Megan Carter in action and with her cello, in photo she shared from several years ago. 

It’s not too often you catch an athlete completely off guard in a press conference, but redshirt junior guard Megan Carter was stopped short at the media day last week. It didn’t have anything to do with basketball.

“Tell me about the cello,” I asked in the last question of the event. (These things are not very formal.)

She paused.

“Definitely not expecting that question,” she said.

So she told us that she had been playing for 11 years (about half her life.) She actually had just gotten a new cello, she said with some pride. (“And she can sing, too,” said teammate Alexa Golden, the other player at the press conference. Megan blushed.)

I know no way to look this up, but there can’t be many Division I basketball players with her particular off-court skill.

Between being a full-time student and the long hours of a Division I basketball player, when does she find time to play?

“I set time out of my day for it,” Carter said, “just to escape from basketball and school, and kind of relax into myself.”

(Where did the question come from?  I had seen mention of it on social media sometime in Carter’s first three years here.)

Back to basketball

Carter and Golden were marquee players in former coach Danny O’Banion’s third recruiting class. Golden actually graduated last December after two-and-a-half years  She downplayed it (“I got a lot of college credit in high school”). But I’ve taught a lot of good students in 30 years and never had one graduate that fast. Golden will get her masters in sports recreation and management in May.

Carter, a public health major, was redshirted after she blew out her knee in the third game of her freshman year. So she has another year of eligibility.

Here’s what they had to say about the upcoming season:

What they’ve worked on to prepare for the season

Carter: “Consistency. I’ve just all around bringing it every day to practice. Last year I had a couple big games, and the next couple of games I would just disappear and have like two points.”

Golden: “Communication. We have so many new people on the team that you have to communicate. You can’t just lead by example.”

How they’ve worked with Kent’s five freshmen and two junior college transfers:

Carter: “Just setting the standard. We want to complete at a high level at all times.”

Golden, who coach Todd Starkey leads the team in toughness: “I’ve always been the type of player that will dive  for loose balls and take charges. You just show them.  They’re going to catch on. Then that’s the norm.”

On the up-tempo style of play Starkey says new players allow 

Golden: “I like playing a little faster and getting points in transition. People know that I like defense probably more than offense. So I always had the thought process that defense creates offense. Playing faster helps that.”

The newcomer who best guards Carter (KSU’s top returning scorer)

“Asiah (Dingle, the freshman point guard). She has very, very quick hands. I have to think and do stuff differently to score the ball.”

On Golden’s health (she had major leg problems in February and March)

“Things are OK.  I guess I’m getting old. So it’s sort of training room every day before practice and after practice, trying to stop the aging.”

 

 

 

Senior Alexa Golden is by far the Flashes’ most experienced player, having started 74 games and averaged 27.1 minutes a game in her three years. (Photo from KSU website.)

Just a few minutsz into practice earlier this month, Kent State freshman forward Lindsey Thall had the ball about 24 feet from the basketball. No one was within five feet of her.

She didn’t hesitate. Shot. Basket.

Minutes later, she did it again.

Later in the practice, senior center Merissa Barber-Smith set a screen for freshman point guard Asiah Dingle, then rolled to the basket. Dingle passed to her in stride. Another score.

“We didn’t have a guard that was going to execute that last year,” coach Todd Starkey said after practice. “They probably wouldn’t have seen it. If they did, they probably would have been late, and it was probably going to be a turnover.”

There’s no question that this is a different team than last season’s. The personnel is very different. Gone are Jordan Korinek, McKenna Stephes sand Naddiyah Cross, who started a combined 286 games in their careers. Arrived is a heralded five-memer freshman class and transfers from two top community college programs.

But the style of play will be different, too. Practice made that evident.

Start with Thall’s three-pointers. She’s 6-2, and led Strongsville High School’s regional finalist team in three-point shooting last season. Starkey says all five freshman can shoot well from that distance. The coach says that senior Alexa Golden is recovered from the leg problems she fought the last six weeks of last season. She’s shooting as well as well as she did when she led the team in three-point percentage (41.2) two years ago, he said. Junior guards Megan Carter and Ali Poole also have shown three-point ability.

That shooting is something we haven’t seen in many years. The Flashes have been near the bottom of the MAC in three-point shooting percentage and three-pointers per game for most of the last seven years.

Cross could be a good passer at the point. But she scored fewer than five points in 23 of Kent’s 32 games last season. It’s clear Starkey expects a lot more points than that from Dingle, who averaged 19.5 for a state championship team in Massachusetts last season.

An emphasis in practice that day I visited was on breaking full-court pressure. The idea was the push the ball and score quickly. Starkey wants the team to average well into the 70s this season. Last year it averaged 62.

At a break in practice, the coach looked over at me and said, “We have shooters. The scores may be 100-98 — us on top, of course. But we have shooters.”

Later, he told his team during a stoppage, “The offense looks a lot better than it is because the defense is so crappy.”

The coach has repeatedly said that college defense is the hardest thing for good high school players to learn.

The team certainly is a work in progress. Results on the press-break drills were, shall we say, mixed. Starkey was in full teaching mode, something he’s very good at. Several times he’d stop play and walk a player to the spot where he wanted her on the floor, explaining what she needs to do there.

At one point, he told Golden, the most experienced player on the team, “You’re playing with three freshmen. You have to know what you’re supposed to do out of the huddle, and make sure they know.”

Then he turned to the freshmen and said, “That’s no excuse for you, though.”

But there is no doubt that he likes what he’s seen so far from his recruiting class.

“I’m optimistic about what we have in place, and I think  we’re a little bit ahead of where I thought we’d be,” Starkey said. “I really like our top eight or nine.

“I think we’ve got more depth as far as ability to come in off the bench and impact the game. I think in the past our bench has kind of been to give somebody a little breather. Now when we bring somebody off the bench, and, if they’re playing well, they can stay out there.”

So who starts?

I can’t predict the lineup. I’m not sure Starkey could, either. But here’s a guess on where the starters will come from:

POINT GUARD: I’ll be astonished if Dingle doesnt’ start. I expect her to start 115  games before she graduates. But Starkey also has made it clear he’s high on Mariah Modkins, a 5-foot guard who quarterbacked Solon to the state finals last season. She’s more for a distributor, the coach says, though she can score — perhaps more than Cross but much less than Dingle.

SHOOTING GUARD AND WING: The Flashes’ depth is here. Golden, Carter and Poole all have started. Freshman Hannah Young, Class 3A player of the year in Virginia as a junior, is another shooter. I could see her starting at some point this season. Freshman Annie Pavlansky averaged 21.5 as a senior at Lakeview High School in Cortland. I expect Golden will start, but at least three others will play starters’ minutes.

POST: Barber-Smith, the squad’s tallest player, should see far more playing time than she has so far in her career. Thall will certainly play a lot. And Sydney Brinlee was the second-leading rebounder on a team than was runner-up at the Division II NCAA Junior College Tournament last year. Two of those three will start, and not necessarily the same two all of the time.

 

 

 

A first look at an image from the video introduction the team will be using this season. Players are (from left), redshirt junior guard Megan Carter, freshman guard Hannah Young and freshman point guard Asiah Dingle. (Photo from team Twitter feed.)

 

Here’s Kent State women’s basketball coach Todd Starkey’s formula for 2018-19:

• Lots of good young players.
• Better guard play.
• Better shooters.
• More points. A lot more points.

Starkey’s 2017-18 team was 13-19 and averaged 62 points a game — last in the MAC. It was seven points below the league average and 20 points below league-leading Central Michigan. It was nine points below KSU’s 71-point average in 2017-18, when the Flashes surprised everyone with a 19-13 record and a MAC East championship.

Getting back into the 70s is key to the upcoming season, Starkey said .

“Sixty-two points probably will put us right squarely on 5-13 again in the league,” Starkey said at the team’s preseason press conference this week. “We want to average well over 70 — the higher 70s —if we can.”

That’s a kind of basketball we haven’t seen in the M.A.C. Center in almost 20 years.

The last Kent State team to average 75 points was the MAC East championship team of 2001, which went 21-8 overall and 14-2 in the MAC. Only three teams, including the 2016-17 Flashes, have averaged more than 70 since. The Flashes went four years from 2011 to 2015 without averaging 60 a game.

Then add KSU’s losses to graduation: leading scorer Jordan Korinek (19.8 points a game) and third-leading scorer McKenna Stephens (9.9 points).

So where are all of these points going to come from?

Redshirt junior guard Megan Carter was Kent’s second-leading scorer at 10.2 points a game and, with more consistency, could average at least five points more. But punch is going to have to come from the newcomers, especially the five freshmen.

“They were recruited to have a big role right away,” Starkey said. “I think we have the ability with these new players to play faster, to be able to shoot the ball from the three-point line, and take a few more calculated risks out on the floor defensively to create some offense.”

Freshman guards Asiah Dingle, Hannah Young and Annie Pavlansky all averaged more than 19 points a game as high school seniors. Forward Lindsay Thall averaged 13.5 and led her team in three-point shooting. Guard Moriah Modkins was the assist leader for state-runner-up Solon High School, which outscored its opponents by 22 points a game.

“We’ve got people can make shots,” Starkey said. “It gives us a lot of offensive options.”

Last season Kent State’s offense went through the 6-2 Korinek, the fifth leading scorer in Kent State history. But when the Flashes were forced to score from the outside, things got tough.

KSU was last in the conference in three-point shots taken (16.5 per game) and baskets made (4.6). It was last in three-point percentage (27.7).

Shooting percentage by KSU guards on all shots was 30.6. By comparison, Western Michigan — which was in the middle of the conference standings and in shooting percentage — had guards who made 37.7 percent of their shots.

“That’s what really kept us away from being over .500,” Starkey said. “. So we addressed it recruiting. Now it comes down to whether they can make those shots in games.”

College basketball, the coach said, “is a guard’s game.”

“Your guards have the ball in their hands the majority of the time,” he said. “So if your assist/turnover ratio isn’t very good, if you can’t shoot the ball from the perimeter, if you can’t create shots for your teammates, it really limits what you’re capable of doing.

“This year we have a much wider array of possibilities because our guard play, talent level and depth is significantly better.

“We’ll have to get creative in post scoring and interior scoring, but not all interior scoring is done by post players with their back to the basket. Interior scoring also comes off of drives and finishes at the basket. It comes from dump-off passes to post players.”

Question marks for Starkey are defense and rebounding.

“College defense is really new to seven of our players,” he said. “So we’re really teaching it from the ground up, and there are going to be some gaps.”

But, he said, “we actually have the ability to be more talented defensively once they’ve learned things.”

Rebounding, Starkey said, is likely to follow the pattern of his first two years.

“We haven’t really had a natural rebounder,” the coach said. “But we also haven’t been at the bottom of the league, either.”

The last two years KSU has had three players average between six and eight rebounds a game. The Flashes actually were second in rebounding margin in the MAC last year and sixth in 2016-17.

One thing that will help rebounding is the return of 6-4 senior Merissa Barber-Smith, who missed the entire conference season last year with a medical issue. “Her rebounds per minute have been the best on our team over the last two years,” Starkey said.

The 6-2 Thall was a good rebounder in high school; Sydney Brinlee, a 6-foot transfer from Highland Community College in Kansas, was the second-leading rebounder on a team that was runner-up in the Division II Junior College NCAA tournament.

But she and six of her teammates have never stepped onto a court for a Division I game.

“Mental toughness — the toughness that gets you through a long college season — is probably going to be the biggest key,” Starkey said. “We just don’t know what that’s going to look like until they’re tested.”

The team’s first tests will be doozies. The Flashes open on the road at North Carolina on Nov. 9 and North Carolina State on Nov. 11.

More coverage is coming

I’ll be writing a lot more between now and the team’s open exhibition against Slippery Rock on Sunday, Nov. 4, at the M.A.C. Center.

There’s more from the preseason press conference, including some specifics  on individual players I hadn’t heard before. I’ve got some observations from practice last week, then was able to interview some of the freshmen. And senior guard Alexa Golden and redshirt junior Megan Carter had some interesting things to say at press day.

 

 

 

 

 

The freshmen: (back row) Guard-forward Annie Pavlansky, forward Lindsey Thall, guard Hannah Young, (front) guard Mariah Modkins, guard Asiah Dingle. (Photo from KSU Twitter feed)

As I wrote in the last post, it will be a very different Kent State women’s basketball team that starts the season Nov. 6 in North Carolina.

It’s minus Jordan Korinek, last year’s leading scorer and the fifth leading scorer in Kent State women’s basketball history. It’s minus both other forwards who played significant minutes last spring. And it’s minus a four-year starter at point guard.

It still could be a very interesting season, and, I think, it’s very possible the Flashes could beat their 13-19 record from a year ago.

A big chunk of the season depends on the freshman class, which is perhaps the best recruiting class in school history.

So here’s a look at the roster, based on an interview I had earlier this fall with head coach Todd Starkey:

Point guards

The Flashes have one returnee who has ever played point guard in college — and she played almost no point last season. That woman is Megan Carter, KSU’s second-leading scorer a year at (10.2 points a game). I’m not even going to talk about her in this segment because she’s now well established at the No. 2 or off-guard.

The people to talk about are two freshmen that Starkey is high on.

A marquee member of the recruiting class is guard Asiah Dingle, the Boston Globe’s high school player of the year in Massachusetts last season. She led her team to three state championships, averaging 19 points, 4.5 assists, five rebounds and five steals per game her senior year.

The other freshman point doesn’t have Pringle’s flashy statistics, but Mariah Modkins  helped lead Solon High School to a 26-3 record and the state finals last season. Modkins is listed generously at 5-1 and averaged 9.6 points, 2.6 rebounds, 4.6 assists and 2.3 steals.

“We’ve got two very talented freshman point guards that are very different,” Starkey said. “Asiah is a true playmaker. She has the ability to really attack in transition. She has the ability to break down a defense, to draw secondary help and to find players. She’s a very talented passer and can finish at the basket, but you have to guard her. She can shoot it.

“Mariah is more of a ball-control-type point guard.  where she great at initiating action. She’s a very good communicator. She’s probably a little bit better shooter right now than Asiah is and a bit more steady in some areas where Asiah is a more of a high-risk player.

“We played some of them together on the court (in summer practice). They’re very small, but they play very effectively with each other. I actually like playing with two point guards because it makes it even harder for teams to press.”

Shooting guards and wings

The positions are fairly interchangeable in Starkey’s system. Larissa Lurken moved between them in her record-setting year in 2016-17, and Alexa Golden did at times last season.

Discussion of this position starts with Golden and Carter. Golden, a 5-9 senior, has started 74 of the 91 games she has played. She has a reputation as a defensive specialist but has expanded her game beyond that. She was second on the team in three-point percentage as a sophomore, and Starkey said shot the ball as well as anyone on the team in summer. The team’s increased depth at shooting guard, the coach said, allows Golden to concentrate at what she does best — being “a great spot shooter, a phenomenally instinctual defender and the backbone of our toughness.”

Golden is fully recovered from leg problems she had last winter, when she barely practiced toward the end of the year because of pain.

Carter has started only four games in her time in Kent but is a key offensive weapon. She played starter minutes as the first player off the bench last season and was the team’s strongest perimeter scorer. But she could be very streaky. For example, after she led the Flashes with 17 points against Miami in February, she went five for 30 in her next four games. Then she scored 24 in KSU’s upset of Toledo in the first round of the MAC tournament.

“She’s just consistency away from being an All-MAC player,” Starkey says.

Guard is the deepest position on the KSU roster. Besides Carter and Golden, there’s Ali Poole, who started 26 of 30 games last season and averaged 7.1 points a game. She was KSU’s second-leading three-point shooter.

And then there are two more highly touted freshmen. Hannah Young was player of the year in Class 3 in Virginia as a junior, second-team all-state her freshman years and first team her last three years in high school. Young, who is 5-10, averaged 19.5 points, 7.8 rebounds, 3.0 assists, 3.5 steals and 1.3 blocks on a team that went 24-4 her senior year.

Six-foot Annie Pavlansky averaged 21.8 points and 8.8 rebounds for Lakeview High School in Cortland despite being the focus of every opponent’s defense. If (probably more like when) the Flashes play a four-guard offense, Pavlansky will be an important piece.

Two more guards are sophomore Margaux Eibel, a walk-on who earned a scholarship this summer, and Jess Wallis, a junior college transfer from Tennessee with a reputation as a shooter.

“We have a roster full of really good shooters,” Starkey said. “The depth at guard provides a lot of versatility. Some of the players are better defenders, some are better pure shooters, some are better off the dribble.”

The shooting will be welcome. KSU has been near the bottom of the MAC in three-point baskets per game for what seems like forever. Last year the Flashes were dead last in three-point percentage at 27.7 and last in made three-pointers at 4.6 per game. (League leader Central Michigan made 9.1 a game and shot 38.4 percent.)

Post players

Perhaps the best three-point shooter on the team, Starkey said, is 6-2 freshman Lindsey Thall from Strongsville High School.

“She’s got range up to 27 feet,” the coach said. (The three-point line is 20.75 feet.) “She’s a good rebounder and a talented passer. She understands offensive flow and has great court vision for a step-out post player.

“She’s not going to score a ton on the block, but that isn’t where she wants to spend all her time. Still she’s definitely an inside-out threat.”

Like most of the freshman, Starkey said, Thall has furthest to go on learning college defense.

Another newcomer who should see a lot of time in the post is junior college transfer Sydney Brinlee from Oklahoma (KSU’s first player from that state). Brinlee was second-leading rebounder on a Highland (Kansas) Community College team that went 35-1 and reached the Division II junior college semifinals. She’s listed at six foot and averaged 8.8 points and 7.3 rebounds in less than 19 minutes per game. 

“She’s just an just alive body, very bouncy, and our biggest voice in practice,” Starkey said. “She has a lot of confidence and is used to winning. She is a really good rebounder outside of her airspace. She can go get the ball. It doesn’t have to be right above her head.”

And back after missing the whole conference season with a medical issue is 6-4 Merissa Barber-Smith. When she was a sophomore, Starkey said, Barber-Smith made the difference in at least three wins of KSU’s 19-13 season.

“Merissa has come back and shown some really good things,” Starkey said. “I think she’s very determined, and she was further along than I expected her to be during the summer.

“I don’t think people really realized how much of a hit losing her was. We won 13 games last year. If we had had Merissa, I think we win three or four more, and we’re over .500. With the roster we had last year, we just didn’t have that much margin for error.”

Other players in the post mix are sophomores Monique Smith (5-11) and Amanda Sape (6-2). Both averaged near 19 points a game their senior years in high school and nearly a double-double from their sophomore years on. Smith — perhaps the best athlete in last year’s freshman class — played mostly post in high school but was learning the wing last season because of KSU was loaded with senior post players. Sape had shoulder surgery right after high school graduation and didn’t start practicing at full speed until just before last season started. She played only a total of eight minutes in five games.

The Flashes, Starkey said, have been a good rebounding team in his first two years that hasn’t had a lot of great individual rebounders. This team might be different, he said.

Still, he said, “There’s a lot of things we’re still learning about this new group.”

Notes

Some catch-up items:

• Korinek is playing professional basketball for Panionios WBC from Athens, Greece. She also participated in the “So You Want to be a Coach” program at last spring’s Final Four. The workshop starts the training of graduating seniors who are thinking about a coaching career. Korinek’s older sister, Morgan, participated in the program in 2012 and is now is an assistant at Kenyon College. KSU assistant Morgan Toles participated in the program in 2013.
• Ijah Fletcher, the 6-2 post from Long Island who accepted a scholarship offer from KSU during the April signing period, never made it to campus. When that happens, it’s usually cold feet or eligibility problems. In this case, I think it was the latter. Fletcher had averaged 20.8 points a game as a senior.
• The team had a 3.6 grade point average in summer classes. Six players on last year’s team were academic all-MAC: Korinek, Poole, Golden, McKenna Stephens, Zenobia Bess, and Tyra James.
• Starkey, as quoted on the KSU website kentstatesports.com after his team’s first practice Sunday:  “I thought our energy was really good for a first practice, and I saw some really good things from the team tonight. We are definitely further along at this point than I anticipated. When transitioning from hour-long workouts to full practice that last a couple hours, it’s always interesting to see if players are able to maintain their energy, attention and focus. I thought they did a good job, especially for having seven new players.”

An earlier posting of this item had freshman guard Asiah’s Dingle’s last name wrong. My apologies for a stupid error. I’ve probably already written about her eight times and will likely write about her 208 more over the next four years.