Rewind to Nov. 16, 2025, back when No. 19 Ohio State women’s basketball played its first top 10-ranked team of the 2025-26 season. The Buckeyes hung around with the No. 1 UConn Huskies for the better part of the first quarter, but played 30 forgettable minutes to end the game in a 32-point defeat.
The second top 10 opponent ended in a seven-point defeat to the No. 4 UCLA Bruins, but on Sunday, against the No. 8 Maryland Terrapins, the Buckeyes went down 15 points at the start of the second quarter.
It looked like Ohio State was finding its ceiling, and it was that it was not a team to compete with the top teams in the country.
Luckily for the Buckeyes, basketball is four quarters and the Buckeyes played nearly an opposite performance than that one-quarter game against the Huskies.
“I’m not even gonna talk about the UConn game, because we didn’t play well at all,” point guard Jaloni Cambridge told reporters. “We didn’t show what we were capable of.”
For the final 28:55 of Sunday’s 89-76 Ohio State victory over the Terps, the moment when the Buckeyes had its largest deficit of the game, the Scarlet and Gray showed they are more than capable. Here are the ways they did it.
Ohio State can rebound
That title might have shocked some longtime fans of the Buckeyes.
For the last four seasons, Ohio State involuntarily sacrificed strong rebounding performances for steals and turnovers. That yielded results, with two conference regular season titles since the 21-22 season and an Elite Eight run in 2023, but it was always a part of the Buckeyes’ game that created issues for head coach Kevin McGuff’s side.
On the other side of the scorer’s table, the Maryland Terrapins entered Sunday as the second best rebounding team in the Big Ten with a positive 15.5 rebounding margin over opponents. The Terps rebound with intent and numbers to win extra possessions.
It looked like the same story was getting told on Sunday when Maryland started off with a 7-4 rebounding margin early in the first quarter. Despite the size advantage for 6-foot-4 forward Kylee Kitts and 6-foot-6 center Elsa Lemmilä, the Terps put two or three players by the basket on each shot and early on grabbed most of the boards.
Ohio State retold the story and out-rebounded the Terps in the second and fourth quarters, not coincidentally the two quarters where the Buckeyes outscored the home side 56-35.
“When you do play great rebounding teams like that, when you get the ball back, they’ve committed so much to offensive rebounding, it does give you a chance to get out and transition,” McGuff said. “And so I think once we got the ball back, we were able to get some opportunities going the other direction.”
The Buckeyes had three players with at least eight rebounds with the aforementioned Lemmilä, who led all players with 11, and eight for Kitts. The third player? 5-foot-7 point guard Jaloni Cambridge, who had nine.
“I didn’t even know I had nine rebounds,” Cambridge said. “So I’m very thankful that I was able to help my team, because that’s huge for me, being one of the smallest player on the floor, being greedy, just trying to do everything I can for my team.”
Maryland came out of the halftime locker room with renewed focus on rebounding, but Ohio State adjusted and grabbed more boards than the Terps in the fourth quarter.
Shots can fall
It is easier for a team to out-rebound an opponent whenever a team only misses four of 16 shots in a quarter. Ohio State did that in the fourth, but from the second through the fourth quarter the Buckeyes’ shooting made early season issues harder to remember.
Before Sunday, the Scarlet and Gray were next to last in the 18-team Big Ten in three-point shooting percentage (28.4%) and 10th in the conference in overall field goal percentage (45.9%). Against the Terps, who led the conference with an opponent shooting percentage of 34% through Saturday, Ohio State had its best shooting performance of the season.
The first quarter was rough and the Buckeyes did not hit a fourth of their shots from the field. However, Ohio State never shots less than 50% for the final three quarters.
Four Ohio State starters hit double-digits, and Lemmilä was two points away from hitting a double-double with eight points and 11 rebounds. From deep, six different players hit a shot from beyond the arc and the Buckeyes went 50% from the floor from three-point range. Sunday is the first time this season Ohio State hit half from long range.
“We have a team that is capable of this type of shooting, and we haven’t always done it, but I think we’re starting to kind of hit our stride in that space and that. I think the more we do that and the more space we create, I think we become that much more dangerous on offense.”
Kylee Kitts’ star is rising
Cambridge led all scorers with 28 points, nine rebounds and eight assists, nearly a triple-double, but at this point of her young career no one doubts the star power of the sophomore guard. Ohio State needed a second big performance on offense and that came from Kitts.
The redshirt freshman tied her conference scoring high with 18 points, the second highest on the Buckeyes. Kitts’ first 18-point performance came against the Northwestern Wildcats, a considerably less difficult opponent than the Terrapins on Sunday.
What stood out was how Kitts did it. Despite the forward’s size, half of her points came from hitting corner threes.
“They were sagging off me a little bit on my three, so I was able to knock a few of those down, which helped us in the long run,” Kitts told reporters. “I missed a lot in the beginning, but I finished strong.”
Kitts turned a 2-of-6 shooting first half into a 5-of-7 shooting half in the second. The forward hit the first two shots of the second half when the Terrapins tried to ramp up intensity again like they did to start the first quarter. Those two baskets turned a four point deficit into a single point and her second shot, her first made three-point shot of the game, started an eight-point run that gave Ohio State its first lead of the game.
Even when Kitts was not hitting shots in the first half, she still had two assists in the second quarter to help add five points to the scoreboard at a time when Ohio State was taking chunks out of the Terrapins’ 15-point lead.
Cambridge is the clear leader of the Buckeyes, and there is no argument against it. However, a performance like Kitts’ in her first season shows what other players are capable of providing to an Ohio State team that surprised the No. 8 Terrapins on Sunday afternoon.
