Earlier this month, as I sucked back the last inch of a cookies and cream milkshake at Cleveland State’s meet-and-greet for season ticket holders, I engaged in a “how’s your summer been going” conversation with assistant coach Shelby Zoeckler, who has been with the Vikings women’s program in various capacities for a decade.
This is all very, very strange, I thought. How strange? Some context is in order.
Back in April, about when I was sorting through CSU coaching rumors ranging from Mark Stephens to Kate Peterson Abiad, while six of the seven Vikings with remaining eligibility sat in the transfer portal, I decided to participate in one of the countless social media conversations about The State of Things.
“The fundamental illusion of college sports has been broken,” I boldly claimed. “Nobody else gives a shit about Cleveland State – every single one of them is just there to angle for something better – so why should I?”
That post quickly received a stunning like: Destiny Leo.
I spent a few minutes trying to decipher her intent. It certainly could have been a “hate like,” one of those “I’m tapping the heart just to let you know that I saw this, but I don’t approve” moves. After all, Leo did nothing short of spend five years as one of the best players in program history, while also a prominent face of the university as a homegrown star. Her run included (among many other things) courageously battling back from an ACL tear to help the Vikings to a 27-win season and a trip to the WNIT’s Fab 4. Who am I to cast aspersions on any of that?
At the same time, I considered my point fairly conceived.
The simple fact of the matter is that, right now, players enjoy an essentially limitless ability to switch teams – including Leo, who ejected to spend her final collegiate season at UNLV. Coaches are somewhat restricted by their contracts, though a buyout typically offers little more than speed bump for a program with resources of any substance that wants to poach someone.
Whatever your opinion of the situation, that’s how college sports exist in 2026, particularly at a place like Cleveland State. Chris Kielsmeier enjoyed eight incredibly-successful seasons leading the Vikings, then was scooped up by Texas State, a school with more money and better prospects for competing on a national level. That part isn’t really new, but in the last five years, it’s been accompanied by a roster flush as reliable as any Swiss timepiece. By the beginning of the next season, affected teams often only have a logo in common with their immediate past.
Players have options. Coaches have options. Me? I’m stuck here, more or less. My only choices are “in” and “out.” And, at the moment I posted, the latter seemed a compelling option, which helped fuel my commentary on an otherwise-normal Monday morning.
The alternative involved confronting a total rebuild at CSU. A new coach who may or may not tolerate me as much as Kielsmeier did. A squad of players I had to Google once I stumbled on their respective commitment announcements. And very little opportunity to change any of that.
On most of my personal social accounts, my bio reads “playing an extra in other people’s lives.” I stole the line from Adam Scott’s hard luck actor-turned-caterer in Party Down, but it also applies pretty well to my relationship with the Vikings. I’m the sort of person you greet in the anticipatory hour before games, not someone you add to the group chat. I’m adjacent, not inside, where teammate bonds are fabricated. In other words, strangers in May aren’t going to be much more than friendly acquaintances in February.
By now, of course, we know the surprising way that most of the personnel questions were resolved. Bob Dunn became the Vikings’ new head coach on April 13th, and the two-time former Kielsmeier assistant retained a pair of coaches from last season’s staff, while ultimately convincing two-thirds of the Vikings’ portal entrants to return to the team. All of that has created the sort of continuity that simply isn’t supposed to exist at a mid-major school in a transitional period.
It didn’t even stop there. One of Dunn’s new assistants is Mariah White, the most valuable player of Cleveland State’s 2021 Women’s Basketball Invitational championship team. White abruptly exited after raising that trophy, playing her fifth year at Missouri State. She then spent a pair of seasons as Virginia’s director of recruiting operations, but had since settled into a pair of non-basketball positions at VCU and Bowling Green. Her return was decidedly unexpected.
Leo also filtered back into the Wolstein Center to work out for a hopeful pro contract. Then, in the last two weeks, a pair of unlikely guests stopped by: former Vikings Isabella Geraci and Isabelle Gradwell.
Geraci and Gradwell, like Leo and White, were core members of that WBI title team who spent four years at CSU before transferring elsewhere as grad students. However, they also differed a bit, in that each harbored at least some lingering resentment towards the program, which occasionally spilled over into public forums.
“She just felt like she was getting kicked down,” Geraci’s mother, Tamara, told The Athletic last summer, in a feature about Isabella’s ascendant flag football career. “You could see her little flame was getting smaller and smaller.”
Just ten months later, the younger Geraci was lifting with Leo in the Vikings’ weight room, posing for photos with Dunn in the practice gym, and generally enjoying herself.
“[Four] years since I’ve been back and it’s all smiles,” she later posted on Instagram.
In those moments, the history and bad feelings dissolved, and it mattered not that they had other reasons for being in town. They had chosen to embrace their former program in a way that seemed unlikely in the very recent past and demonstrated that, for all of the uncertainty in the current iteration of college sports, you can always go home again.
Just then, I was interrupted by a tap on my shoulder and pivoted. It was Leo, circulating during the season ticket holder event as an unofficial ambassador. She immediately greeted me with a big hug.
Maybe everything’s going to be okay.
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