Kent State’s Mid-American Conference Tournament ended pretty much the same way its MAC season went.
The Flashes fell to top seed and league champion Toledo 68-58. They’ll now wait until late Sunday night to see if they get a bid to the WNIT. Kent has made the tournament four times in the last seven years, each time with a worse record than their current 21-10 mark.
Toledo, which is 27-4 and the winner of 15 straight games, advances to the MAC Tournament finals at 11 a.m. Saturday on the CBS Sport Network. The Rockets will play No. 2 seed Bowling Green (27-5), which beat Ball State 70-61 in the other semifinal Friday.
The loss to Toledo reflects a lot of the good and bad of KSU’s conference season:
- The Flashes finished 0-6 against the top three teams in the league, losing three times to Toledo, all by 10 points or fewer. They lost two games to second-place Bowling Green, one by six points and one by nine points, and lost their only game against Ball State by nine points.
- Kent State was 13-1 against all of the other MAC schools, including the team’s 75-68 quarterfinal win over Northern Illinois.
- Senior guard Katie Shumate continued her outstanding second half of the season. She scored 21 points and had 12 rebounds, her second-straight double-double in the tournament. In KSU’s last 11 games, Shumate averaged 17.7 points and 9.5 rebounds. Both those numbers would have ranked third in MAC if maintained for a whole season.
- As they have in every game against the league’s top teams, the Flashes had up-and-down quarters and couldn’t manage a fourth-quarter push to pull out a win. KSU trailed 17-7 after the first quarter and outscored Toledo 20-11 in the second. The Flashes took the lead briefly in the third quarter but saw the Rockets outscore them by nine in the second half.
- When the Flashes don’t shoot well this season, they struggled. They made just 35% of their field goal attempts against Toledo, about 6 percentage points below their average.
- When opponents shot well, KSU struggled. Toledo made 46.2% of its shots, about 7 points above Kent’s average defensive performance.
“We were shooting the ball so well coming into the game and, and we needed to shoot it well again,” coach Todd Starkey said. “Today we got the shots for the players that we wanted to get the shots, from the spots that we wanted them them to shoot. They just didn’t go down for us.”
In the fourth quarter, Kent State cut Toledo’s lead to 56-53 on a layup by Shumate with 4:59 to go. But the Flashes made only 2-of-9 shots the rest of the game as Toledo outscored KSU 12-5.
“I thought Toledo had a great defensive game plan for us,” Starkey said. “Offensively they attacked us where we were weakest and, they were able to get to the free throw line, especially down the stretch.”
Shumate keeps sizzling
Along with her fifth double-double of the season, Shumate blocked a career-high three shots, had two assists and made 3-of-5 three-point attempts.
She and junior Casey Santoro spoke for the team in the postgame press conference. Starkey said his four graduating seniors were “pretty broken up.”
Here’s how Shumate summarized the season:
“I’m proud of us this season. We played hard, and we played for each other. I wouldn’t want to have done it with any other girls. It’s tough ending like this, but Toledo’s a really good team.”
On the Kent State seniors
Starkey said his seniors were “better than any coach could hope for, and not only as basketball players.”
“They really have fought hard to get better every single year and done everything we’ve asked them to do,” he said. “And then in the classroom, the team has a 3.71 cumulative GPA. Two of our seniors are pre-med.”
The missing post player
Starkey said that against a team like Toledo, the Flashes really missed 6-3 post Bridget Dunn, who was lost for the season with a knee injury in January.
“We’ve been able to kind of mask that a little bit,” Starkey said. “But when you get a situation like this down the stretch, we really need Lindsay to be able to defend their bigs. A nd we don’t have any more size to go to.”
Thall is KSU’s only other true post player. Only one other player on the team is taller 6 feet tall.
The view from Toledo
Coach Tricia Cullop, MAC coach of the year for two straight seasons:
“Kent State is very skilled and can really shoot the ball, and we knew it would take a phenomenal defensive effort. I really thought we did a great job of taking away some of the opportunities and also securing rebounds.”
“I could feel the momentum of our team in that last quarter — like, ‘We’re not gonna let this slip away.'”
Numbers
- Kent State committed only seven turnovers, the seventh time in eight games it has had fewer than 10. In my 30-odd years of following the team, there have been entire seasons that the Flashes have had no more than four games with that few turnovers.
- Toledo outrebounded KSU 40-30. Besides Shumate’s 12, Santoro had six and Clare Kelly four.
- The Rockets had 40 points in the paint to Kent’s 32 and 12 second-chance points to KSU’s five.
- Toledo senior Jayda Jansen made 6-of-7 shots off the bench and scored 16 points. Guard Sophia Wiard also had 16. Junor guard Sammi Mikonowicz had 12 points and 15 rebounds.