Two questions loom over as the Kent State women’s Mid-American Conference Wednesday opener against Toledo.
- Will the Flashes’ 8-1 non-league record translate into a successful conference season?
- What’s is COVID-19 going to do to the rest of the women’s basketball season? Kent State’s Dec. 21 game against Florida State was canceled because of COVID problems for the Flashes.
We start to find out this week. After playing 6-3 Toledo at the M.A.C. Center Wednesday, the Flashes travel to 6-3 Western Michigan on Saturday.
The Toledo game is part of a doubleheader with the KSU men, who play Central Michigan at 4:30 p.m. The women will play a half-hour after that game finishes, probably about 7 p.m. A ticket to the men’s games gives you a free general admission ticket to the women (and most of the women’s seats are general admission).
The game will be streamed on Boxcast through the KSU website. It can be heard on the Kent State Radio Network and live statistics during and after that game can be found on the team website.
Do the Flashes have a MAC championship in them?
Kent has the best record in the conference. Every other team in the MAC has lost at least two more games.
The Flashes have played no cupcake schedule. They beat UCLA (then ranked No. 19 in the country, now 5-3) and Penn State (7-5) by solid margins in the Gulf Coast Showcase over Thanksgiving weekend. They opened the season on the road with an 80-73 win over Northern Kentucky (now 7-3).
Yes, they played two non-Division I teams and routed them by an average of 53 points. They didn’t play their best in their last two Division I games against St. Bonaventure and Duquesne.
But their schedule is rated between second and fourth hardest in the MAC by various services that do that kind of thing.
Kent State has piled up some fancy statistics in its best start to a season in 13 years. The Flashes:
- Rank third in the country in 3-point shooting percentage (42.0%) and seventh in 3-pointers per game (10.2). The Flashes are 13th nationally in fewest turnovers per game (12.0), 17th in rebounding margin (+10.9) and 30th in scoring average (77.3 points per game.)
- Were ranked 13th in this week’s College Insider Mid-Major Poll, highest of any MAC team. Buffalo is 18th. Kent State coach Todd Starkey and Ohio coach Bob Bolden are on the 31-member panel that votes in the poll.
- Sophomore guard Casey Santoro is third in the country in 3-point percentage (54.55%) and 10th in the country with a 3.08 assist-to turnover ratio. Lindsey Thall is 43rd in 3-point percentage at 43.4%). KSU’s Katie Shumate actually averages an even higher percentage of 55.2%, but she hasn’t taken enough shots to qualify for the NCAA rankings.
In the MAC, Kent State is:
- Second in scoring offense (77.3), first in scoring margin (+17.9) and second in scoring defense (59.4).
- First in 3-point percentage (42.0, more than 5 points ahead of any other team) and first in 3-pointers per game,
- Third in field-goal defense (opponents are shooting 28.8%).
- First in rebounding margin (+10.9, more than five rebounds a game ahead of any other team).
- First in fewest turnovers per gtame (12.0), second in assist/turnover ratio (1.19).
- Kent State players rank 1-2-3 in 3-point percentage: Shumate (55.2%), Santoro (54.5%) and Hannah Young (52.4%). Thall is ninth (43.4) and Bridget Dunn 12th (39.4%).
- Nila Blackford is seventh in rebounding (7.8 a game), Thall is ninth (7.1) and Hannah Young 10th (7.0).
- Shumate is fifth in field-goal percentage (52.2%) and Santoro fifth in free-throw percentage (85.7%).
- Santoro leads the conference in assist/turnover ratio (3.1) and is ninth in assists per game (4.1).
“We’ve had a solid start,” coach Todd Starkey said. “Now we’re going to have to prove it game-in and game-out. Everybody is 0-0 now. Everybody in the league is solid.”
The Flashes need to focus on consistency, he said.
“There have been games we’ve played very well,” Starkey said. “There have been games we’ve played solid for 30 minutes— and the other 10 minutes hasn’t been the best.”
About Toledo
The Rockets have won six games but haven’t beaten any team with a record better than 4-7. They have played good teams well in their three losses, losing 69-60 to the Atlantic Coast Conference’s Dayton (8-3) and 68-63 in overtime to Seton Hall of the Big East. Last week Toledo lost 60-46 to Missouri, the top-ranked mid-major team.
Toledo has the MAC’s best scoring defense (58.4 points per game, a point better than KSU) and best field-goal defense (35.8%).
Guard Quinesha Locket averages 18.6 points per game, sixth in the MAC. Point guard Sophia Wiard leads Toledo in rebounding (6.7 per game) and assists (4.1). She also averages 10.8 points a game.
Game preview from Toledo website.
The COVID conundrum
All 12 MAC teams were supposed to open the conference season Wednesday. Only four will. As of Tuesday night, four of six games had been canceled because of COVID outbreaks. Besides the Toledo-KSU game, the only other game is Central Michigan at Buffalo.
Kent State missed 10 days of practice (and the FSU game) because of a COVID outbreak that started just after the team’s 89-43 win over Clarion on Dec. 11.
Akron had three games non-conference games canceled, Eastern Michigan two and Northern Illinois one.
The Flashes returned to practice on Dec. 26. Starkey wouldn’t say much beyond “we’ll have enough healthy players” to play Toledo.
Starkey said this fall that all team members and coaches were vaccinated, but that was before booster shots and the Omricon variant.
As Kent State learned last year, early postponements in league play can be crippling. The Flashes started 5-0, then lost 25 days to COVID problems on the team. They ended up playing more games than any other MAC team in February to make up some of the missed contests and were pretty worn down by the end of the season.
But as has been the case since the pandemic started, there are more COVID questions than answers. Here are three on my mind:
How bad will this get? 65 Division I games scheduled for this week already had been canceled or postponed by Tuesday afternoon. The CDC reported more COVID infections yesterday than at any time in the pandemic, and a lot of experts are predicting a very bad January because of the Omricon variant.
Will colleges adapt the new CDC recommendation that cuts quarantine time to five days (from 10) for non-symptomatic infections and for people who had had close contact with someone who was infected? Those five days could be the difference between one game being canceled to losing three games. State and local health authorities, plus individual schools and conferences, would have to sign off on that. The recommendations are so new that we won’t know the answer to this question for days.
Will Kent State’s early problems help it in the long run? Previous infection can help build immunity and prevent COVID for a time. Perhaps this season KSU will watch other teams wear themselves out making up postponed games. But teams can be hit by COVID more than once. That happened to KSU last season, but that was pre-vaccination.