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6 score in double figures as Flashes get big win over Ohio, 84-80

By on Friday, December 11, 2020

THE KENT STATE WOMEN PLAY AT TOLEDO AT 2 P.M. SUNDAY. PREVIEW AND LINK TO ESPN+ BROADCAST IS HERE.

Katie Shumate led Kent State in scoring with 18 points. The sophomore guard is battling back from knee surgery and had only 10 points total in KSU’s first two games. She also played twice as many minutes as she had in both of the team’s first two games. (Photo from team’s website.)

Kent State’s 84-80 win over Ohio Friday had lots of important pieces:

• After two disappointing losses, the Flashes (1-2) beat one of the favorites for the MAC championship. Ohio (2-1), which is led by two all-conference players, had beaten Notre Dame two weeks ago.

• Kent State made a school-record 16 3-points baskets.

• Six players scored in double figures.

• The Flashes had 22 assists on 25 baskets.

• And a key moment came when KSU scored eight points in one trip down the court. Nila Blackford made a layup and converted on a 3-point play. Ohio was called for a technical foul, and Lindsey Thall made both shots. After Kent put the ball inbounds, Clare Kelly hit a 3-point basket. That took KSU from a 63-61 deficit to a 69-63 lead with 8:10 to go in the game. Kent State led for the rest of the game.

“I didn’t know whether we were quite ready for a performance like this based on how things have gone over the last couple of months,” coach Todd Starkey said. “I’m really proud of their resilience. They really responded to things that we talked about after the St Francis game (a 67-64 Wednesday loss). They were coachable and swallowed their pride and came out and competed.”

In this season of COVID-19, the Flashes lost 10 days of late preseason practice because of the virus and saw their opener canceled. They have had five other games canceled or postponed. They played their first game three days after returning to practice and were run off the court by No. 18 Ohio State 103-47. They lost a disappointing game at 1-4 Saint Francis Wednesday.

KSU’s Super Six

KATIE SHUMATE: 18 points, 3 of 5 three-pointers, 3 assists and a block.

Shumate, Kent State’s second-leading scorer and rebounder last season, had off-season knee surgery. She played only 15 minutes in each of KSU’s first two games and wasn’t much of a factor. Against Ohio, she played 30 minutes.

“She’s been working hard all year coming back,” Modkins said in a postgame interview. “It was a good boost of confidence for Katie and just what she needed.

“Now, I think, she’s going to get into a groove, and it’s going to be really hard to stop her.”

Starkey also praised Shumate’s defense against all-MAC wing Erica Johnson.

“She just needed to shake off some rust,” the coach said. “She’s not quite 100%; she’s still working on getting some strength back.’

MARIAH MODKINS: 15 points, 3 of 3 three-pointers, 6 of 6 free throws, 7 assist in 37 minutes.

“I just kind of do what I have to do every night,” she said. “Some nights it’s going to be different — whether it’s making shots or distributing the ball. Today I think it was a little bit of both. And I was able to step up to the plate and connect.”

Modkins, who averaged three points in 14 minutes a game her first two year, leads the team in minutes at 32 per game and is third on the team with a 10.7 point average.

NILA BLACKFORD: 11 points, 13 rebounds, two assists and two blocks.

Starkey had called out Blackford’s rebounding against Saint Francis. (She had only five boards against players three and four inches shorter).

“We’ve been pretty hard on her, to be honest,” Starkey said, “and she’s responded. That’s a great thing as a coach to see — when you present the truth to someone and then they respond to it. That’s being coachable.

“And she did a really good job of letting the game come to her instead of forcing drives into three or four players like Ohio wants you to do.”

CLARE KELLY: 14 points, 4 of 8 three-point shooting, an assist and a steal.

Kelly’s 14 points and four 3-pointers were her highest by far against a Division I team. (She had 20 against Division III Hiram last season.)

“It was a great boost for her,” Starkey said. “Clare is a talented player, and her freshman year she was trying to figure out what college basketball was going to look like.

“Some of these kids are a confident performance away from being the kind of player that they’re capable of being. I’m hoping that’s the case with Clare.”

LINDSEY THALL: 11 points, 4 rebounds, 4 assists, 4 blocks and a steal.

All of Thall’s points came in the second half.

“Lindsey was a big reason we won this game,” Starkey told David Wilson on the team’s postgame radio interview. “She didn’t get frustrated and did a really good job of being a screener that opened up 3-point shots behind her.”

CASEY SANTORO: 14 points, 5 of 8 shooting, 3 of 5 on 3-pointers, 5 rebounds, 2 assists and a steal.

Santoro, who scored 2,156 points at Bellevue High School, had her highest-scoring game in her brief college career.

“We got great productivity out of Casey,” Starkey said. “As a freshman, she showed some really high-level toughness and knocked down three big 3s for us.”

During almost all of her 25 minutes, Santoro played alongside fellow point guard Modkins.

All those 3-pointers

The 16 three-point baskets broke the 26-year-old record of 15 set against Eastern Michigan.

“It’s the kind of a shooting performance we’ve been waiting on,” Starkey said. “For a couple of years, I’ve known we’ve had good shooters, and it was nice to finally have a breakout shooting game.”

Assists on 88% of their baskets

Kent State’s 22 assists were the most since Starkey’s first year in 2016-17.

Assists on 88% of KSU baskets has to be close to the best in school history. Last season the Flashes’ assist rate was 46%, which ranked 332nd of 349 Division I teams.

“This team is built a little bit differently than the teams we’ve had in the past,” Starkey said. “We’ve had players that can really create their own shot. We’re not built quite that way anymore. We have some people that can do that, but this is going to be a team that plays better as it gets better at screening and passing and moving.“

The 8-point possession

Neither Starkey nor Modkins had ever seen a sequence like Kent State’s eight points in 22 seconds, sandwiched around an Ohio technical.

“But if we can get that again, I’ll be really happy,” Modkins said.

“That was huge for us,” Starkey said. “They had put on a good run on us, and we found a way to take advantage.”

Ohio’s dynamic duo

Ohio guards Cece Hooks and Erica Johnson went into the game as the nation’s top-scoring pair. That’s not likely to change.

Johnson played all 40 minutes and scored 29 points, made six 3-point baskets, 9 free throws, and had 6 assists and four rebounds. Hooks had 23 points and, at 5-foot-8, led her team in rebounding with 9. The rest of the team scored 28 points.

Ohio, which always shoots a lot of 3-pointers, took 34 and made 13.

Box score

Notes

  • Ohio coach Bob Boldon tweeted Friday morning that he would miss the game because he had had COVID-19 for about 10 days. So now we know why the Ohio-Kent State game was postponed last Saturday. Associate head coach Tavares Jackson ran the Ohio bench.
  • It was the ninth straight game between Ohio and Kent State that has been decided by fewer than eight points. Six of them were decided by four or fewer. Over the last four years, Ohio has won two MAC East titles and Kent has won two.
  • Kent State made 25 of its 56 shots for 44.6%. Ohio was 23 of 56 for 36.5% and was only 3 of 15 in the fourth quarter.
  • Kent State outrebounded Ohio 39-33, the first time the Flashes have had an edge on the boards in their three games.
  • Ohio scored 19 points off of Kent’s 19 turnovers. Kent State scored 11 off of Ohio’s 13.
  • Kent State’s bench outscored Ohio’s 28-6.

Next: Sunday in Toledo

The Flashes play their second MAC game and third game in five days at 2 p.m. Sunday in Toledo.

The Rockets are 3-0 and coming off an 82-79 victory at Northern Illinois on Thursday. Sophia Wiard, a 5-7 sophomore guard who averaged 3.8 points a game last season, tied Toledo’s school record with 42 points against NIU.

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