Finally getting 'it', St. Edward set for sectional battle
"It" can be elusive.
Against a 2008-09 boys basketball schedule heavy on Class 3A and 4A competition, Class 2A St. Edward simply couldn't find "it." The Green Wave finished the regular season with a record of 9-18.
"We (coaches) talk about kids who get it or don't get it," St. Edward coach Keith Chuipek said last Friday. "And I don't know what it is, but some of our kids didn't have it during the season."
When the Class 2A tournament opened last week, the Green Wave finally found it. The No. 4 seed smoked No. 5 Amboy in a play-in game, stunned top-seeded Genoa-Kingston (17-10) on its home floor in a semifinal, then knocked off two-time regional champion Aurora Christian (14-13) to win its first regional title since 2003.
"I don't know what it is, but we have it right now," Chuipek said on Friday as his team cut down the net.
St. Edward senior guard Josh Dix tried to put a finger on it.
"We're playing more as a team," Dix said. "We're not yelling at each other. If someone gets beat, we're helping him out. We're taking charges. Our main thing is that our rebounding is most improved, our boxing out.
"I think right now it's a sense of pride. We have it and we don't want to lose it."
St. Edward (12-18) will try to keep it going Wednesday against Rockford Lutheran (18-14) in a Class 2A Plano sectional semifinal at 7:30 p.m. A live webcast of the game can be viewed at reapernation.com.
"Rockford Lutheran is a good team, but everyone is tough when you get to the sectional," Chuipek said. "I think we match up pretty well, and I think we'll be able to compete with them."
The Crusaders finished tied with Genoa-Kingston for second place in the Big Northern Conference-West. The winner of tonight's semifinal will advance to Friday's sectional final at 7:30 p.m. Unbeaten Winnebago (29-0), champion of the Big Northern-West, beat Morrison 57-45 in the first semifinal at Plano on Tuesday.
Of the 1,474 points St. Edward has scored this season, 558 have come via 3-pointers (37.9 percent). St. Edward bombed away from 3-point range in the regional tournament. In 3 games the Wave sank 26-of-56 shots from 3-point range (38.5 percent), led by seniors Riley Coleman (10), Steve Martin (6) and Josh Dix (5) and junior Phil Johnson (4).
"We've got four real good shooters and we're all around 40 percent," Coleman said. "I don't know how to describe it. We're just feeling confident and feeling good about our shots."
Coleman has also developed into the team's best defender. In the regional title game against Aurora Christian, the 6-foot-3 guard held Eagles leading scorer Nate Hill to 2 points.
The heady feeling of winning a regional is a far cry from the sinking feeling the team experienced after finishing 1-4 against mostly Class 4A competition at the Jacobs Holiday Tournament in December.
"When we came out of that Jacobs tournament who would have thought we'd win a regional and go on to a sectional against a team we can probably play with?" Chuipek said. "The whole purpose of playing those bigger schools was to prepare for this. I think teams take us a little lightly when they see our record.
"A couple of the kids from Genoa-Kingston came up to me after we won and said, 'Coach, you have a super team. We really took you lightly based on your record.' Then I told them the teams we've played. It's good to go up against those teams because it prepared us for exactly this."