On Monday night, Cleveland State defeated Monmouth 74-68 in the second round of the WNIT, securing a place in the tournament’s final 16, thanks largely to an electric 39 points by Colbi Maples, as well as 23 backloaded tallies from Izabella Zingaro.
Here are five things that stood out, as the Vikings kept their season going, and moved to 25-9 overall:
1. Maples entered the Wolstein Center media room following the contest with two hands on the game ball, as if someone might try to rip the orb – and all that it represented – away without notice.
Magical evenings have a way of doing that to people, of making them a little bit suspicious that someone or something will arrive to negate all that just transpired, perhaps a realization that some subconscious hallucination or broken reality helped things along.
However, an announced crowd of 484 eyewitnesses can confirm the legitimacy of Maples’ outing against the Hawks. The explosion not only smashed her previous career high, it was also the second-best single-game total in Cleveland State history, trailing only a 40-piece that former Vikings great Audra Cook dropped at Akron on December 15, 1997.
Maples scored CSU’s first eight points to jump start the effort, on the way to a 13-point opening quarter. By halftime, she had 20 of her team’s 33 points, and it was clear that she might be en route to something special.
After all, it’s now or never for the graduate student. Once Maples takes her next loss, her college career is over.
“When it gets to this time [of year], all of us are kind of thinking like that,” she said. “So I just knew I wanted to give my all and do whatever I can to win.”
If there was a downside, it’s that the Vikings might have been a little too dependent on her. In one glaring example, Chris Kielsmeier tried to give Maples a breather midway through the second quarter. However, without the star point guard on the floor, consecutive empty possessions resulted, while MU managed to trim the green-and-white advantage to 24-23. Maples then hurried back to the scorer’s table, and almost immediately after re-entering the game, connected on one of her four three-pointers.
In another, a team-wide cold spell contributed to a 12-2 Hawks run bridging halftime, and helping the visitors to a 39-35 edge midway through the third quarter. Once again, it was Maples who put her foot down at that moment with five consecutive points, on a drive and a step-back three, to give the Vikings the lead back.
“She’s had some moments here at this place where she just gets herself in a comfort zone,” Kielsmeier said. “You can’t stop her. And she has those moments, and you’ve got one shot this time of year. And then when you’re a senior, you’ve got one shot forever. And she’ll remember this night for the rest of her life, or at least she should.”
Those moments, cumulatively, resulted in 13-for-30 shooting, including 4-for-8 from three-point range, while Monmouth threw several different, mostly-unsuccessful defensive looks at her. Maples’ four assists and three steals would be headlining numbers on almost any other night.
They also produced a game ball, and though the prize never left her possession during the postgame interview session, it might have deflated a little bit during those nine minutes and three seconds.
“I told her she needed to hit her free throws,” Kielsmeier quipped.
For the record, Maples went 9-for-11 from the charity stripe, a good rate by anyone’s standard, though obviously, 11-for-11 would have meant breaking CSU’s single-game scoring record. Both of her misses came in the final 30 seconds of the contest, with the Vikings trying to salt away the result through Monmouth’s fouling.
The coach admitted that those shots poisoned his memory a bit.
“I didn’t know she went that good,” he said. “What was sticking in my head, she’s missing those ones late. She never misses those.”
2. As top-heavy as the Vikings might have been at times, Monmouth’s reality was probably even worse. The Hawks only used seven players on Monday, with the five starters chewing up 174 of the 200 available minutes.
What’s more, 49 of the visitors’ 68 points came from two players, forward Divine Dibula and guard Gigi Gamble. That duo represented a classic inside-outside partnership, with Gamble’s 23 points coming mostly from a 5-for-13 effort from three-point range. Dibula, a slightly undersized frontcourt player who compensates with extreme physicality, produced 26 points and 11 rebounds.
Madalena Amaro facilitated between the two, offering a game-high eight assists to the MU cause.
“I felt like we gave away too many points tonight,” Kielsmeier said. “You could take ten, 12 points off the board just on stuff that I feel like we’re coached better than. You don’t get time to learn from those mistakes. Those mistakes will end your year.”
If there was a bit of a saving grace for Cleveland State, it’s that the third member of Monmouth’s big three, Alexis Andrews, was held to 4-for-13 shooting on the way to 12 points, including 1-for-7 from three-point range.
3. With Maples propping up CSU to some extent, and both Dibula and Gamble answering for Monmouth, the affair remained airtight. What ultimately provided that decisive bit of separation was Izabella Zingaro.
For a lot of the evening, the Hawks did an outstanding job of denying Zingaro the ball, as she only had nine points on 4-for-9 shooting at the end of the third quarter, and had also coughed up the ball five times (including a pair of traveling whistles).
Part of that secret involved physicality, as several Zingaro-Dibula interactions ended with the former slowly picking herself up off the floor. That trend hit a crescendo midway through the fourth quarter, when a Dibula elbow to Zingaro’s stomach produced an easy two points for the Hawks, as well as an ultimately-fruitless video review.
“March basketball, it’s been that way all month,” Kielsmeier said. “It’s just hard that four months of the college basketball season, everything’s a charge, and now nothing’s a charge. She got trucked on two of them and those are significant plays, but you’ve got to show composure, and you’ve got to play through stuff.”
That fourth-quarter incident also produced something else. In the short term, that meant Zingaro heading to the bench to throw up. Just after that though, came the rage of someone who finally had enough.
“I think she just said ‘I’m not losing, I’m going to take this game over,’” Kielsmeier observed. “I think she went into beast mode, and just [with] the physicality she said, ‘okay, fine, I’m sick of being on the receiving end of all this and I’m going to go after them.’”
Immediately upon returning to action after purging, Zingaro took a baseline lob from Sarah Hurley and scored through Dibula’s contact to tie the game at 61-61 with 3:33 remaining.
A couple minutes later, after five more Maples points (both on spectacular driving buckets, the latter of which also earned a free throw), Zingaro helped put CSU on the front foot for good. In the decisive sequence, within the final two minutes of play, the center hit a pair of free throws, rebounded a Dibula miss, then scored one more time past her adversary and some double team help to give the Vikings a near-prohibitive 70-65 advantage with 68 seconds to go.
“She got beat on all night and responded,” Kielsmeier said. “And just to be able to step up there and hit free throws, and you’re playing a physical knock-em-out game, and then you’ve got to be composed to shoot free throws. You’ve got to have a lot of toughness mentally and just be able to really compose yourself. And that’s what she did tonight.”
Despite the slow start, Zingaro closed with numbers exceeding her season averages, including 23 points and nine rebounds.
4. Largely because of that physicality, Zingaro ended the contest with four fouls, which meant that Laurel Rockwood was on the floor for some crucial late-game defensive possessions.
With 33 seconds remaining and CSU still holding that 70-65 lead, Rockwood stood up Dibula down low to force a miss, then rebounded the errant shot. On Monmouth’s next possession, following a Maples free throw, the Las Vegas-area native grabbed another board, this time from a offline Gamble three. That set up one more Maples free throw, which gave Cleveland State a three-possession lead with only nine seconds left.
“As big of plays there was in the game, both of them,” Kielsmeier said. “And she’s done that before. She got a huge stop in the Oakland game. When she stays down and moves and doesn’t lift and take herself out of place, she’s as good a defender as there is. And she really locks in and does that in the moment when we need her.”
5. Thanks to its pay-for-play nature and compressed time frame, the WNIT is uniquely stressful in certain ways. Specifically, not only is any participating team’s next opponent up in the air and based on the results of other games, so are the date and site of that contest.
The tournament’s rounds are scheduled in three-day blocks, so in the Vikings’ present circumstances, that means a trip to Murfreesboro, TN to play Middle Tennessee State in the WNIT’s Super 16 round on Thursday. None of those details became official until the Blue Raiders finished beating St. Bonaventure about 20 minutes after the Cleveland State-Monmouth game went final.
That decidedly means some late nights for the CSU coaching staff, which does its best to confront the many contingencies, but ultimately has to wait to know which way to proceed.
“Our staff will have stuff done [Tuesday] morning,” Kielsmeier said. “When we get in, it’ll be full prep, and go through everything. And we’ve always got a plan. You just got to go execute it.”
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