SAN FRANCISCO >> The Clear Lake Cardinals came down with a case of the Urban Blues on Wednesday night during a North Coast Section Division V semifinal-round girls basketball game in San Francisco.
No. 4 seed Urban (13-16) beat Clear Lake 61-51 and will advance to the Division V finals against No. 2 seed St. Bernard (19-8) of Eureka, a 64-40 winner over No. 3 seed International (24-5) in Wednesday’s other semifinal. The championship game takes place 7 p.m. on Saturday in Eureka.
“That’s a team we can beat, we just didn’t do it,” Clear Lake coach Kory Reynolds said. “We just didn’t execute on either end of the floor.”
Clear Lake (20-10) was gunning for a third straight playoff victory after beating Holy Names of Oakland 61-28 in the first round and Upper Lake 48-40 in the quarterfinals of the Division V tournament. The Cardinals, the last public high school in the mix as the No. 8 seed, might not be finished just yet as they could receive an at-large berth into the NorCal Division V playoffs on Sunday. The NorCals open on Tuesday.
“We’ll just have to wait for Sunday to see,” Reynolds said. “The girls still want to play and I still want to coach them.”
The Cardinals got off to a good start against Urban and led 19-16 after one quarter only to watch the Blues outscore them 24-10 in the second quarter for a 40-29 halftime lead. Clear Lake cut it to six — 51-45 — after three quarters but it was never a one-possession game down the stretch. The Blues sealed the victory late by hitting two 3-pointers.
“We’ve never done that before,” Reynolds said of his defense allowing 40 first-half points and a season-high 61 points. “We didn’t play very good defense. We were really flat-footed and I’m not sure why. We were anticipating what they were going to do instead of just playing defense.”
The Cardinals also struggled on offense with the exception of junior Valerie Hutton who lit up the Blues for 25 points, including a pair of 3-pointers.
“Valerie did a real good job, kept going to the basket, but she can do it all by herself,” Reynolds said.
Clear Lake had several mini-spurts of offense, most of them provided by Hutton, but never went on a sustained run, according to Reynolds.
“That’s where we needed someone else to step up and do something,” Reynolds said.
Kortnie Reynolds added eight points in the loss and Camille Donald contributed seven more.
