‘Two more weeks of basketball.’ Kellione’s Transylvania career short but ‘super special.’
In the week leading up to the second weekend of the women’s NCAA Division III basketball tournament, Transylvania senior guard Madison “Maddie” Kellione had exams Wednesday through Friday, a program due Thursday and a presentation Friday.
Kellione, the team’s top scorer at 15.0 points per game, proceeded to lead the Pioneers to back-to-back wins against Ohio Northern and NYU. Those victories earned the program its first-ever trip to the Final Four and herself a spot on the D3Hoops All-Region 8 First Team. This weekend, Kellione and her teammates are in Hartford, Connecticut, to face Smith College of Northampton, Mass., and look to add to the historic season they’ve built together.
Or, it could all end there.
“I think it’s been on my mind all season,” Kellione said. “I’ve played for so long. So imagining it coming to an end, it doesn’t really seem realistic right now. And I think that this weekend, it’s like a big finale to such an awesome career that I’ve had here. If that’s the end of my career, then like, I’m so happy to go out that way. And especially after, if we win this weekend. Obviously we’re playing to go to the national championship, but in my mind, I’m also playing for two more weeks of basketball.”
The national championship game will take place April 1 in Dallas, where title games in Divisions I, II and III will all be contested at the same site in the same weekend.
Hailing from Cynthiana, Kellione played basketball for Harrison County High School after picking up the sport in middle school when a softball teammate’s dad convinced her parents to send her to tryouts.
“He was talking to my parents and he was like, ‘I just think, just have her come try out,’” Kellione recalled. “‘She’s athletic and coachable, and I can do a lot with that.’ They talked me into trying out and then after that, I just dropped every other sport but basketball.”
As a senior for the Fillies, she was named the 2019 KABC 10th Region Player of the Year and a 2019 KABC Miss Basketball candidate, averaging 19.1 points per game.
She originally committed to play basketball at Trine University (Ind.). But, after conversations with Transylvania head coach Juli Fulks, Kellione decided that Transy was a better fit. The Pioneers had already built a strong program, she connected with the coaching staff, and Lexington is far closer to Cynthiana than Angola, Ind.
A slow start
Kellione arrived in Lexington in 2019 with the intention of playing basketball and majoring in engineering as a college freshman. Neither of those things happened.
Within two weeks of stepping foot on campus, she tore the anterior cruciate ligament in her right knee during a camp drill, causing her to miss the season.
“Thankfully, at that point, I only knew Maddie was good,” Fulks said. “I didn’t know how good she was. I was already devastated, but I would have been more devastated a year later knowing how great she was.”
She also battled a slew of sicknesses for months. Kellione dealt with pneumonia, mono and a bacterial infection, rendering her so ill that she wouldn’t have been able to take the floor anyway.
Kellione, unlike many, did not struggle with the academic adjustment of college.
“It hurt more so socially because I didn’t get to play on the court,” Kellione said. “And I already was an introvert, so building connections with my teammates, I really struggled in my freshman year. And after getting to play and then getting used to people and even like as our class got closer, I think that’s really what helped me thrive outside of it.”
Off the court, she would go on to find that engineering wasn’t what she wanted to pursue. A summer job in the field granted her experience but left her considering other options, she said. “I came back and was like, ‘no, I don’t want to do that as much.’”
Transy’s coaching staff has an open-door policy for its players, always available to discuss anything and everything. So when Kellione told Fulks about her interests, Fulks connected her with a friend in medical physics.
“She was like, ‘I have a friend who does this. Why don’t you just go job shadowing and see how you like it?’” Kellione said. “And I really enjoyed it, and I’ve really just been pursuing it since.”
The talented guard, a three-time selection to the Heartland Collegiate Athletic Conference All-Academic Team, is a Physics major with minors in Math, Biology and Computer Science. She has been accepted to Medical Physics graduate programs so far at Florida, Rhode Island, Kentucky, Tennessee, Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis.
“I’m not really sure which way I want to go with that yet,” Kellione explained. “I think one side is more like cancer treatment, and the other side is sticking more to machines and diagnostics and imaging. I haven’t decided which way I want to go yet, but I want to help people.”
Kellione still works part-time at Associates in Medical Physics, the place at which Fulks encouraged her to shadow. She has a near-perfect GPA and is set to graduate with honors. All while leading the Pioneers in points and free throws in each of her three seasons.
Finding her voice
Fulks calls Kellione the most disciplined athlete she’s ever coached.
“And she’s the most coachable and the easiest to coach,” Fulks said. “And is the perfect teammate and does everything you ask her to do. And when your biggest challenge is helping her balance taking an overloaded science curriculum with big goals and basketball, that’s as hard as it’s gotten.”
Kellione credits her time at Transy with finding her voice as a leader. In high school, she said, she was expected to step into that leadership role; but she wasn’t yet comfortable with it.
“I was still very much introverted,” Kellione said. “And didn’t want to tell people, not what to do, per se, but to just be that leader and to help others. And I think here, especially with the help of our senior class, that it’s not like it’s all on one person. I think that’s allowed me to step individually into my role and like play to my strengths and help teammates in that way.”
Kellione technically has remaining eligibility as a result of both her freshman year injury and the extra year granted by the NCAA to athletes following the pandemic, so her career may not, in fact, conclude with this tournament run.
“It’s weird to imagine shifting into ‘adult life’ per se and possibly ending basketball,” Kellione said. “But I mean, I think I’ll always have a tie to it. And I’ll probably be involved in it some way for the rest of my life.”
She’s had only two seasons in a Transy uniform unaffected by outside factors. But the experience, she said, has been well worth it.
When Kellione was benched with her torn ACL as a freshman, the Pioneers were eliminated in the round of 64 by Randolph-Macon. The tournament was later canceled after the first two rounds due to the pandemic. When she was a sophomore during the 2020-21 season, the Pioneers were crowned conference champions, but the 2021 NCAA Tournament was also canceled due to the pandemic.
During her junior season, Transy went 27-1 before falling to, believe it or not, Trine in the Elite Eight. The Pioneers haven’t lost since, taking a 2022-23 record of 31-0 into this weekend’s Final Four.
Nothing panned out how it was supposed to, but Kellione isn’t disappointed.
“If I had to do all that again to get just these two years I’d do it in a heartbeat,” Kellione said. “Because I told my mom last year, I was like, ‘I’ve never had so much fun playing basketball as I have with this team.’ And I think it’s because of our bond outside of the court. They ignite the love for the game so much more when you’re playing with people you love and you’re winning. And, I mean, I’d give all those hard years again, even in high school when I wasn’t that successful, just to experience what I am now. It’s super special.”
Saturday
Women’s NCAA Division III Final Four
At Oosting Gymnasium in Hartford, Conn.
5 p.m.: Christopher Newport (30-0) vs. Rhode Island College (28-3)
7:30 p.m.: Transylvania (31-0) vs. Smith College (30-1)
Livestream: NCAA.com
