On Monday night in Jonesboro, Ark., Cleveland State’s 2025-26 season ended at the hands of Arkansas State, which earned a 71-53 decision in the WNIT’s Great 8 quarterfinal round.
Here are five things that stood out, as the Vikings wrapped up the year with a 26-10 overall record:
1. It’s probably fair to point out that the Red Wolves were a bad matchup for CSU all along. Thanks mostly to an intense pressing and trapping defense, A-State leads the nation in forced turnovers per game, with a historically-elite average of 26.5. Meanwhile, the Vikings intermittently struggled with ball security all season long.
On top of that, the visitors remained without injured starter Jada Leonard, leaving the guard position perilously thin, with only Colbi Maples, Paula Pique, and Hanna Medina Kajevic available for rotation minutes.
As if those realities weren’t tough enough, Arkansas State ranks among Division I’s top ten in a pair of related statistics, three-point rate and percentage of points accumulated through three-pointers. During their demolition of Purdue Fort Wayne in the Super 16 on Friday, the Wolves knocked down a program-record-tying 20 triples, including ten in the first quarter.
Cleveland State’s aggressive zone is somewhat less susceptible to the deep ball than traditional forms of the defense, but it is still, nevertheless, a zone.
“The way they play is hard for anybody,” Chris Kielsmeier said. “They just rotate those players in and keep them fresh. And it’s our ability to play our game our way was not there tonight, and we had to adjust. If you’re doing that, you’re probably on the losing side.”
To Kielsmeier’s point, ten different Arkansas State players were on the floor for at least 13 minutes, allowing Destinee Rogers’ squad to exploit CSU’s thin lineup – despite the fact that the Vikings finished with numbers that could at least be considered manageable in both turnovers surrendered (19) and three-pointers allowed (10-for-30).
2. So why did A-State score the first seven points of the game, build a 19-7 lead by the end of the first quarter, and never truly look back from there?
A lot of it involved their ability to find soft spots in the zone through dribble penetration and back-door feeds. The home side’s face shield-wearing dynamo, Wynter Rogers, feasted on the latter, en route to a game-high, and career-high, 20 points.
Beyond that though, it was pretty simple to Cleveland State’s head coach. Though the Vikings went on to shoot a mostly-acceptable 41.5 percent from the floor over the final three quarters, they only made one of their 13 field goal attempts during the opening period.
That stat becomes particularly hard to swallow when considering that disproportionately, the tries arrived while running downhill after breaking the Red Wolves’ press. Kielsmeier theorized that Arkansas State sped his team up, adding an extra layer of difficulty to shots it typically converts.
“We got some good looks right around the basket, and they’re certainly really athletic and going to contest shots,” he said. “There’s a lot of contact on shots, but it’s not like they had a lot of shot blockers or people that stuck it on us. It was just, we just didn’t finish. And the game’s a lot easier when you finish.”
“We just didn’t have it tonight. And to win a championship, especially in March, you’ve got to be dang near perfect six games out, and we just didn’t have it tonight.”
3. Kielsmeier has always been tight-lipped about what transpires in his postgame locker room meetings, which have occasionally lasted for more than an hour beyond the final buzzer. Memorably – at least to one person – he simply responded “getting better, next question” when asked what took so long after a game at Wright State last year.
The end of the season is a little different than a December league clash though, as there’s nothing in particular to lose by sharing more than two words of detail.
“I want to learn, I want to get better as a coach,” Kielsmeier began. “Our prep was off a little bit, and our focus was off a little bit, and that kind of was indicative of how we played. And so I wanted to know if there’s something we could have done better.”
As noble as his intentions may have been, the request for feedback was quickly derailed.
“This team being this team, the answer to it was multiple players apologizing for their performance and being sad that they didn’t play well, which was not what I was looking for.”
4. The loss marked the end of the line for Maples’ college career, though she was able to close things with the sort of coincidence that doesn’t happen terribly often for those who play at a school outside of their familiar region. Arkansas State is located roughly 50 miles northwest of Maples’ hometown, Earle, Ark., which meant a massive group of her friends and family were stationed just behind the visiting bench to support the former Horizon League Player of the Year.
On the court, Monday night won’t go down as one of the performances that bolstered her legend, though she did find a way to score a team-high 15 points while adding three assists, and very nearly willed the Vikings back into the game for a brief moment early in the third quarter.
Maples was likely more concerned with her six turnovers or at least a couple of her 12 missed field goals, given that she was one of the players who apologized in the locker room after the game. Kielsmeier immediately shut that down.
“Colbi Maples does not have a reason to apologize for anything that has happened in this program,” he said. “She has cared and protected for the program for three straight years. Even when she wasn’t on the court, she was still impacting, making others and myself better.”
As the coach said, Maples time at Cleveland State was transformational. Though her 72 games in green and white will exclude the MBA student from most program record lists, her career was very much a case of “if you saw it, you know.”
“She’ll go down as one of the best players in the history of the school,” Kielsmeier began. “She’ll go down as one of the best people in the history of the school. What more do you want your legacy to stand for, than when you say those two things?”
5. In several ways, Cleveland State’s 2025-26 season was superficially similar to its 2024-25 campaign.
Last year, the Vikings finished 27-10 after a spirited run to the WNIT’s Fab 4. The loss to the Red Wolves in the WNIT’s Great 8 on Monday settled the present squad’s account at 26-10. Essentially, the only thing separating the two groups was that one extra postseason victory, that one additional line down the bracket.
Of course, there’s also the matter of what happened in between the two seasons: nine transfer portal departures, leaving just three returning players.
Somehow, Kielsmeier and his staff re-assembled a stellar roster from spare parts out of the portal, and kept the machine humming with additions like Leonard, All-HL selection Izabella Zingaro, and defensive ace Pique.
Some of the new players, like Pique, Leonard, and Shey Magassa, have college eligibility remaining, but others, including the post rotation of Zingaro and Laurel Rockwood, do not. Whatever those specifics, for one productive basketball season, they came together and accomplished an awful lot.
“Their legacy is simple,” Kielsmeier said. “They showed that whatever people may think, or whatever was thrown our way that made it more difficult, or whatever the roster looked like because of choices by others, Cleveland State does what Cleveland State does.”
What does Cleveland State do? To most, that might involve winning 20 games, finishing near the top of the Horizon League standings, and making postseason appearances, but Kielsmeier made sure to go beyond that.
“I really want people to know they were phenomenal people, and just one of the most fun groups I’ve ever coached in my career. As a coach, I think especially as a head coach, you just want a lot of basketball time. You just want to coach, you want a game plan, you want to not be distracted by a lot of things. And this group brought that. The amount of distractions and off the court issues that we had were so minimal.”
“What they did and how they did it will be something I’ll remember forever.”
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