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Kent State women's basketball

Casey Santoro’s triple-double — first in KSU history — leads Flashes past Clarion 89-43

By on Saturday, December 11, 2021
Sisters Cory (left) and Casey Santoro, who played against each other in a game for the first time Saturday, gave a joint interview afterwards at the request of their hometown newspaper. (WbbFlashes photo.)

Playing against her sister and in front of her parents and a big group from her hometown, sophomore guard Casey Santoro put up the first triple-double in Kent State history as the Flashes overwhelmed Division II Clarion 89-43 Saturday.

Santoro had 16 points, 10 rebounds and 10 assists. No KSU player — man or woman — had ever done that before.

Santoro had eight rebounds when she went to the bench with five minutes to go in the game. “Put her back in!” her teammates and some assistants told head coach Todd Starkey.

“That’s when I knew I was close,” Santoro said.

She went back in with 3:32 left and passed to Bridget Dunn to set up a 3-point basket 11 seconds later. A minute later, as the crowd cheered for another assist, Santoro passed to Dunn for another 3 and a place in the record book. Santoro got a standing ovation when she came out of the game shortly afterward.

“It feels pretty awesome,” Santoro said. “But I couldn’t have done it without my teammates knocking down the shots.”

The big things to know from the game:

  • Santoro’s triple-double included assists on eight 3-point baskets.
  • Senior Hannah Young scored a career-high 16 points and had her first collegiate double-double. Bridget Dunn (15 points) and Annie Pavlansky (10) had career highs in scoring.
  • The win gives the Flashes an 8-1 start, tying for second-best in school history.

Here’s the pass that gave Santoro the triple-double:

Santoro made 4-of-6 three-point attempts and 6-of-10 shots overall. She had a career-high 10 assists, two steals and only one turnover in 31 minutes

The Santoro backstory

“It was awesome to see Casey play like that,” Starkey said. “I don’t think she went into the game trying to do that. But you don’t do it by accident. It’s the type of habits she has every day, her work ethic, her focus. She’s tough as nails as a player.

“There were a lot of coaches that didn’t even look at recruiting her. They said she was too small. (Santoro is 5-4.) I said, ‘She doesn’t have to be good for you. She just has to be good for me.'”

Starkey has no problem with small point guards.

“I’ve won six championships in my career,” the coach said. “Every championship I’ve won, I’ve had a small point guard. They play with the chip on their shoulder. People tell them they can’t do it, and they go out every day to try and prove that they can. That’s what Casey’s all about.”

Santoro scored 2,400 points in Bellevue High School and made the all-Ohio first team three times. Last season she averaged about 20 minutes and scored 6.7 points a game. Her shooting percentage was just 31.1%.

This year, she’s making 47.1% of her shots and 54.5% of her 3-point attempts, which is fourth in the Mid-Amerian Conference.

Last season she averaged a bit more than two assists and 1.5 turnovers per game. This season she’s averaging 4.1 assists and 1.3 turnovers. Her assist-to-turnover ratio — something coaches care a lot about in point guards — is second in the MAC at 3.1-to-1.

“She was such a prolific scorer in high school,” Starkey said. “There’s an adjustment to playing with really good players around you and the type of post players that we have.

“So it was a process that she had to go through last year. And in a COVID year, we didn’t have as much time to work with them individually, and there were gaps where we couldn’t have them in to watch film.

“She’s gotten better at learning her teammates. You have to know not only the other team’s personnel but your own personnel. You have to know where your teammates need the ball and where not to throw it. Just because they’re open doesn’t mean they’re the right person to throw it to.

“And Casey’s been a really good student of the game. She spends a lot of time watching film. She spends a lot of extra time in the gym — the old cliche, ‘first one in the gym, last one to leave’ — well, it’s true with her.”

Saturday’s game was the first this season that Santoro has started. She said that Mariah Modkins, the usual starter, had COVID-19. (Starkey has said that the entire team has been vaccinated. But protocol still requires a player to sit out if they show breakthrough symptoms or have a positive test.)

The Santoro sisters did a joint interview after the game, mostly for the Sandusky Register, their hometown newspaper.

Cory said it was “pretty cool” to see her sister get a triple-double. “I guess it’s OK if she gets it against your team,” she said, laughing.

Here’s link to the Sandusky Register story on the sisters by sports writer Billy Heyen.

Scoring from unexpected places

Neither of KSU’s top scorers going into the game managed 10 points. But Santoro and three other players did.

One was Young, who has started all nine games this season after starting only seven total her first three years. A 5-10 guard, Young had achieved her double-double against Clarion with six minutes to go in the third quarter. Her 16 points were one above her previous best and her 13 rebounds were two off her career-high. (“One of the coaches was telling me, ‘Try to beat it,'” Young said, smiling.) She played only 21 minutes in the game.

Dunn, a 6-3 freshman forward from Carmel, Indiana, had 15 points and seven rebounds, both the best of her young career. She made 3-of-7 three-point shots and ranks 15th in the MAC in 3-point shooting at 39.4%.

“She’s had a good start,” Starkey said. “She has a very high basketball IQ and is a really good passer for a post player. Obviously, she can shoot really well from outside.”

The coach said Dunn’s style of play is similar to senior Lindsey Thall, who has started every game in her four-year career.

“We thought Bridget would be great to play and learn beside Lindsey,” Starkey said, “and then be able to be a lot like her as she continues to develop.”

Pavansky, a senior, had 10 points, the most of her career.

“We’ve had a lot of talent here over the last four years, and she hasn’t been able to get the playing time that she would like to,” Starkey said. “So when you get opportunities for somebody like her to have a game like that — where it’s fun, your teammates are cheering — it’s an awesome thing.”

Every time Starkey talks about Pavlansky, he points out she has a perfect grade point average. She’s only one of three upperclassmen in the MAC to have a 4.0 average.

The coach also smiled as he remembered that Pavlansky’s uncle was Starkey’s junior varsity basketball coach in the early 1990s at Canfield High School outside Youngstown.

Dunn and Pavlansky combined for five 3-pointers. Santoro assisted on all of them.

A fast start and a tough next opponent

The victory gives Kent State an 8-1 start to the season, tying for its second-best in the 45 years of KSU women’s basketball. The best start was 11-1 in 2008-09, when the team finished 20-9. Teams in 1978-79 and 1993-94 also started 8-1. (wbbFlashes’ preview on the Clarion game has some interesting detail on those teams and three of the best teams in school history, which got off to mediocre starts.)

Clarion is 2-5 on the season.

Kent State has 10 days off for final exams.

Then they’ll host Florida State of the Atlantic Coast Conference, a team that has made the NCAA Tournament the last nine years. The Seminoles were ranked in the top 25 for several weeks earlier in the season. They are 6-2 going into Sunday’s game with Florida (8-3).

The game will be at the M.A.C. Center at 4 p.m. on Tuesday, Dec. 21 (the same afternoon the KSU football team plays in the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl). The FSU game is the first game of a doubleheader with the Kent State men’s team, which plays Cleveland State a half-hour after the women finish.

Box score

Notes

  • Starkey said junior guard Abby Ogle was out indefinitely with an injury. She was on the bench with her leg heavily bandaged. Ogle is a transfer from West Virginia who was a third-team all-American in junior college. She had played in six games and was tied for the team lead in steals despite playing just 11 minutes a game.
  • With Modkins out, junior Clare Kelly backed up Santoro at point guard. She didn’t score but had four assists, four rebounds, two steals and a blocked shot. Kelly started 13 games last season at shooting guard and averaged 8.8 points, scoring 27 against Toledo.
  • Every KSU player in uniform got into the game, with freshman guard Jenna Batsch logging 21 minutes. Bexley Wallace, a 6-3 junior forward and transfer from Penn State, scored her first two baskets for Kent. Sophomore Lexi Jackson, the team’s tallest player at 6-4, saw her first action in almost a month after being sidelined with illness. She scored four points and had a rebound.

Numbers

The statistics were as lopsided as you’d expect a 46-point win to be.

  • KSU outrebounded Clarion 55-30, its biggest margin in three seasons.
  • Clarion made only 24.1% of its shots and 15.4% of its 3-pointers. The Flashes shot 44.1% from the field and 45.2% on 3-pointers.
  • Kent State outscored Clarion in the paint 36-14, on second-chance points 24-7 and on fast breaks 19-7. The Flashes equaled ther season high of 23 assists and blocked five shots, the most since their opener at Northern Kentucky.

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Kent State women's basketball

KSU’s 4th-quarter rally can’t overcome slow start, 19 turnovers as Flashes fall to Buffalo in MAC quarterfinals

By on Wednesday, March 10, 2021

Buffalo’s Dayaisha Fair shoots over Kent State’s Lindsey Thall. Fair, the seventh leading scorer in Division I, had 30 points and six steals. (Photo from Buffalo website.)

It took three quarters for the Kent State women’s basketball team to get its offense scoring. But by then, it was too late.

The Flashes scored the game’s first basket, then missed three straight shots and committed three turnovers. Suddenly Buffalo led 12-2.

It didn’t get much closer until the fourth quarter, when the Flashes cut the lead to three twice. But Buffalo answered both times.

The 73-66 loss in the Mid-American Conference Tournament quarterfinals ends Kent State’s season with an 11-9 record. Buffalo (15-8) advances to face regular-season champion Bowling Green Friday in the semifinals.

In the first quarter, coach Todd Starkey said, it seems as if the Flashes “were trying to feel our way into the game.”

“Against the team like Buffalo, you can’t do that,” he said. “You have come out of the gate a hundred miles an hour — just like them.” 

Sophomore forward Nila Blackford said the team lost its focus early on.

“We put ourselves in a really difficult position, especially against a team like Buffalo,” she said. “They got us scrambling, and we lost our composure. When you have so many live-ball turnovers, it’s going to lead to layup after layup. It’s hard to come back from that.”

For the game, Kent State committed 19 turnovers. Buffalo scored 24 points from them. Buffalo had just nine turnovers, which led to only five KSU points.

The fourth-quarter comeback

Trailing by 12 going into the quarter, Mariah Modkins hit a layup, then fed Katie Shumate for a 3-point basket a minute later. The lead was down to seven, and Hannah Young hit a short jump shot to make it 56-53 with 4:35 to go.

Buffalo then made two free throws. A minute later, Dayaisha Fair, Buffalo’s star 5-5 guard, missed a layup but got her own rebound in heavy traffic. She passed the ball out to Jessika Schiffer, who hit a 3-point basket to push the lead back to 61-53.

Kent State had one last-minute push in it. With 1:06 to go, Modkins passed to Lindsey Thall, who hit a long 3-pointer. Twelve seconds later, Modkins hit her own 3, then hit another 20 seconds later. All three shots came from well behind the NBA 3-point line at Rocket Mortgage Arena, and the score was 69-66.

That was as far as Kent State could go. Buffalo made four free throws (and missed three more) in the last 22 seconds to clinch the win.

“We couldn’t quite get over the hump,” Starkey said. “We fought so hard, and we needed some good fortune down the stretch. We didn’t get it on a few key plays in the last couple minutes. But I’m really proud of our team for not giving in.”

For three quarters, shooting woes for the Flashes

Kent State made 10 of its 19 shots (52.6%) in the fourth quarter. But before then, KSU shot only 31.6%.

“We really struggled to shoot the ball for the last eight or nine games,” Starkey said. “I just think everything this season just wore them down, and it really showed in our field goal percentage.

“If we just shoot the ball better, we’re winning a lot of those games. But at the end of the day, you’ve got to put the ball in the basket.“

Buffalo’s shooting was the reverse of Kent’s. The Bulls made 57.1% of their shots ion the first half but 33.3% of their shots in the second.

Big games for Young and Blackford

Young, who has started three straight games in place of injured guard Clare Kelly, had a career-high 15 points to lead the Flashes. She made 3-of-5 three-point shots, had five rebounds and drew two offensive fouls on Fair.

“She is making a ton of effort plays,” Starkey said. “And we always talk about scoring as kind of a by-product of playing really hard. We were really struggling to score, and she was able to hit some key shots. It really kept us in the game.”

Blackford had a career-high 18 rebounds. That ties for the ninth most in KSU history and fourth most in the MAC this season.

“I can’t say enough about Nila,” Starkey said. “To get 18 rebounds against this team was phenomenal.”

Buffalo leads the MAC and ranks 15th in the nation in rebounding. Blackford had 10 offensive rebounds — the same number as the entire Buffalo team, which leads the MAC on the offensive boards.

Blackford also had 12 points for her 12th double-double of the season. That’s second in the conference to 13 for Ball State’s Oshlynn Brown, a senior who has been first-team all-MAC for two years.

A much more than Fair performance

Fair is Division I’s seventh-leading scorer, averaging 24.1 points a game. She had 30 against Kent State, making 8-of-19 field goals, 3-of-4 three-pointers and 11-of-14 free throws. She had six steals and four assists. (She’s among MAC leaders in those categories, too.)

Kent’s walking wounded

KSU starting guard Clare Kelly, who missed the last two games because of a foot injury, and 6-4 freshman reserve center Lexi Jackson, fighting a high ankle sprain, both played. Kelly had no points in 16 minutes. Jackson had a basket and three rebounds in nine minutes. Both were “weren’t even close to 100%,” Starkey said.

Wait ’til next year

Kent State returns all starters and 11 of its top 12 players.

“We’re excited about the future,” Starkey said. “We built the program around these two recruiting classes, who are coming through as juniors and sophomores. They’ve been really big so far, and we expect even bigger things in the future.”

Blackford said she was “super optimistic.“

“We have learned a lot about ourselves and our team this year,” she said. “I think some of the adversity we have gone through is only going to make us better in the future.“

Box score

The rest of the tournament

All four top seeds won.

No. 1 seed BOWLING GREEN trailed No. 8 Eastern Michigan by 10 at halftime but held the Eagles to 16 points in the second half and won 63-47. BG’s Lexi Fleming, the conference player of the year, left the game with a shoulder injury in the second half and scored only four points. Kenzie Lewis, another freshman guard, led the Falcons with 14 points and 11 rebounds.

No. 2 CENTRAL MICHIGAN broke a close game open with an 12-1 run in the second quarter and beat No. 7 Northern Illinois 83-69. Sophomore guard Molly Davis had 24 points and senior guard Micaela Kelly had 23 for CMU. Both had been named first-team all-MAC Tuesday.

No. 3 OHIO edged No. 6 Ball State 61-59. Cece Hooks, the MAC player of the year, had 21 points, and Erica Johnson had 19. Both players suffered severe cramps in the last minute. Johnson had to leave the game; Hooks fought through pain as Ball State had to foul four times in the last 15 seconds to try (and never succeed) to force Ohio to shoot fouls shots.

Bowling Green and Buffalo will play in the semifinals at 10 a.m. Friday. Ohio and Central Michigan will play a half-hour after that game ends, probably about 12:30. Both games are on ESPN+. Finals are at 11 a.m. Saturday on the CBS Sports Network.

The view from Buffalo

Coach Felisha Legette-Jack in her postgame press conference

“What a great team win. Our story is not about Kent State or whoever else we’re playing, but it’s about how good we can be if we rely on each other, see each other, trust each other and play for each other. Today we did that, and we beat a pretty good team.“

Notes

  • Three other Kent State players scored in double figures. Thall had 13 points and Modkins and Shumate 12. No one besides Blackford and Young had more than four rebounds.
  • The game was the fourth straight year Kent State and Buffalo have met in the quarterfinals. Buffalo has won three times. The better seed has won each season.
  • In the regular season, Buffalo beat No. 1 seed Bowling Green, its opponent Friday, twice.

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Kent State women's basketball

Kent State wins 5th straight and goes to 4-0 in MAC with 70-61 win over Ball State

By on Saturday, January 9, 2021
Associate head coach Fran Recchia with team in huddle. Recchia led the team because head coach Todd Starkey is recovering from COVID-19. (Photo by Hayley Steffy from KSU Athletic Communications.)

Nila Blackford kept piling up the double-doubles in MAC play.

Hannah Young and Casey Santoro stepped up in reserve roles and played their best basketball of the season.

Associate head coach Fran Recchia won her first game as an acting head coach.

And Kent State is 4-0 in the Mid-American Conference and alone is second place after a 70-61 win over Ball State Saturday. The Flashes have won five in a row and are 5-2 on the season.

Blackford: Points and rebounds keep coming

Blackford had 20 points and 11 rebounds, her fourth time in fourth league games with double figures in both. She was a season-best 8-of-11 shooting, made a 3-point basket and had three steals. Blackford is averaging 13 rebounds a game in MAC play, best in the league in conference games only.

“When she puts complete games together — as she’s been doing — she gets really hard to guard,” said Recchia, who ran the team from the bench. Coach Todd Starkey was home after testing positive for COVID-19.

“She competes on every possession,” Recchia said, “and is an aggressive, instinctual player. She wants to win and really listens to coaching.”

Blackford talked about playing for her team.

“They need me to crash the boards really hard,” she said. “I feel like I just have a knack for the ball. I try to stay aggressive on offense, try to get mismatches and be strong to the basket — just strictly for my team.”

Santoro and Young: Big games from the bench

Freshman Santoro ran the KSU offense after starting point guard Mariah Modkins went out with an injury three-and-a-half minutes into the second quarter. The Flashes trailed 22-21.

Twenty-four seconds later Santoro fed Blackford for a layup to give Kent the lead, and a minute later Santoro hit a 3-point shot. Kent State never trailed again.

Santoro scored 12 points with two 3-point baskets and three assists. She played 33 minutes, the most of her short career.

“You have to step up when the opportunity presents itself,” Recchia said. “Casey took advantage of that opportunity. We see it in practice every day. Our team has a lot of trust in her with the ball in her hands.

“We’ve really been talking to her about staying aggressive offensively and defensively and listening to the scouting report. That’s always an adjustment for freshmen.”

Kent State outscored Ball State 49-39 with Santoro at the point.

Young came into the game in the second quarter. With 3:07 left in the half, she grabbed an offensive rebound and scored. Two minutes later, she did it the same thing.

For the game, Young had seven rebounds and 12 points in 23 minutes, all by far season highs.

“Hannah had a really good week of practice, and it translated to the game today,” Recchia said.

“Toward the end of last year, she was playing well,” Recchia said. “2020 has been crazy with the coronavirus, and some people lost a little bit of their rhythm. If Hannah continues like that, she can really contribute.”

Winning with rebounding

After being outrebounded 9-7 in the first quarter, the Flashes dominated the boards for the rest of the game. They outrebounded Ball State 14-6 in the second quarter, then outrebounded the Cardinals 22-18 in the second half. Game totals were 43-33 Kent State.

Kent State had 17 second-chance points. Ball State had two.

“Rebounding is a mindset,” Recchia said. “We talked about after the first quarter, but the girls just decided that we were going to win this game with defense and rebounding. So they kind of flipped the switch.”

The Modkins collision

Modkins went out after she and Ball State guard Essence Booker banged knees hard as Booker attacked the basket. Booker lay on the court for several minutes and could put no weight on her leg as she was helped off the court. Ball State’s second-leading scorer at 12.8 points a game, Booker was on crutches after the game.

Modkins was on the ground for a shorter time, then managed to get to the KSU bench. She sat in the front row of the socially distanced bench for the rest of the game.

Asked after the game how Modkins was doing, Recchia said: “She’s OK. She’ll be all right.“

Modkins was Kent State’s second-leading scorer at 10.8 points a game and leader in assists at 3.5.

Thall the floor leader

As point guard, Modkins is the team’s leader on the floor. After she went out, junior forward Lindsey Thall took on more of that role.

“She and Mariah have become leaders of this team,” Recchia said. “So when Ri when out, Lindsey really stepped up. She was really talking to the team in all the dead balls, repeating what we were saying on the sidelines and keeping the five on the floor together.”

Thall scored 11 points, had five rebounds, two assists and a blocked shot.

Recchia: 1-0 as a coach

It was the first game Starkey had missed as a coach in 21 years, he told told Allen Moff of the Record-Courier before the game.

He and Recchia had talked throughout the week as the team prepared for the game.

Leading the team was a new experience for Recchia, who has been an assistant at Radford College before coming to Kent State. She was head coach at William Byrd High School in Vinton, Virginia, from 2007-10.

“It’s a lot different when you’re the one making the decisions,” she said. “Until you’re actually in that position, you don’t really understand just how many decisions go into a game day — from shootaround to even writing on the board.

“As an assistant, you can suggest. Then coach gets to and decipher through all that and decide what to actually tell the team. I feel very fortunate because (Starkey) allows us to have a big voice in practice and games. So the girls have been used to hearing our voices.”

Starkey tweeted congratulations to Recchia and the team minutes after the game.

Blackford said the change in coaching was different but not that big of a deal.

“She’s always coaching us,” Blackford said. “We talk every day.”

The San Diego seniors

It was Senior Day, and forward Monique Smith and Margaux Eibel started for the Flashes. Smith is the last member of Starkey and Recchia’s first recruiting class. Eibel walked on the team her freshman year and earned a scholarship that summer.

Neither have ever played big minutes, though Smith had made a difference on defense and rebounding in some key games. She had five rebounds in six minutes in KSU’s win at Eastern Michigan last week. Smith had started one game her freshman year.

Eibel has played in 24 games over four years and scored 18 points.

Both she and Smith are from the San Diego suburbs but had never met before they arrived at Kent State. They’re the only two California players I can remember playing for the Flashes in 30+ years of following the team.

Smith and Eibel played two minutes at the beginning of the Ball State game and checked out with the Flashes leading 6-4. Smith scored a point on a free throw. Both returned for the last 39 seconds.

The second-place Flashes

Four teams went into Saturday undefeated in the MAC. Only Central Michigan and Kent State still are. Central (5-0 in the league, 7-2 overall) beat Buffalo (4-1 and 7-3) 79-63 in Buffalo. Bowling Green (4-1 and 8-2) lost its first league game to Northern Illinois (4-5 and 2-2) at BG.

Kent State is 4-0. It has played one fewer game than than the other leaders because the Flashes’ Wednesday game against NIU was canceled after Starkey’s positive COVID test.

In other MAC games Saturday, Akron (1-4 MAC, 4-4 overall) beat Miami (1-8 and 0-5) 84-77 at Akron. Ohio (3-2 and 5-3) beat Toledo (2-3 and 6-3) 85-66 in Athens. Link to MAC standings.

Box score

Notes

  • Kent State made a season-high 45.8% of its shots. Ball State hit 37.1%. From 3-point distance, the Flashes were 7 of 20 for 35%; Ball State was 6 of 18 for 44%.
  • The Flashes committed a season-low 12 turnovers; BSU was even lower at eight. Off those turnovers, the Cardinals outscored KSU 16-4.
  • Sophomore guard Clare Kelly had a career-high four assists to lead the Flashes in that category. She also had seven points and two steals.
  • The last time Kent State started the MAC season 4-0 was 2010-11, when the Flashes won their fifth game and went on to finish 11-5 and second in the MAC East and 20-10 overall.
  • Oshlynn Brown, Ball State’s all-conference forward, led the Cardinals with 16 points and 13 rebounds. But she sat out eight minutes of the second quarter with two fouls. During that time, KSU took control of the game.
  • The game is the only meeting between the two teams in the regular season.

Wednesday at Akron

The Flashes travel 13 miles to the James A. Rhodes Arena for a 6 p.m. game against the Zips. The game will be on ESPH+.

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Kent State women's basketball

Suddenly, Flashes are opening Wednesday at Ohio State

By on Tuesday, December 1, 2020

Lindsey Thall takes aim at the basket against Ohio State last season. She scored 32 points in KSU’s75-65 loss.

As fast as games can disappear in this COVID-19 basketball season, a new one can appear.

Kent State announced Monday morning that it would play its first game of the year 48 hours later.

So the Flashes will open their 2020-21 season at noon Wednesday against Ohio State in Columbus. The game will be on BTN+, the Big Ten’s paid streaming service. Here’s link to broadcast. Details on how to sign up are in the “Notes” section below.

“We are excited about finally playing,” Kent State coach Todd Starkey told Allen Moff of the Record-Courier. “I’m not sure what we’ll look like on only three days of practice. Ohio State is a very talented team. I think they have a chance to win the Big Ten this year.”

Junior point guard Mariah Modkins put it like this in an interview: “We’re just excited to touch the ball, honestly, and get up and down the floor.”

Modkins said the fall on campus has been tough, but the key has been “just being able to go with the flow.“

“Everything is up in the air,” she said. “You never know from day to day, honestly from hour to hour. So just being ready to do whatever is one of the most important things.”

Modkins the team’s pause in practice because of COVID “kind of sucked.“

“We were so close,” she said (just 10 days before their first game after having been able to practice all fall). “We’re ready to go now. Everybody’s excited.”

It will be the second game between KSU and Ohio State in two years and the second in 39 years. The Buckeyes beat the Flashes 75-65 at the M.A.C. Center last season before the biggest women’s crowd (4,272) in Kent State history. Before then, the teams hadn’t met since 1981.

Like Kent State, OSU had its first game — against Akron — canceled last week because of COVID-related issues (on the Zips team). The Flashes had their first game — at Northern Kentucky — canceled after COVID issues in Kent.

The Buckeyes played their first game Sunday, beating Duquesne 82-47. The Flashes are scheduled to play Duquesne of the Atlantic 10 on Dec. 21.

Ohio State started the season ranked 20th in the country and moved up to 19th with the Duquesne win. The Buckeyes have five starters back from last season’s team, which went 21-12 and tied for fifth in the Big Ten.

Top starter is 6-4 senior forward Dorka Juhasz, an all-Big Ten selection last season. She averaged 13.2 points and 9.4 rebounds last season and made 40 three-point shots last season. She had 10 points and 12 rebounds in 23 minutes against Duquesne.

Guard Jacy Sheldon led the Buckeyes in that game with 20 points on 8-of-13 shooting. Guard Braxtin Miller had 16 points, including two of OSU’s three 3-point baskets.

Ohio State outrebounded Duquesne 52-37 even though the Dukes have a 6-4 center and two other 6-2 starters.

Duquesne coach Dan Burt after the game said his team had been able to have only six or seven full practices all fall while Ohio State hadn’t had any kind of shutdown. “It was like lions waiting for their meat, and unfortunately today we were that meat,” he told pittsburghsportsnow.com.

Kent State also likely will start a 6-4, 6-2, 6-2 front line. The 6-4 center is Linsey Marchese, a transfer from Indiana who will be playing her first game for KSU. She would have played against Ohio State two years ago.

Kent’s 6-2 forwards are junior Lindsey Thall, who set a school record by making eight 3-point baskets against Ohio State last season, and Nila Blackford, an all-MAC freshman team member last season who led the Flashes in rebounding.

Kent State will look different at guard, where starter Megan Carter graduated, leading scorer Asiah Dingle transferred, and second-leading scorer Katie Shumate is injured.

Kent State’s pregame media notes list Marchese, Thall, Blackford, Modkins and Hannah Young as probable starters.

Modkins started 13 games at point guard last season; Young started four and guard. Also expect sophomore guard Clare Kelly and sophomore wing Annie Pavlansky, along with 5-4 freshman guard Casey Santoro and 6-4 freshman center Lexi Jackson, to see considerable action.

That’s if everyone is healthy, and this year, that’s never guaranteed for any team.

Notes

• The game will at the Covelli Center, the new 3,700-seat home of Ohio State’s volleyball, gymnastics, wrestling and fencing teams. No fans will be allowed; Columbus and Franklin County are under the state’s highest “purple” COVID rating.

• Best price to watch the game on BTN+ is to buy a $7.95 monthly pass for Ohio State games only. It will be renewed automatically every month, so cancel after the game if you don’t want to watch more Buckeye sports. You can buy a season pass for OSU events for $79.95. You’ll get Ohio State men’s and women’s basketball games that aren’t shown on the Big Ten Network, plus sports like gymnastics, baseball and softball. You can also subscribe to get all sports from all Big Ten Schools or all of the Big Ten’s games in a single sport like women’s basketball.

Other key links

KSU’s home opener is Saturday vs. Ohio U.

Kent State’s second game, assuming no COVID problems, will be Saturday against Ohio University at the M.A.C. Center. Tipoff is at 2 p.m., but no fans will be allowed. Game will be streamed on the KSU website.

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Kent State women's basketball

Just 17 months after graduation, Alexa Golden is a KSU assistant coach

By on Sunday, October 11, 2020
Alexa Golden and coach Todd Starkey after she checked out in her final game as a player at the MAC Tournament in 2019. (Photo by Austin Mariasy.)

In 2016, Alexa Golden made Kent State’s starting lineup as a freshman. When she graduated in 2019 as an all-MAC defensive player four years later, she had two degrees.

Now she is one of the youngest assistant coaches in the country.

Golden, who is just 23, officially got the job this week, barely a year after she became a graduate assistant and 10 months after she became the team’s director of basketball operations.

She had been doing the duties of an assistant since Morgan Toles left the Flashes in June for an assistant coaching job at Florida State, her alma mater. But promotions have been slow and complicated in Kent State’s COVID-hiring freeze.

“There aren’t many assistants so young,” coach Todd Starkey said in an interview this week. “It happens on a rare occasion, but it’s certainly not the standard.”

“She was always a coach on the floor for us when she was a player,” Starkey said in an earlier interview. “She’s an exceptional person. She’s earned everything she’s gotten, and it’s more about the job that somebody can do than the amount of experience they have.

“Lex has done an exceptional job at everything she’s done from player to GA to DOBO to assistant.”

Golden, who went to high school outside Pittsburgh, started 107 games for the Flashes over four years. She’s the only player in KSU women’s history to graduate with more than 500 points, 500 rebounds, 200 assists 200 steals and 100 3-point baskets. Her senior year she was 19th in the country in steals.

She earned her bachelor’s degree in criminal justice in December of her junior year and a master’s in sports and recreation management in May 2019. She was a three-time Academic All-MAC selection.

Starkey has said one of the reasons he has always liked Golden in all of her roles is that “she hates to lose as much as I do.”

She is Kent State’s first new assistant since Mike McKee was hired at the start of Starkey’s second year. The KSU staff has been remarkably stable under Starkey, one of the reasons for the team’s 71-57 record and two MAC East titles in the coach’s four years.

Toles joined Starkey’s staff a month after he was hired.

“She meant a ton to our program,” Starkey said. “She was a phenomenal player development coach, a really good recruiter…and just part of our family. She’s missed, but we’ve also celebrated this great opportunity with her.”

Toles, who started at point guard at both Auburn and Florida State in college, had worked with KSU’s point guards. Associate head coach Fran Recchia will move into that role. Golden will work with wings, which was her position for the Flashes.

KSU also has added graduate assistant Dasia Logan, who graduated from St. Bonaventure in May. Logan started 38 games as a guard in two years for the Bonnies (she transferred from the College of Charleston). She played Kent State twice in those two years, scoring 18 points against the Flashes in 2018. (KSU won both games.)

Starkey said he hoped to hire a director of operations, which is sort of a hybrid administrative assistant/assistant coach, this fall. But that would depend on the state of Kent State’s hiring. The university is in a semi-hiring freeze, with each position having to be justified at several levels.

All about new transfer Bexley Wallace, a 6-3 post player who spent two years at Penn State, and 2021 recruit Lexy Linton, a 5-9 New Jersey guard. NCAA transfer rules require Wallace to sit out this season.

Shumate sidelined with knee injury

Sophomore wing Katie Shumate, Kent State’s second-leading scorer and rebounder last season, is out indefinitely after having knee surgery this summer.

“It was kind of a chronic thing she had played through,” Starkey said. “She played with a knee sleeve most of last year, and it was an irritant. So she went in to get that checked out and needed to have some stuff cleaned up.”

Will Shumate play at all this season?

“We don’t know,” Starkey said. “It’s a decision we’ve put on hold to see a couple of things — how her rehab continues and how the season starts to play out.”

Shumate, who made the MAC all-freshman team last season, is the third starting guard lost from last season’s lineup. Senior Megan Carter graduated and sophomore Asiah Dingle transferred to Stony Brook. Dingle led the team in scoring last season at 13.3 points a game, and Carter led the Flashes two years ago at 15.8. Shumate averaged 12.2 points last season.

Shumate’s logical replacement is junior Hannah Young, a four-time all-state selection in Virginia. She averaged 28 minutes over the Flashes’ last 10 games, averaging 6.4 points and 4.5 rebounds. She had 12 points against Toledo and Bowling Green and 11 against Ohio and had nine rebounds against Miami and eight against Northern Illinois. For most of her time at Kent, she played behind Golden, Carter and Shumate.

Sophomore guard Clare Kelly also likely will see an increased role while Shumate is out of action. Kelly averaged 2.5 points and 1.4 rebounds as a freshman and saw increased playing time in the second half of the conference season. She never did find the range that made her one of the state’s top 3-point shooters in high school.

The team posted this video of workouts and practices this week.

Schedule is still a work in progress

Starkey told the Record-Courier early last week that four of five non-conference games were “pretty much set.”

“Scheduling has been difficult, just like everything else these days,” he said.

“At this point, we are scheduled to have non-conference games,” Starkey said in his interview with wbbFlashes. “But to say anything is with a grain of salt. And that could change in any 24-hours news cycle.“

The earliest teams can play is No. 25, the day before Thanksgiving.

Kent State is scheduled to open conference play at Toledo on Wednesday, Dec. 30.

Dingle gets waiver to play this season

Dingle, who announced her transfer to Stony Brook, in April, has received a waiver from the NCAA to be immediately eligible to play. (Without the waiver, she would have to sit out a season.)

Dingle had applied for a hardship waiver. Part of her reason for transferring was to be closer to her father in Boston, who has had several strokes.

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