Iowa City Regina plays for state football title with group of seniors who couldn’t win at first

CEDAR RAPIDS - They weren’t very good. You hate to say it this way, but honestly they were pretty bad.

Which makes you feel good for the 14 seniors listed on the roster of this Iowa City Regina football team. The Regals play West Lyon for the Class 1A state championship Friday at the UNI-Dome in Cedar Falls (4 p.m. kickoff).

Sure, Regina has a lot of talented underclassmen who play significant roles, but do not discount the importance of the seniors. These perseverant seniors.

Success did not come immediately.

“They went from literally not winning a ballgame in middle school to this,” said Regina head coach Dustin Elsbury. “Just continued to work and trust the process, so they went from that to being 9-2 as juniors and this year being 12-0. The last two years they’ve been 21-2. I don’t know, that’s just really cool to me. That goes to show that hard work pays off over time if you stick together.”

This senior group did stick together, stuck with football despite getting no positive results initially. Quarterback Kyle Tracy recalled Regina being 1-11 combined his seventh-grade and eighth-grade years.

Most of those losses were true beatings.

“We lost most of those games by, like 40,” Tracy said with a chuckle. “I don’t think many of us at that age would have thought that we’d be here at this point. Football wasn’t a lot of fun. I would credit it to the other grades around us and the coaching that we have. Just to encourage us to keep going, right? There are a lot of people in our grade that love football, but it’s hard to love when you’re losing by 50 every week.”

“You wouldn’t believe how small we were as junior high kids,” said Regina senior wide receiver-defensive back Drew Greve. “We were always kind of a smaller group, so that made it tougher, especially in football. We were OK in track and basketball, but football was always tough because we were just so small. We didn’t have a lot of line guys. Our grade has always been more of a skilled-group type of football players.”

Which melded together perfectly with the physically larger junior and sophomore classes.

“One of the things that Regina does is the junior high runs exactly the same base offense and defense as varsity. It gets you right up to speed so when you do get to varsity, you’re ready,” Greve said. “We played hard but obviously weren’t very good. That’s OK, seeing where that took us now. It was just buying in. We’ve got 14 (seniors) now, and I think we had 16 back then. A lot of the guys stuck it out, stayed with it. Just a close, tight-knit group, and I think that helps.”

Regina ended Grundy Center’s amazing 50-game win streak in last week’s semifinals, 31-12. The Spartans were 1A champions last year and the year before, and Class A winners in 2022.

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Now Regina faces West Lyon, which won the Class 2A title last season. Some reward.

“I think it’s a flip of a coin as far as who to face, who is better between West Lyon and Grundy,” Elsbury said. “All four teams that made the Dome (were good), even South Hardin battled with West Lyon in the semis for a long time. So I think all four of these teams do it the right way, are disciplined and physical. At this point, it just comes down to having a great week of preparation, going out and executing.”

Elsbury said West Lyon is a much larger team physically than Grundy Center and will seek to establish its running game. The Wildcats have two-time all-state offensive lineman Bryce Kock (6-foot-6, 290 pounds) up front, as well as Jerrence Knoblock, who has an offer from Iowa State.

“They have championship DNA,” Greve said. “They won it last year, they’re coming down a class. I’m sure they have a lot of confidence. They’re a big team, but we have a great scheme in place, and if all of us do our jobs offensively and defensively, I don’t see a reason why this won’t be a tight game, and that at the end of the day we can get the result that we want.”

Elsbury said he felt his team maybe played with some jitters last week, that the environment might have gotten to them a bit. He is confident those will go away Friday.

And he’ll lean on those aformentioned seniors to make sure of that.

“I credit it to Coach Elsbury’s culture,” Tracy said. “Everybody buying in and wanting to be a part and wanting to do your part in making something bigger than yourself.”

“This was our end goal all along,” Elsbury said. “We kind of make season goals at the beginning of the year, and when we sat in our team film room at the beginning of the year, there was no doubt in the room that they wanted to be state champions.”

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