Cleveland State was unable to follow up its season-opening upset at Penn State at Bowling Green on Thursday, falling to the Falcons by a 77-73 count. With the defeat, the Vikings dropped to 1-1 ahead of a trip to Drake on Tuesday.
It Was Over When…
…Macie Taylor and Sarah Hurley missed three-pointers on consecutive CSU possessions in the final 20 seconds of the contest. Taylor’s miss, which would have tied the game at 74-74, was particularly excruciating, as it swirled about halfway through the basket before popping out. By the time Hurley took her turn, the Falcons had added a free throw to pad the margin to four with ten seconds left. However, given that BG shot just 7-for-12 from the charity stripe during the game, the Vikings certainly would still have had life if Hurley connected.
It was an appropriate conclusion to a night where CSU shot just 3-for-19 from deep, a significant drop in fortune from an 8-for-29 effort in Monday’s opener at Penn State.
Those three-point misses might have been the official seal, but in some broader sense, the game ended much earlier than that.
Bowling Green fired out of the gate, using a full-court press to force the Vikings into eight turnovers in the first quarter. Thanks largely to the 11 points earned from those miscues, and the 18-4 run they helped produce, the Falcons surged ahead 23-10 at the end of that opening frame. BG’s lead eventually peaked at 18, 30-12, midway through the second quarter.
“I thought we just weren’t ready to play,” CSU head coach Bob Dunn said. “We knew what was coming, the pressure that they have, and the toughness that they play [with]. We weren’t ourselves that first quarter, and it put us in a big hole.”
Cleveland State would come all the way back to tie the game late in the third quarter on a pair of Chloe Oliver free throws, then again shortly after that on an Alexa Hocevar bucket, but the Vikings never had the lead after BG’s initial surge.
“[We need] some more toughness to start games, and to be able to play the style of play that we have, and not let some pressure full court take us out of what we want to do, or let a crowd take us out of what we want to do on the road,” Dunn said.
Cleveland State’s Standout Player
Though she ended up on the bench for most of the second half, and despite Paula Pique and Hocevar each churning out a double-double (Pique, in particular, had one of the best games of her career with 14 points and 11 rebounds), Siliva Gonzalez was CSU’s most important player at a crucial moment of the contest.
The George Washington transfer scored ten points on Thursday, entirely within the last five minutes before halftime. Her lone three-pointer came immediately after the Falcons built their largest lead of the evening, and 4:51 later, she scored the final points of the second quarter to make the score 40-31 BG at the break.
“She’s a huge piece of who we are,” Dunn said. “She has the ball in her hands a lot running our offense on the perimeter. [We have] a lot of trust in her, and she’s just got to keep growing in her role offensively and defensively. We need her voice, she’s a big part of that, and a big part of our style of play is sharing the ball with her skill and shooting.”
Obviously, there was still more work to do from there, but Gonzalez shifted the game’s momentum towards the visitors right before things went completely off the rails.
Three Other Observations
1. Bowling Green was led by junior forward Lauren Gerken, who poured in a career-high 27 points on 10-for-20 shooting, including 5-for-12 from three-point range. Seemingly every time the Falcons needed a big shot to push aside the latest CSU rally, the ball ended up in the hands of the Findlay, OH native.
Like a lot of players from within the overlapping geographic footprints of the Mid-American Conference and the Horizon League, Gerken was recruited heavily by schools from both circuits ahead of her 2024 graduation from Liberty-Benton High School. Within the HL, that included Wright State, Purdue Fort Wayne – and Cleveland State, which offered Gerken a scholarship during the summer before her junior year.
Dunn, who led that effort during his first turn on Chris Kielsmeier’s staff, probably wishes things turned out a bit differently.
“I remember recruiting her a couple of years ago,” he lamented. “She’s a great, versatile player, and she showed it tonight.”
2. A lot of Cleveland State’s second-half surge was fueled by a pressure-heavy zone defense that undoubtedly looked pretty familiar to Vikings observers, given Kielsmeier’s preferred scheme over his eight seasons at the helm.
It was particularly fruitful during the third quarter, when CSU forced four turnovers and held Bowling Green to 16 points, enabling the completion of its push from 18 points back. Three of those Falcons miscues came over just a couple minutes early in the frame, including a Taylor steal-and-score cut the BG edge to just four and serve as a marker of the comeback’s legitimacy.
In part because of transition hoops like that, and the fouls drawn during similar situations, Cleveland State shot 10-for-11 from two-point range during the period, and 18-for-25 from the free throw line during the course of the evening.
3. On the offensive end of the floor, the Vikings were superficially well-balanced. Taylor’s 16 points led the visitors, though four other players landed in double figures, including Gonzalez, Oliver, Pique, and Hocevar.
Dunn, however, wasn’t nearly as satisfied with how CSU arrived at that point, compared to the similar distribution in the Vikings’ season-opening win at Penn State. As he saw it, the team was too dependent on iso plays for the two primary ballhandlers, Taylor and Oliver, and didn’t circulate nearly well enough.
“That’s not who we are,” Dunn stated. “That’s not our style of play. That’s not what people can expect when they see us, when we have eight assists and 19 turnovers. We need to be sharing the ball. We need to have 15, 20 assists, and we’re far off from that.”
Of course, assists aren’t credited on missed baskets, and the helper number probably would have looked at least a little better without that 3-for-19 line from deep.
“We’re not going to win many games that way,” Dunn added.
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