Iowa City Regina out-Cascades Cascade

DES MOINES — It has been a season of trying to pound a square peg through a round hole.

One of the things first-year head coach Stu Ordman brought with him from Cedar Rapids Jefferson was a belief in playing man-to-man defense, almost exclusively. This went against everything Iowa City Regina's players had been taught before.

'We've really been struggling on defense this year, but I feel like we're just getting better and better,' said Regina's Drew Cook, after his team knocked off Cascade, 45-32, Tuesday morning in a Class 2A state basketball tournament quarterfinal at Wells Fargo Arena.

'Honestly, at the beginning of the year, we were horrible,' Ordman said, 'Then by the end of January, we were bad, so that was improvement. Now we're decent. I'm proud of them. They've come along.'

Regina (21-4), frankly, was better than decent defensively in avenging a loss from the regular season. The only semblance of consistent offense Cascade (22-3) had was 6-foot-7 center Devin Green, and the Regals didn't make it easy for him with constant double teams.

Green had half of his team's points (16), and if you take out his 7-for-11 performance from the field, Cascade shot an abysmal 23 percent. In this assumeed-from-the-beginning slog-it-out game, that wasn't nearly good enough.

'They were very tough defensively,' said Cascade Coach Al Marshall, whose 716 wins still do not include one in a state championship game. 'They really got out into the passing lanes, disrupted what we were trying to do offensively. Give them a lot of credit. I thought we were a little bit out of sorts, rushed a couple of things ... We picked a bad day to play a clunker.'

'We knew it was going to be smash mouth with them,' said Regina guard Nick Phillips. 'You see their scores, that they keep people in the 30s and 40s. But I thought if we could run our offensive sets the right way, we'd have a good chance.'

Phillips hit back-to-back 3-pointers late in the second quarter to help lift Regina to an 18-16 halftime lead. A 6-0 Regals run (mammoth in a game like this) pushed the lead to nine midway through the third quarter.

Iowa Hawkeyes football recruitCook did what he always does, which is perform on the big stage. He had a game-high 17 points and 14 rebounds, throwing in three assists and three blocks.

He also never left the floor.

'Cascade's a great team,' Cook said. 'We wanted to shut them down on defense and then be patient on offense. Try and get good looks every time. We knew they were fundamentally tough, patient. You almost have to play a perfect game to beat those guys.'

It wasn't necessarily perfect, but really good. Regina is in the semifinals for the first time since 1986 and gets an unexpected opponent Thursday afternoon at 3:45 in Pella Christian (17-7).

The Eagles upset second-ranked and second-seeded Western Christian, 70-69. That's a six seed versus a seven seed playing to get into the championship game.

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