Streamwood's size too much for Dundee-Crown

The Streamwood girls basketball team's 54-32 victory over Dundee-Crown in Tuesday's Class 4A Cary-Grove regional semifinal was truly a tale of the tape.

No. 2 Streamwood (12-16) held a distinct advantage in the paint against No. 3 Dundee-Crown (2-26) with the likes of junior center Michelle Tomczak (6-foot-3), senior Melissa Oehlerking (6-1) and junior Emma Schmidt (5-11).

"Height has given us problems all year," said D-C coach Michelle Russell, whose tallest starter Tuesday was senior Danna Janson (6-0). "We tried to get it inside, but they definitely took advantage of our height disadvantage."

Oehlerking finished with 14 points and 11 rebounds, Tomczak had 14 points and 6 rebounds and Schmidt posted 12 points to go with 9 boards.

"They were really small," Oehlerking said. "We heard them talking about (the height differential) before the game, which felt pretty good."

The Sabres won their sixth straight game to advance to Thursday's 7:30 p.m. regional title game against Cary-Grove (25-3). The Trojans defeated Streamwood twice this season: 58-31 on Nov. 23 and 56-41 on Dec. 22. It will mark Streamwood's first appearance in a regional title game since the 1998-99 season.

"Our focus was to get the ball inside," Sabres coach George Rosner said of the win over the Chargers. "They had one big player and we had three, so I thought if we could get it inside we'd be OK. Our defense kept us in it the first half."

Streamwood held the Chargers to 6 points in each of the first three quarters on 7-of-30 shooting. The lion's share of those rebounds went to taller Streamwood, which finished the game with a 35-23 advantage on the boards.

"That's always a great aspect of our game," Tomczak said. "We started off slowly, but we eventually got our offense going."

Sophomore guard Ali Sanders led Dundee-Crown with 11 points, including 7 free throws in 8 attempts. No other Chargers were able to contribute more than 4 points.

"Overall, I think the team made a lot of improvements and reached a lot of goals, but the win category was not one of them," Russell said. "The girls definitely did a nice job, but we just had trouble scoring throughout the season."