are five things that stood out from the Senior Day effort, which improved the Vikings’ record to 23-8 overall, and 13-7 in HL play:
1. At one decisive moment of the contest, late in the second quarter, CSU had an uncharacteristically low four forced turnovers.
On balance, things weren’t going terribly. Thanks largely to big first halves by Colbi Maples (who finished the game with 20 points) and Jada Leonard (17 points and six assists), the Vikings held a 27-26 lead, but the longevity of that slim advantage appeared to depend on continuing to outscore the Golden Grizzlies.
Then, seemingly out of nowhere, a Sarah Hurley interception and subsequent three-pointer opened the floodgates. Leonard followed that up with a steal-and-score layup, while Maples and Shey Magassa similarly set up baskets with takeaways. Those four thefts – on consecutive OU possessions – did most of the work behind a late 11-0 run, which helped Cleveland State take a 36-28 lead into the locker room.
Maples couldn’t recall the exact timeout that caused everything to click, but nevertheless remembered the moment itself.
“We all huddled and were like, ‘we have to get stops,’” she said. “And you could just see the determination change in everyone’s faces. And then, you could even tell the excitement we had when we got stops and steals, and we were able to build off there.”
The Vikings, despite a couple of dicey moments in the second half, never trailed after the surge, enabling them to double down on their fundamental line of attack.
2. For Cleveland State, “fundamental line of attack” means Izabella Zingaro, who shook off a slow start to finish with team highs of 26 points and six rebounds. The scoring total was the second-highest figure of the center’s career, behind only the 29 tallies she posted at Wright State on Wednesday.
Zingaro scored all 12 of the Vikings’ third quarter points, thanks to a diverse attack that saw teammates ranging from Maples and Leonard, to Magassa and Paula Pique, serve as the fulcrum of various plays ending in the hands of the 6-4 Canadian. Her production helped fend off Oakland’s last significant push, which trimmed CSU’s lead to 48-44 eleven seconds into the fourth quarter, after Filippa Goula burned her old team for a three.
The scary part, at least for the Vikings’ remaining opponents? Kielsmeier felt that the Montana transfer was limited by the wave of feelings inherent to Senior Day, along with the 50 or so family members who traveled to Cleveland to support her.
“Izzi was pretty emotional and not really herself in that first half,” he observed. “She had a lot of family here and you just never know how individuals, you certainly don’t know how your team is going to handle Senior Day.”
“Your head tells you that this is towards the end of the journey, and it’s been on her mind because she’s talked to me about it and I’ve tried to just keep it simple with her, [saying that] you’ve got to stay in the moment and do what you’ve got to do. She didn’t get very deep position in the first half, and I think they were able to kind of push her to where they wanted her to play, and she doesn’t really let that happen.”
She certainly made up for it by being nearly unstoppable during the final 20 minutes, powering what ended up as a fairly-comfortable victory.
3. Zingaro’s game was a sturdy closing argument in an equally-robust case to be named the Horizon League’s Player of the Year on Monday, when the conference’s postseason awards will be announced. The graduate student finished HL play as the circuit’s leading scorer, with 18.5 points per game, and third in rebounding, with 8.1 boards per game. Her field goal percentage has ranked among the top ten players nationally for most of the season, and she also places among the elite for drawing fouls and free throw attempts.
If Zingaro wins the honor, it would be the fourth straight time that a Cleveland State player has captured the HL’s top individual honor, following Destiny Leo (2022-23), Maples (2023-24), and Mickayla Perdue (2024-25).
“I think people that watched us play this week know who’s playing the best in the league right now, but it’s out of our control,” Kielsmeier said, in something of an attempt to pitch his awards candidate.
He quickly pivoted to crediting others, however, particularly Maples and Macey Fegan. In his assessment, it takes a team to win an individual award.
“Izzi’s really stinking good, but you’ve got to give everybody else credit too, like her teammates, just those passes and Colbi getting it into her. Macey – just like Sara [Guerreiro] last year – she’s never going to get as enough credit for how much she’s helped Izzi become Izzi, because Izzi hasn’t shot a shot all year on her own, other than maybe that [pivotal overtime] three-ball against Green Bay, right?”
The good news for Kielsmeier is that alongside Zingaro, Maples and Fegan, as well as defensive stalwart Leonard, also stand an excellent chance of capturing some sort of individual honor on Monday.
4. Though Oakland never led by more than three points, the Golden Grizzlies began the game at a blazing pace from three-point range. OU connected on its first four attempts from deep, and five of its first six.
Lianna Baxter, one of the Horizon League’s best floor-stretching bigs, led the Grizzlies with 18 points, including a 4-for-5 line on threes. Conference freshman of the year contender Makenzie Luehring hit three triples in the first 14 minutes of the affair, with the final shot giving Oakland its penultimate lead, 24-23.
“They’re good shooters and a good team and we didn’t do enough to prevent the shot,” Kielsmeier said. “I think when you go back and watch the tape, it’s not like we blew any of the covers or rotations that we’re supposed to do like really bad. It just wasn’t good enough. And I think that was indicative of what we were doing defensively as a whole.”
Regression to the mean eventually came for the visitors with a vengeance, and they ultimately finished with a decent-but-unremarkable 35.5 percent accuracy on threes, thanks to a 6-for-25 clip following the opening salvo.
Still, Kielsmeier was bothered by the fact that OU managed to get 31 shots up from behind the arc.
“We just weren’t doing enough, especially against a team that’s been hot,” he added. “I mean, they’ve been as good as anybody in the league some nights. We can’t ever be at our best when a team shoots 31 threes on us, and that’s what happened today.”
5. The victory, combined with Wright State’s loss to Robert Morris in Pennsylvania later in the afternoon, set up something quite awkward: a return visit from the Golden Grizzlies on Wednesday for the first round of the Horizon League tournament.
Bizarrely, it’s the third time in the last four seasons that Cleveland State has closed the regular season and opened the HL playoffs with the same opponent. In 2022-23, the Vikings wrapped up the home-and-away schedule in Milwaukee, then hosted the Panthers for the conference quarterfinals. The following year, Northern Kentucky was the other side of the double-dip, though in that case, both games took place at the Wolstein Center.
CSU bucked the old “it’s hard to beat a team twice” adage in both situations to advance to Indianapolis, and will try to do the same on Wednesday against Oakland.
“Ideally, that’s not what you want,” Kielsmeier admitted. “But what we want is to play at home on Wednesday night at 7:00, and that’s what we get. We’ve earned that right, so now let’s see what we’re going to do with it because it’s the time of year where if you’re not at your best or close to your best, you’ve got no shot to win. So let’s lock in and be at our best.”
The coach mentioned a few times that that the weight of Senior Day might have produced a somewhat flat team on Saturday, even outside of Zingaro, and that Wednesday might be a different story.
“I think that hopefully they get away from the game this weekend, flush some of the emotion out and really just get back to playing ball and being the team that we’ve become,” he said. “We were just so out of sync today, and I think a lot of it was just the emotion of the day.”
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