REGIONAL — While the Ely boys put a massive 70-point beatdown at home against Mesabi East last week, 93-23, Monday’s 72-54 road loss to No. 2-ranked Cherry was more impressive than the final score indicated.
Teams playing Cherry have come to dread “the run,” that moment when the Tigers go on a sudden scoring spree to break a close game wide open, and they needed two of those on Tuesday to put away the scrappy Wolves.
Ely got on the board first when Wyatt Tedrick took a lob pass down low and scored the bucket, and he followed that up with a three ball to give the Wolves a 5-0 lead. When Cherry went ahead 10-7, Jack Davies tossed in a shot from well behind the arc to knot the score. Another trey by Tedrick and a basket by Drew Johnson erased a five-point Cherry lead and tied the score at 18-18.
Ely took the lead again, 21-18, on a triple by Grant Chittum, and the Wolves trailed by only one, 24-23, with about four minutes left in the half.
And then came “the run,” episode one. Using long balls, fast breaks, and strong inside play while stifling Ely’s offense, the Tigers reeled off 15 unanswered points to take a commanding 39-23 lead. A Leo McKrahl bucket right before the buzzer left Ely staring at a 14-point deficit at the half.
Mounting a comeback on the home court of a team ranked No. 1 in Class A for the first two weeks of the season was going to be tough, but the Wolves didn’t shy away from the attempt. As he did in the first half, Tedrick got Ely rolling with a pair of baskets, and two charities by Drew Johnson cut the lead to ten at 41-31. A pair of Davies free throws at the 6:17 mark got the deficit down to single digits at 53-44, but a devastating 16-1 Cherry run squashed any hope of a comeback. But the Wolves played last year’s state tournament runner-up to within four in the second half, losing by a total of 18 points.
Johnson led the Wolves in scoring with 16, Wyatt Tedrick had 14, and Jack Davies had 12.
“I thought we played well against a very good team,” Head Coach Tom McDonald said. “They made two runs on us, one at the end of the first half and then after we cut the lead to nine. We had some bad possessions, they got some run outs on us, and we lost any momentum that we gained. They play such physical defense that it just wore us down physically and mentally at the end of each half.”
And while the Wolves struggled on offense, forced into taking more treys than twos, McDonald was pleased with the team’s defensive play.
“Our defensive effort was very good, and I thought we rebounded well,” he said. “I think it proved to our guys that we can play with the best teams for most of the game. We will just need to put all 36 minutes together against the teams in the upper level of our section.”

Mesabi East
Friday’s monstrous 70-point win over the Giants wasn’t something Ely fans are unfamiliar with. Last year, they watched their Wolves destroy Floodwood 110-36 and Lake of the Woods 108-36. What they saw against Mesabi East was more of the same: the same intensity, the same execution, the same focus on playing the only way they know how, leaving everything on the floor.
Davies was deadly from beyond the arc early, hitting three in the first seven minutes to stake Ely to a 13-4 lead. Ely’s zone defense was virtually impenetrable as they led by 43 at the break, 53-10.
The Wolves held Mesabi East scoreless on their first eight possessions of the second half as they built a 66-10 lead, and a McKrahl bucket at the 10:13 mark upped the margin to 78-17. Had McDonald elected to keep playing his starting rotation, the century mark was definitely in range, but the bench got some valuable minutes toward the end that could prove useful if and when the Wolves need some additional depth.
Of note in this game was the Ely press, which helped the Wolves race to their big leads after the ball started dropping on offense.
“I think we’re going to live off that press this year because we’re not very tall and we’re pretty athletic,” McDonald said. “We couldn’t press early because we were having trouble scoring. But once we started scoring, we could turn them over and got some easy baskets there in the first half.”
Davies led the team with 28 points, with Johnson close behind with 23. Tedrick tallied 12 as the Wolves put ten players in the scoring column.
The Wolves were scheduled to slide into the winter break with road trips to North Woods on Thursday and Cook County on Friday. They’ll have home games against Two Harbors and Cook County on Dec. 29-30 to wrap up the 2025 portion of their schedule.