On Thursday night in Murfreesboro, TN, Cleveland State took control in the second half to defeat host Middle Tennessee State 66-56 and advance to the WNIT’s Great 8, where the Vikings will face either Purdue Fort Wayne or Arkansas State.
Here are five things that stood out from the effort:
1. The contest began rather chaotically, thanks to the pair of stellar defenses on the floor.
In the first quarter alone, each team turned the ball over nine times, and added a combined seven more giveaways by the midway point of the second stanza. Neither team looked particularly comfortable with the ball against its opponent, and that timidity was generally met with an interception or, at the very least, a pass swatted out of bounds.
Of course, all of that is just fine with CSU’s chief chaos agent: Paula Pique.
Pressed into the starting lineup for the first time since January 4th thanks to Jada Leonard’s lower-body injury, Pique matched her career high with five steals, three of them coming in the opening period. She also played a pivotal role in limited a strong three-point shooting team to 6-for-21 from behind the arc.
For the Barcelona, Spain native, those successes are simply a matter of relishing the defensive end of the floor on a level few understand.
“I love to be aggressive,” she said. “I love to go for steals and tips. I love [that] this zone allows me to do that. And yeah, if I play aggressive and confident, I get the tips and the steals, and we can go and score each point.”
What’s more, Pique was also one of the few offensive options that was firing early on. She scored CSU’s first five points, on a three-pointer and a pair of free throws, and after two runout buckets, she had nine of her team’s first 23 tallies.
“I’m always ready to play whenever he wants me to play,” Pique said, while motioning to her right.
“She played one of her best games, if not the best game, in her life tonight,” Chris Kielsmeier, the man to Pique’s right, said. “And she just was simple Paula. Not a lot of flashy plays, but just tough as heck. Defended great. Hit some timely shots. And her upside is huge. This is going to give her a lot of confidence.”
2. Though Pique might have been the ringleader, the Vikings’ defense was truly a team-wide effort.
“We were just locked in and played really well all night,” Kielsmeier said. “Our defense started the game well and really kind of disrupted them.”
It didn’t hurt matters that the opponent wasn’t a Horizon League team with ample experience playing against the Cleveland State zone, but a non-conference opponent with only a couple days to prepare for it.
“If you’ve never gone against our defense before, it can be disruptive if we’re playing it the right way,” Kielsmeier added. “And [MTSU] shoots a ton of threes, and if that zone’s not firing on the outside the way it should – it needs to – we can give up a lot of shots, but our defense was outstanding tonight.”
“That zone gave us some problems,” Blue Raiders coach Rick Insell admitted.
Macie Phifer and Blair Baugus led the Blue Raiders with 17 points each, though Baugus was held to 7-for-16 shooting from an inside position. MTSU’s leading scorer, Alayna Contreras, was limited to nine points on 3-for-12 shooting. CSU won the rebounding battle by a staggering 43-24 count.
Really, just about the only thing that slowed the visitors down a bit defensively was foul trouble.
By halftime, Izabella Zingaro – generally the largest concern in that department – had two fouls. The two players generally used to shield Zingaro, Laurel Rockwood and Shey Magassa, had three and two, respectively. Stars Macey Fegan and Colbi Maples also had a pair each.
The quick whistles in Murfreesboro took Kielsmeier by surprise, given that March basketball tends to be officiated much more leniently.
“That first half, they called it really, really tight,” the coach observed. “And I don’t think we were ready for that because [our previous] game was as physical of a basketball game as I’ve ever been in, and there was way less fouls called that night than what there was tonight. So I think our players had a hard time adjusting to it.”
They did eventually though, and by the end of the evening, the foul situation had more or less disappeared as a significant concern, beyond the fact that it limited Zingaro to ten points in 19 minutes.
Still, for a time, the situation led to some pretty bizarre lineups, including one that had Sarah Hurley and Ella Van Weelden, who typically play the same position, on the floor simultaneously. At one stage, Fegan had to tell Magassa which position she was playing as she entered the game, a foreseeable outcome of another instance where players who typically substitute for each other were on the floor at the same time.
“We had lineups out there that we’ve never had all year,” Kielsmeier confirmed. “And boy, they played with confidence and on a big stage.”
3. The game ground to a halt after a Baugus bucket with 2:27 left in the second quarter trimmed Cleveland State’s advantage to 31-29. From there, neither team managed a single point for the next 7:08 of game time, a dry spell that finally ended with a Sarah Hurley corner three.
That shot seemed to take the lid off the rim, at least on one end of the floor, and it set off a quick 9-2 run that provided the Vikings a welcome bit of separation at a crucial juncture of the game.
In all, the Canadian sophomore went 4-for-7 from deep, producing a career-high 12 points. Most of her bombs were in big situations, including one that gave the Vikings a surprising 10-3 lead early on, as well as a game clincher with 71 seconds remaining, after Middle Tennessee State had fought back to a we-still-have-a-chance six-point deficit.
“She hit timely shots, big shots there in the fourth,” Kielsmeier said.
Hurley and Pique weren’t the only unsung heroes of the affair. Hanna Medina Kajevic stepped in as CSU’s third guard due to the injury to Leonard, while Rockwood and Magassa performed the thankless taks of covering for foul-saddled starters while not allowing much, if any, performance dropoff.
The final box score, on the Vikings’ side of things, was quite unusual. In their WNIT second round game against Monmouth on Monday, Maples and Zingaro scored 62 of Cleveland State’s 74 points. However, on Thursday, all five green-clad starters landed in double figures, and none hit 20 points.
“We know that we can play a lot of different ways,” Kielsmeier said. “When we build rosters, we’ve built them very versatile to be able to attack what our opponent is trying to take away that night. And some nights we don’t have to get that deep and exploit it, but we had to tonight, and players had to step up and hit shots, and they were ready in the moment.”
“Players make plays, players win games, and we won tonight because our players played outstanding, and they hit shots and made plays.”
4. Despite that balance, Maples provided a more-than-suitable follow-up act to her 39 points on Monday – the second-highest single-game total in program history – with a game-high 19 tallies, in front of a large group of family members who made the trip from Arkansas.
It wasn’t just the fact of that scoring, a fairly routine output for the graduate student, it was how it transpired.
Midway through the third quarter, about when Hurley hit her drought-breaking three, Maples was 2-for-13 from the floor, and had just six points, thanks to the defensive work of Middle Tennessee State’s Kirston Verhulst.
However, Maples finally broke free to connect on six of her last eight shot attempts, as Cleveland State slowly took over the evening over its final 15 minutes.
Perhaps “broke free” isn’t a proper choice of words, though.
“They defended her great,” Kielsmeier said. “She hit tough shots, off-balance shots, physical shots, where she’d get knocked to the ground and just…I said it on Monday and I’ll say it again. She’s going to remember these last two games the rest of her life, because she’s just that stinking good and for her to be playing this great, to end her career is really, really special.”
“[Maples] just took over, and just what a player,” Insell agreed. “She just flat put her team on her back, and we did all we could do. Kirston is our best perimeter defensive player, and she did everything she could do. Kid was just a player. She made shots. That’s all you can say.”
Ultimately, Maples scored nearly half of CSU’s points during the game’s fulcrum stretch. She exploded for six in exactly one minute of game time to give the Vikings a 40-31 lead, then scored a pair of hoops early in the fourth quarter to fend off MTSU’s last significant challenge, and push her team’s lead out to ten.
5. The result signaled the end of the line for Insell’s run at Middle Tennessee State, as he announced his retirement last week, effective at the end of the Blue Raiders’ campaign.
His son, Matt, will take over head coaching duties next year.
It’s hard to do justice to Insell’s 21 years at MTSU within a blurb tucked inside a recap, but suffice it to say that his program is a true national powerhouse. The Women’s Basketball Hall of Famer won 506 games at the school, while leading it to 12 NCAA Tournament appearances, 20 conference regular season or playoff titles, and 18 20-win seasons. Two years ago, the Blue Raiders pulled off an ever-elusive upset in the women’s version of March Madness, memorably taking down Louisville.
As much as anything else, his legacy might rest in Thursday’s attendance: 3,986, a number that would make many power conference schools envious, and a show of Middle Tennessee State’s earned status in its community and beyond.
“What [Insell] has built here, it’s special,” Kielsmeier said. “Nobody should take it for granted, because what they have built is tied to him, and a lot of people that have built this thing over the years. Complete respect for everything that Middle Tennessee State is about. It was fun to compete against them and have the opportunity to play on this kind of stage.”
“We love him so much, and it hurts me to know that I won’t get to play another game with him as the head coach, but I know that he will be around,” Baugus added. “He will be there to encourage us and to help us get better.”
Insell mentioned the possibility of helping his son with the program in some capacity next season. That seems appropriate, given that he clearly has more to offer his players and the sport of women’s basketball.
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