For most of its season, Kent State’s defense had been its strength.
But Toledo blew all that away to beat the Flashes 79-59 Monday and end the KSU season in the second round of the WNIT.
The Rockets, regular-season champions of the Mid-American Conference, are now 28-5 on the season. Toledo next will play Marquette (23-10) in the WNIT Sweet 16.
Kent State finishes at 19-12.
Toledo made 55.8% of its shots and 53.8% of its 3-point attempts. Both are the highest percentages against Kent State this season. No other opponent had made more than 46% from 3-point distance.
Going into the game, Kent State’s defense had allowed an average of 38.9% shooting and 30.9% on 3-pointers.
“It was just their night,” coach Todd Starkey said. “They were shooting the ball well — even contested shots were going down.
“That’s a really good basketball team, with great balance. And you could tell they’re on a mission. They’re a team that felt like they got snubbed by the NCAA tournament. I hope they go on and win it all. They’re a great representative of the MAC and deserve everything they get.”
After Toledo led 22-18 after the first quarter, the Rockets outscored Kent State 23-5 in a 12-minute span from the middle of the second quarter to 7:04 to go in the third quarter.
Then the Flashes played their best of the game and cut the score to 57-47 at the end of the quarter.
But that was as much as Kent State had left. Toledo’s Quinesha Lockett started the quarter with a quick layup, then hit two 3-point baskets. Forty seconds later, Jayda Jansen hit another 3 and the lede was back to 21.
“That just kind of buried us,” Starkey said. “We just didn’t have the ability to come back from that. We gave everything we had, but at the end of the day, we ran out of gas against a better team.”
Looking back
Kent State now has won 19 games in three of Starkey’s six seasons and went 20-13 in 2018-19, when the Flashes also reached the second round of the WNIT. Kent was 19-11 and the highest surviving MAC seed when the 2019-20 season was canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Flashes went 11-9 in last year’s COVID-shortened season.
The 2021-22 season was a strange one for the Flashes. They started the season 8-1, including victories over UCLA and Penn State. Then multiple members of the team contracted COVID before Christmas. The team was still recovering when it went 2-6 at the start of the MAC season. Then the Flashes won six in a row but went 2-4 over their last six conference games and missed the league tournament due to tiebreaker rules. Then the Flashes beat Youngstown State, co-champions of the Horizon League, in the first round of the WNIT. It was only Kent State’s third postseason win in the history of the program.
“It was up-and-down,” Starkey said. “COVID completely wrecked our rhythm and the conference schedule. We have seven games in 18 days, then one game in 18 days, then five games in 11 days, then finished with five games in 11 days. Seasons aren’t meant to be played that way.
“I’m really proud of where this program is. The season didn’t go exactly how we wanted it to go, but these kids still fought. We were 19-12, close to the top 100 teams in the NET (the NCAA’s statistical ranking system) and beat the Horizon League champion on the road. When this team was at its best, they were as good as anybody.”
Looking forward
The Flashes will return at least three starters — junior forward Nila Blackford, junior guard Katie Shumate and senior forward Lindsey Thall, who has said she is coming back for a fifth season. Guard Casey Santoro started only five games but averaged 25 minutes and 10 points a game.
Senior guard Hannah Young, who started every game for the Flashes, is eligible for a fifth season but hasn’t committed to coming back. Junior guard Clare Kelly, who led the team in steals and was third in assists, returns.
Freshman forward Bridget Dunn averaged 9.1 points and led the team in 3-point baskets and freshman guard Jenna Batsch scored 18 points in KSU’s two tournament games.
The Flashes’s incoming freshman class looks like a good one. It includes:
- Guard Corynne Hauser, a two-time all-Pennsylvania player who averaged 25 points a game her senior year.
- Point guard Dionna Gray, West Virginia player of the year in leading her team to a state championship. She averaged 21.7 points, 7.3 assists, 5.8 steals and 5.1 rebounds her senior year.
- Wing Tatiana Thomas, who averaged 11 points and seven rebounds in leading her team to the Illinois state tournament semifinals.
Running the numbers
- Thall led KSU with 11 points, including two 3-pointers. She now has 217 in her career, the most in school history. Blackford and Shumate each had 10 points.
- Kent State made 35.5% of its shots, about 6 percentage points below its average, and 29.1% of its 3-point attempts, about 5 points below average. Toledo’s defense ranked first in the MAC this season.
- Toledo outrebounded the Flashes 39-27, Kent State’s second-worst margin of the season. The Rockets outscored KSU 16-6 on second-chance points and 40-26 in the paint.
- Kent State had nine turnovers, its fewest of the season against a Division I opponent. Toledo had 13 turnovers.
- All-MAC guard Quinesha Lockertt led Toledo with 25 points. 6-5 center Hannah Noveroske, the league’s sixth player of the year, had 13 points, five rebounds and four blocked shots in just 13 minutes.
- Toledo had 20 assists on 29 baskets, led by point guard Sofia Wiard’s seven.