CLEVELAND, Ohio — One phone call six years ago on a cool spring day in West Virginia changed the trajectory of Cleveland State women’s basketball. Cleveland State head coach Chris Kielsmeier had been on the the job for about a year when, in the spring of 2019, he and his staff made it a priority to recruit at local player out of Eastlake North. Destiny Leo had all the accolades a high school senior could work for. She was first-team All-Ohio as a senior, cleveland.com girls basketball Player of the Year, runner-up for Ohio Ms. Basketball. Her 2,227 points in high school were 24th all-time in Ohio history, but Leo was far from finished with her work on the basketball court. Standing in the parking lot of a West Virginia high school while on the recruiting trail, Kielsmeier felt his phone ring. Destiny was on the other end. Leo committed to Kielsmeier and the Vikings that day, becoming a major part of the most successful run in Cleveland State basketball history. “It’s incredibly emotional for me because she’s the first kid I recruited when I got here and we weren’t very good,” Kielsmeier said. “She had to believe in the vision of what we were going to become.” Six years later, Leo has been the catalyst for Vikings basketball, which reached the Horizon League tournament semifinals in Indianapolis for, coincidentally, a school-record sixth straight year. The third-seeded Vikings (24-8) face second-seed Purdue Fort Wayne in the league semifinals on Monday. Tipoff is 2:30 p.m. at Corteva Coliseum in Indianapolis. Leo will go down as one of the best to ever put on a Vikings uniform, even after missing most of last season with a leg injury that kept her to just six games. With a third-team all-league selection this season, she became the fourth Viking ever to be a four-time all-league selection. Since she arrived, Leo has also been named the league’s player of the year (2022-23), sixth player of the year and to the first team and freshman team. She’s second in career scoring at Cleveland State, and one of two players with more than 1,900 career points. Last Thursday night, Leo, a fifth-year senior, played in her final game at the Wolstein Center, but leaves behind a legacy so much more than six straight quarterfinal wins at home. “A year ago I wouldn’t have dreamed of being in the position that I’m in now,” Leo said. “It means the world to me and everything is out there for us to get. We just have to be confident, play really hard and stick together and hopefully we’ll get the outcome that we want.” Leo has been complimented all year by Mickayla Perdue, who has shaped the program in her own right in two years with the Vikings after transferring from Glenville State. She was named Horizon League player of the year this season. “Nothing we do in the program is just for the moment, it’s certainly for the moment for these kids, but everything we do as a program is celebrating the past, focused on the moment, but having a plan for the future,” Kielsmeier said. “You’ve got to have players that represent what you want the program to stand for and teach younger players how to go about doing that. “There’s a reason not everybody’s doing this and it’s them. (Leo) gives me some credit, but you haven’t seen me make a shot over the last six years. We work really hard as a staff, we believe in what we do. Players go out and get it done.” As Leo has worked her way back from an ACL tear last year, Purdue has been the player the Vikings have needed. Perdue scored a game-high 24 points against Detroit Mercy in the first round of the league tournament to help send the Vikings to Indy. Leo added nine points and four rebounds in the effort while both players played more than 34 minutes a piece. “You’ve gotta have players that believe in you, then you’ve got to believe when things get tough because it’s going to get tough, it’s only a matter of time,” Kielsmeier said. “These two kids have cemented their legacy in this program pretty high, but hopefully the best is yet to come.” The Vikings are far from done, with a chance at an automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament if they can win the Horizon. Kielsmeier believes in his team more than anything and hope people notice that what they are doing isn’t common as this Vikings team rewrites the record books. “We’ve got the third most successful season the history of the school in back-to-back-to-back years, people need to talk about that,” Kielsmeier said. “There’s been women’s basketball at Cleveland State for 52 straight years and this three-year stretch that we’ve been on, the 49 before couldn’t touch. “And that’s done in a three-year stretch, all packaged together (with) great players that have cemented their legacy as some of the best players that have ever played in this program, and that’s powerful stuff.”