Mundelein 75, Warren 67

It was an interesting week of practice as Mundelein prepared for Wednesday's Class 4A regional semifinal against Warren.

To get their guys to box out better against a team that blistered them on the boards less than two weeks ago, the Mundelein coaches decided that they needed to, well, think "out of the box."

So they brought in other coaches with rebounding expertise. They spent more time on rebounding than ever before.

And head coach Dick Knar and assistant Corey Knigge wore T-shirts with the words "BOX OUT" in giant letters so that the focus of the day was never far from anyone's thoughts.

The message seemed to resonate at the Libertyville regional.

The eighth-seeded Mustangs limited No. 9 Warren to just three putback baskets on the game. They also dictated the kind of high-octane tempo that they're most comfortable with. It added up to a 75-67 Mundelein victory that came in spite of a 36-point effort by Warren's Brandon Paul that tied his career high.

"I'm giving credit to Brian Evans, our girls coach (at Mundelein)," Knar said. "I said, 'Listen, you guys are tiny and you rebound well. What do you do?'

"So he came everyday to practice and worked with us on boxing out and being fundamentally sound defensively. We just worked more on rebounding and we preached it."

Knar said that at practice he went as far as to assign every coach in the gym to an individual player to monitor that the player was boxing out on every play.

"It made a huge difference tonight -- light years," Knar said. "They beat us soundly in the last game because they killed us on the boards."

Mundelein (18-11) will now face top-seeded Zion-Benton (27-3) in the Libertyville regional championship at 7:30 p.m. Friday.

The Mustangs, who got double figures from four players, including a team-high 21 points from Navjot Singh, will be shooting for their second straight regional title.

Mundelein also avenged their poor rebounding game against Warren in which they lost by 24 points.

"We took that personal and we just wanted it more this time," said Mundelein guard Eric Pagsanjan, who scored 16 points. " We were just embarrassed. We didn't want to lose like that ever again."

Warren, meanwhile, closes out the season with a 16-10 record.

Early exists are atypical for a Warren program that is a perennial power in Lake County. The Blue Devils have won regional titles in 11 of the last 13 years and last went without one in the 2002-03 season.

"It's very disappointing. I'm not going to sugarcoat it," Warren coach Chuck Ramsey said. "We just didn't do what we needed to do and that's more heightened during tournament season."

Ramsey pointed to the fact that his team struggled defensively, lost the turnover battle 22-13 and got beaten soundly at the free throw line partly because there wasn't enough action going to the basket.

Mundelein converted on 19 of 24 free throws while Warren got only 11 attempts and made 5.

For the Mustangs, Andy Rochon came up huge at the line. En route to 14 points on the night, he converted on all eight of his free throws, including six in the fourth quarter.

Mundelein was 13-of-15 from the line in the fourth quarter.

"We've been working on game situations a lot in practice and it's just having confidence," Rochon said of his free-throw shooting. "You just can't think too much about the shot, you just have to shoot it."

Mundelein was ahead at the end of each of the first three quarters, but only by as many as seven points.

Warren took a 58-57 lead midway through the fourth quarter after two Paul free throws, but then Mundelein answered with a 13-2 run to go up by 10 points with about a minute to play.

"They hit a lot of shots and we didn't put our hands up," said Paul, who also scored 36 points earlier this season against Oak Park-River Forest. Against Mundelein, he hit 16-of-26 shots. "We let too many people get open and let them have too many second-chance opportunities.

"I just feel bad that we weren't able to extend the season a little more for the seniors."

Warren's only other player in double figures was Jake Anderson. He had 10 points.

Mundelein also got 14 points from Ben Brust.