The Harlan Cyclones girls basketball team completed a dream season by running the table, finishing with a 26-0 record and capturing the Class 4A State Championship on Saturday in Des Moines.

The Cyclones ended the ADM girls basketball team’s season in the regional semifinals with a blowout victory on February 21, but the teams played an entertaining regular season game. The Tigers lost by 18 at Harlan on January 10, but ADM did get within six points in the third quarter of that game, which is viewed by Tigers head coach Corey Schneider as a turning point to this past season.

That game showed the Tigers, who had limped to a 3-7 start to the year, could compete with anybody. ADM would then nearly defeat a ranked Carlisle team three days later, instead suffering its sixth straight loss. But the Tigers went 6-4 the rest of the the regular season, putting together some of their best basketball of the season at the right time.

With the high school girls basketball season now completely in the rear-view mirror (ADM had its post-season banquet on Sunday), head coach Corey Schneider talked with Raccoon Valley Radio about the 10-13 season that was.

“It was definitely up-and-down. I would have liked to see us be more consistent than we were, I think offensively especially,” Schneider said. “I thought defensively, for the most part – we had games where we weren’t very good defensively – but for the most part we were fairly consistent defensively, and so I was a little disappointed, especially early on.

“It wasn’t that we were losing, it was that we just weren’t playing very good basketball, especially on the offensive end. And so it was good to see us kind of flip the switch there in the second half and play better.”