City of Basketball Love

By Jerome Taylor (@ThatGuy_Rome)

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Five minutes is all it took for Lauren Klieber to realize she had taken her game to a new level. 

By the 4:59 mark in the first quarter of the first game of the 2022-2023 season, Klieber had knocked down two 3-pointers and scored all of Neumann’s points against Arcadia. 

“The first couple minutes of that first game, I realized I have the advantage, whether it's a smaller or bigger defender.” Klieber said. “Either way, it just plays in my favor.”

Klieber finished the first game of her sophomore year with 29 points. She followed that up with 21 against Goucher, 22 against Mount Aloysius and 27 against Rutgers University-Camden. 

“I honestly think after that first game, after the season I had, it surprised myself and the coaches, but it was something that we both knew I was capable of doing,” Kleiber said.

“We just kept telling her you have so much ability, you can really be good,” Neumann head coach Mary Beth McNichol said. “When she came back and she had the success in those first three or four games, your confidence level is really high. But you see some athletes who have like three or four or five great games in a row, and then maybe there's a little bit of a slump, but it just never happened the whole season.” 

Klieber surpassed her total scoring output from her first year through the first seven games of the 2022-2023. She ended the season averaging 22.3 points per game, good for seventh in Division III and the second-highest mark in a single season at Neumann (Nafisa Saunders averaged 26.2 in 2018-2019), on top of averaging 9.9 rebounds and 1.2 steals all en route to being named to the Atlantic East’s and CoBL’s Division III first teams.

“When the [2021-2022] season ended, we sat down to talk, we told her this is what you need to work on. And I've been coaching a long time, and I have never seen anybody who improved like her,” McNichol said. 

“How to play the game. Her skills improved — her skills were good, but they improved dramatically. And then just everything about her, how she approached it and being more aggressive, it was astounding.”

Klieber, a West Chester East product, said she was more comfortable in her second season. She locked in on skill development, becoming a better defender and improving her conditioning during the offseason before her sophomore year.

“I always knew I could score at that level, but coming into college right after being kind of the main player at West Chester East. I think my freshman year was a little hard for me, acclimating to a different team, different coaches,” Klieber said. “I think the jump from freshman to sophomore year, I was just more confident with myself.”

At 5-foot-9, she has an advantage in the post against smaller guards and the speed to beat opposing teams' bigger defenders out at the 3-point line (Klieber shot 34% from 3 last season).

Klieber and the rest of the Knights have their collective gaze on team-centric milestones this season — specifically, getting past the first round of the conference tournament. It’s something the program hasn’t done since its last season in the Colonial States Athletic Conference in 2018, when it made the conference championship game.

Neumann was part of the creation of the Atlantic East Conference in the 2018-2019 season.

Last year, Neumann (13-14, 6-6) lost against Immaculata University, a team it beat twice in the regular season, by six points in the first round.

“It's something we're frustrated by because if we won that game we would have faced Marymount, and we wanted to win that game so badly just so we could face them because we only lost (to Marymount) by two (during the regular season),” Kleiber said. 

“We've all talked about how badly we want to win the conference, to beat these teams and show them that they need to respect us.”

With returning players like junior Emily DuPont, who started 13 games and was the team's second-leading scorer (9.9 ppg), Jacqueline Wardrop and Lindsay Holden, the Knights have the experience to earn that respect.

“We've already seen some improvement in (other players’) game, and that could help us. And that'll be good for (Klieber), too. Because if a couple of other scorers are on the floor, it'll take a little bit off of her,” McNichol said. “Although we kept saying that last year, ‘Is somebody ever going to stop her?’ And 27 games into it, no one ever stopped her.”

Klieber anticipates she might see her numbers dip this season now that she’s at the top of every opposing team’s scouting report. If more offensive threats emerge around her, they might have the firepower to make a run at their first championship game since 2018.

“I'm not too worried about my average dropping a little bit. I'm not going to be like, ‘I had a worse season,’” Klieber said. “I'm just worried about the end of the season. Can we get to the playoffs? Can we win the championship? Can we just have an all-around good year?”