Belle Plaine’s first trip to state a short one

DES MOINES - Stats sheets were handed out to Belle Plaine players and coaches as they entered the Wells Fargo Arena media room Monday afternoon.

Everyone looked intently at the numbers. They weren't pretty.

At least not pretty enough to advance. An 18-0 run in the second quarter allowed Earlham to rally past the Plainsmen, 63-50, in a Class 1A state basketball tournament quarterfinal.

Belle Plaine's historical season is over but won't long be forgotten. The school won the South Iowa Cedar League for the first time in 39 years and played basketball on the state stage for the first time ever.

'Absolutely incredible,” said Belle Plaine's Jacob Ehlen. 'No real words to describe it. Blessed to be here.”

'It's the old saying ‘Don't be sad it's over, be happy it happened,'” Belle Plaine Coach Justin Northrop said. 'We were just looking at the (participation) trophy in the locker room. There have been some great athletes come through our school ... It's a pretty big deal taking some hardware home.”

Belle Plaine (24-2) had an 18-11 lead early in the second quarter after Ehlen splashed a 3-pointer, but it went sour from there. Earlham (24-2) called timeout, regrouped and scored the next five points to force Northrop to burn a timeout of his own.

That's didn't stop the damage. Dan Schmidt came out of seemingly nowhere off the bench to nail three 3s and score 12 first-half points to give Earlham, also making its state tourney debut, a 29-22 lead at the break.

Belle Plaine packed in its 2-3 zone defense as tight as you could get in attempt to negate beefy 6-foot-4 forward Canyon 'Moose” Hopkins. That left guys like Schmidt - who did come in averaging 9.6 points - wide open outside the circle.

'They hit a lot of shots on us,” said Belle Plaine's Justin Jacobi. 'They were just raining them down on us, and it was like ‘Whoa.' We got into a deeper and deeper hole.”

'We knew they were going to play zone, but we weren't sure how packed in they were going to be,” said Schmidt. 'Looking around, we were open, and we had to knock them down. You have to take those shots.”

Earlham seemed to be get more and comfortable offensively as the game wore on, with crisp ball movement around the perimter and inside to Hopkins.

'One of their guys that comes off the bench that you don't expect (to hit shots),” Northrop said. 'You've got to protect against those fringe guys. I think he hit 3 in a row there.”

Belle Plaine also had a tough time negotiating through a trapping three-quarters court defense that Earlham slapped on it during its telltale run. The Cardinals led by as many as 14 points in the fourth quarter, with BP making one final push late that cut it to eight.

But Jacobi traveled making an inside move, and Hopkins came back with a couple of interior hoops that made it 57-45 with 2:58 left.

'That's kind of when I knew it was done,” Jacobi said.

Hopkins finished with 16 points, Schmidt and fellow guard Andy Algreen added 15 each. Jacobi had 14 points for Belle Plaine, with Ehlen adding 13 and Trey Squiers 10.

The Plainsmen shot just 38.3 percent from the field, with Northrop lamenting his club's inability to capitalize on several attempts in the lane.

'We talked all week about if we did what we were supposed to do and played our game, we'd be fine,” he said. 'We just had a bad stretch handling the basketball. Shooting it, we thought it might be a little rough in here ... but the ones you should make there from a foot, we just seemed to have a spurt there where we couldn't get it going.”

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