Montia Johnson put back a missed shot with 5 seconds to go to give Kent State a 58-55 victory over Belmont Tuesday. It was KSU’s first win of the season.
Larissa Lurken had a career-high 20 points, including two key three-point shots in the second half.
Cici Shannon equaled her season high with 17 points and had seven rebounds. Johnson had 11 points. Point guard Mikell Chinn had 10 assists.
The win gives Kent State a 1-3 record. The team plays next against Texas-Corpus Christi at 6 p.m. Friday in the Cal Poly Holiday tournament.
In Belmont, Kent State faces a team that returns all five starters and is picked to win the Ohio Valley Conference.
Tuesday home game begins at the strange time of 11 a.m. The game originally was supposed to be Tuesday night, but it was moved when Kent State’s football game against Akron was moved to Tuesday night so it could be on ESPN. That football game, of course, itself has been rescheduled because of the schedule snafu caused by Kent’s snowed-out game in Buffalo.
Bellmont, like Kent State, is 0-3. But it has lost to Vanderbilt (3=0), North Alabama (3-))and Louisville (4=0). The score of the last Thursday’s game against 12th-ranked Louisville was 95-35.
Kent lost to Belmont 84-60 last season on Belmont’s home court in Nashville. Belmont went on to a 14-18 season but finished second on the OVC with a 10-6 record.
The Bruins are led by 2014-15 OVC Preseason Player of the Year, Jordyn Luffman-Hartsfield, a 6-1 senior guard-forward who averaged 14.3 points per game last season. Also returning are 5-6 senior guard Katie Carroll, a 2014 All-OVC Tournament Team selection, and 5-5 guard Taylor Mills, who earned league Newcomer of the Week honors six times last year.
Three-game statistical leaders (per game except as noted):
- Points: Larissa Lurken 10.3, Cici Shannon 10.0
- Rebounds: Jordan Korinek 4.7, Montia Johnson 3.7
- Assists: Naddiyah Cross 4.3, Mikell Chinn 4.0
- Steals: Krista White 3.0, Chinn 2.0
- Turnovers: Cross 3.3, White 3.3
- Minutes: Lurken 31.3. White 29.3.
- Three-point shots; Larissa Lurken 6 of 18. Naddiyah Cross 2 of 5.
Team stats:
- Scoring: KSU 57.0, Opponents 71.3 (minus 14.3 margin)
- Field goal percentage: KSU 38.5, opponents 44.0.
- Three pointers: KSU 9 of 30 for 30 percent. Opponents 20 of 52 for 38.5 percent.
- Rebounds: KSU 41.7, opponents 33 (plus 8.7)
- Assists: KSU 15.7, opponents 15
- Turnovers: KSU 19.7, opponents 13.3 (minus 6.4)
Full stats are on KSU website
(Updated with Sunday games)
Kent State (0-3) is the only MAC women’s team yet to win a game,
Ohio and Akron are 3-0. Ohio, which tied with Kent State and Miami for last in the Eastern Division last season is off to its best start since 2006. Akron has won all three of its games at home and has an early season RPI of 31.
Western Michigan is 2-1, including a 74-59 victory over North Dakota State at home. NDSU beat Kent State 74-68 in Bismarck in Kent’s opener.
Highest RPI (25th) in the conference belongs to Central Michigan, which is 1-1 but lost to 13th-ranked Kentucky at home, 71-68. Central was picked to win the MAC West and tournament at the pre-season media day.
Buffalo, which was picked to win the MAC East, is 2-1. So is Bowling Green, which was 30-5 last season but graduated six seniors.On Sunday, MAC teams lost to three power conference schools. It was
- No. 12 Louisville (4-0) 69, Ball State 56
- No. 24 Purdue (2-1) 66, Toledo (1-2) 48
- Michigan (3-1) 74 , Western Michigan (2-1) 47
Here’s a link to the early MAC standings.
If an 18-point loss can be encouraging, Kent State’s 72-54 defeat by the Big Ten’s Northwestern was.
Consider:
- Northwestern (3-0) had defeated its first two opponents by a combined 164-84. It beat Hampton, which has won five straight Mid Eastern Athletic Conference champions, by 26.
- Kent State outrebounded the Wildcats, one of the few teams Kent State will play this year that are taller, 46-36.
- The Flashes showed a scrambling full-court defense that gave Northwestern real problems at times. The Wildcats are an experienced team with all five starters back, including three players who have gotten some all-Big Ten honors at guard. “Our defensive pressure certainly made Northwestern uncomfortable,” Kent coach Danny O’Banion said in her post-game interview on Golden Flashes Radio “If we can make a team like that uncomfortable, we can do it to a lot of people.”
- Shooting guard Melanie Stubbs (10 points) and Krista White (8 points) showed scoring production in a position that’s going to need to score if Kent is going to win. O’Banion called them the “x-factor” in the team’s offense. They combined for 9 of 18 shooting. Stubbs had six rebounds, five of them offensive. They were all in the second half. White had four steals. Both played very hard.
- Freshman point guard Naddiyah Cross, who leads the team in assists, had five more. She actually played two more minutes than starting guard Mikell Chinn and had five points, including a three-pointer.
- Freshman guard Madison Ridout got her first college baskets with a two- and a three-pointer.
- Forward Montia Johnson haad eight points and nine rebounds in a very active 24 minutes. But like Tuesday’s game against Youngstown, she didn’t score in the second half.
Things that weren’t good:
- The Flashes, who shot only 32 percent against Youngstown State Tuesday, shot only 34 percent. Northwestern, though, had held Hampton to 14 percent.
- Starting center Cici Shannon and starting forward Jordan Korinek continue to struggle shooting. Shannon was 4 of 12 and missed a lot of close-in shots. Korinek was only 1 of 4. She had six rebounds but fouled out. She played only two minutes in the second half.
- Kent State had 21 turnovers and gave up 18 fast-break points.
- Kent State got only seven foul shots and made just two. Northwestern had 12 fouls, the Flashes 23.
- Guard Larissa Lurken, Kent’s best shooter, was 3 for 14 and missed all six of her three-point shots.
- Kent State was only 2 for 11 on three-pointers.
The Northwestern win was the 600th for coach Joe McKeown, who played for Kent State’s men’s team from 1976 to 1978 and captained the 1978 team. He’s been at Northwestern for six years and previously coached at George Washington and New Mexico
The Flashes next play Belmont at 11 a.m. Tuesday. The morning time is because Kent State’s football team was originally scheduled to play Akron Tuesday night.
Kent State out-rebounded a taller Big Ten team Friday, but Northwestern shot much better and beat the Flashes Friday, 72-54.
Melanie Stubbs and Cici Shannon led Kent State with 10 points each. Montia Johnson had nine rebounds while Stubbs and Jordan Korinek had six as KSU held a 46-36 rebounding advantage.
The loss drops Kent State to 0-3.
Northwestern is 3-0 and has won its three games by an average of 33 points. Kent State came the closest.
The Wildcats shot 46 percent, including 6 of 14 three-pointers and 20 foul shots. Kent State shot 32 percent, with just two three-pointers. It got only seven free throws and made two.
A more detailed story will be up soon.
Head women’s coach Danny Lymphoma is being treated for lymphoma, the team announced late this afternoon.
Here’s the story form the women’s website:
O’Banion Gets Positive Prognosis
Kent State women’s basketball announced Thursday afternoon that Head Coach Danielle O’Banion has been diagnosed with lymphoma and will begin treatment on Monday, Nov. 24. O’Banion may miss time with the team periodically.”I am extremely grateful for my early diagnosis and eager to attack treatment in the months ahead,” said O’Banion. “Our team continues our daily drive to move Kent State women’s basketball forward and I am confident that we will do so.”Assistant Coach Geoff Lanier will take over head coaching duties if O’Banion is unavailable.
“Our number one priority is to support Danny as she takes on this challenge,” said Director of Athletics Joel Nielsen. “Danny is a strong, resilient, inspiring woman who has great faith and we will be there to help her in any way we can. I’d like to thank everyone in advance for their support and respect for her privacy during this time.”
O’Banion was hired as the fifth head coach in Kent State history by Nielsen in April 2012. A 12-year coaching veteran, she is currently in her third season leading the Golden Flashes.
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O’Banion and the team are in Evanston, lIl.., where the Flashes play Northwestern tomorrow night.
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Lymphoma is a cancer of the blood cells. It’s treatable and controllable, especially if caught in its early stages. O’Banion’s apparently was. There are a number of different kind of lymphomas, with somewhat different treatments and prognoses.
The best overview I found was on Wikipedia, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lymphoma.
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I’m a fan and an ex-journalism professor, and I haven’t quite figured out which this blog is. It’s tilted toward journalism. But news like this certainly puts into perspective how important putting a ball in a basket is.
Danny is one of the most relentlessly upbeat people I’ve ever known. Even I admit we haven’t had time to figure out how good a coach she is going to be. I can tell you that she is a very good human being.
Kent State faces what should be on one of the best teams on its schedule Friday.
Northwestern probably won’t end the season with the best record of Kent’s opponents; there are a lot of good teams in the Big Ten.
But the Wildcats are the only team from a power conference Kent State is scheduled to play this year. They have all five starters back from last year’s team, which was 17-16 and beat Ball State in the first round of the WNIT. Two other Northwestern players didn’t start last year but were all-Big Ten honorable mention earlier in their careers.
Top player is 6-1 sophomore forward Nia Coffey, who was a First Team All-Big Ten player as a freshman while leading the Wildcats in scoring (15.3) and rebounding (8.1).
6-1 junior guard Maggie Lyon was Big Ten freshman of the year two years ago. She makes 38 percent of her three-point shots. Point guard Ashley Deary and Karly Roser both have been all-Big Ten honorable mention.
6-5 center Alex Cohen is one of the few taller players that Kent’s Cici Shannon (6-4) will face this year. Cohen was third in the Big Ten in blocks with 2.2 per game last year.
As a team, Northwestern was third in the nation last season with 6.7 blocks per game.
Northwestern is 2-0. It beat Illinois-Chicago of the Horizon league 102-48 on the road in its opener.
It beat Hampton, a team that has won five straight Mid Eastern Athletic Conferences championships, 62-36, on Sunday in Evanston. The Wildcats held Hampton to 14.1 percent shooting.
NU coach Joe McKeown played for Kent State from 1976 to 1978 and was captain his senior year. He still holds the KSU single-game assists record (15 against Bowling Green in 1978).
After graduation, McKeown coached for a year as an assistant on Kent State’s women’s team.
McKeown will be going for his 600th coaching victory against Kent State. His teams at George Washington and New Mexico State made the NCAA tournament 17 times. His 88 wins at Northwestern in six years are more victories than NU won in the previous 11 years (77).
The game is at 8 p.m. Kent time. Audio on Golden Flashes iHeart Radio and Akron Fox sports 1350, starting 10 minutes before the game.
You can get video through the “school pass” of Big Ten Network Plus. You’d have to buy a monthly pass for $9.95, then cancel it after the game. (Otherwise it renews automatically month to month.)
Two Kent players’ seasons ended before they started.
Junior guard Rachel Mendelsohn and freshman wing Tyra James went down with knee injuries during the last weeks of pre-season practice.
Mendelsohn, who is 5-foot-8, played in 28 games last season, starting five. She was Kent’s seventh leading scorer at 5.1 points per game. She or Krista White generally was the first shooting guard off the bench. Mendelsohn took the second-highest number of three-point shots on the team, though she hit only 21 percent.
Mendelsohn was an all-state point guard at Portland (Ore.) Jesuit High School, helping lead her team to a state championship her junior year. She was the only freshman coach Danny O’Banion’s was able to recruit after O’Banion was hired in mid-April 2012. Mendelsohn was available late because the coach at St. Louis University, where Mendelsohn had committed, was fired. Mendelsohn started her Kent career as a point guard, starting seven games but moved to shooting guard last year.
James is a highly regarded 5-foot-11 freshman who scored more than 1,000 points in her career at Cincinnati Winton Woods. She averaged 19.5 points per game her senior year and scored a school-record 38 points against a nationally ranked opponent. She was all-district and all-Ohio Division I honorable mention. O’Banion sometimes spoke of her as a possible starter.
At Kent’s pre-season media day, O’Banion didn’t want to talk about what the loss off the players meant. “Injuries are part of college basketball,” she said when she was asked about losing the players.
But not having the two will affect the season. The team has much less depth at guard.
We can assume Mendelsohn worked on her three-point shot in the off-season; Kent desperately needs more outside shooting. She also could fill in at point guard if needed. No one else on the team has ever played point in college.
If James had played, Larissa Lurken likely would have played some at shooting guard, leaving Kent with more scoring punch.
Mendelsohn’s injury leaves Melanie Stubbs as Kent’s only senior next year. She’ll join Lurken, White and forward Janae Peterson as juniors.
James will join five incoming freshmen.
I tried to post a short story from my iPhone right after the game. It obviously didn’t take. Sorry.
I never would have guess that Kent State would lose to Youngstown State by 19 points, 68-49. YSU was 15-16 last year.
But I never would have guessed that Kent center Cici Shannon would have two points and that starting forward Jordan Korinek would have four.
Coach Danny O’Banion said after the game that Youngstown State was better at being Youngstown State than Kent State was at being Kent State.
YSU likes to score a lot of points and shoot a lot of three-point shots. It did, hitting 10 of 26 three pointers. The Penguins stuck with the three pointer even after 4 of 15 in the first half.
Kent State’s best scorers are inside players. Shannon, who had 17 points in Kent’s opener, went 1 for 8. Korinek, who had 23 points in Kent’s exhibition, went 2 for 8. Youngstown packed the inside against the Flashes. But Kent missed a ton of inside shots. (“We got about any shot we wanted,” O’Banion said. “We just didn’t make them.”)
Kent’s other post player, Montia Johnson, went 5 for 5 in the first half. But she took only two shots in the second half.
Kent State played miserably in the second half. The Flashes shot only 25 percent and were outscored 16-5 in the first seven minutes of the half. Youngstown even outscored Kent in the paint, 16-9 and had 12 second-chance points to Kent’s 3.
“We’re a young team that got frustrated” when shots didn’t drop, O’Banion said, “and therefore didn’t play good defense.”
Later, though, O’Banion acknowledged that Kent wasn’t all that young. Shannon, Johnson, and guards Mikell Chinn, Krista White and Larissa Lurken all started at least some games last year. YSU had three returning starters and just five returning players.
Other impressions:
- As most games are, this one was about shooting. Kent shot 40 percent in the first half and led by four points with three-and a-half minutes to go in the half. Then it missed four of its last five shots and YSU led 31-27 at the half.
- Kent 4 of 11 three-point shots. Two were in the last minutes.
- White and Lurken led Kent with 11 points each. White took the most shots on the team — 12. O’Banion said YSU was, at times, just not guarding Kent’s guards (not counting Lurken, who’s a wing), in order to collapse on the post. The coach said that White had to take many of those shots in that circumstance, but she could have been more patient.
- Lurken took six of Kent’s three-pointers, making three. She’s being guarded closely as Kent’s only proven three-point threat. Back-up point guard Naddiyah made Kent State’s first three-pointer not by Lurken this season, a line drive with three minutes to go.
- Cross, who played 15 minutes, led the Flashes with six assists. Chinn and Korinek each had three. Kent had 16 assists on 19 baskets, including 12 out of 12 in the first half.
- After having 27 turnovers in its first game, Kent State had only 11. (YSU actually had more — 13.)
- Every Kent player who got into the game played at least 12 minutes. O’Banion tried about every possible combination, including four guards. None of it worked in the second half.
- O’Banion said that every team will try to stop Kent’s inside game this season. Kent’s post players have to find a way to score, and it has to find some outside shooters.