The University of Regina's women's basketball team registered an 82-65 victory over Calgary on Friday night that gave the Cougars a two-game sweep in a best-of-three Canada West semifinal series.
 
The win not only sends the Cougars into the Canada West title game next Friday against the Saskatchewan Huskies in Saskatoon, but also gives Regina one of the conference's two automatic berths to the 2019 U SPORTS Championship hosted two weekends from now by Ryerson University.
 
Regina never trailed in Friday's win and though they jumped out to a massive 28-10 lead in the first quarter, the Dinos got right back into it with a huge 15-0 run of their own. But the Cougars got the lead back up to 10 by halftime and outscored Calgary by a 21-12 margin in the fourth quarter to secure the victory.
 
"I thought all weekend when we needed to, we were able to respond and to sweep a nationally ranked team in their gym is extremely tough to do," Cougars head coach Dave Taylor said. "Obviously Kyanna Giles had a monster game and that was huge for us."
 
Giles was held to a season-low three points in Thursday's win, but exploded for a game-high 27 points on Friday while also piling up eight rebounds and five assists. Carolina Goncalves got the start for the second straight night and added 16 points for Regina, while Christina McCusker added 10 points and seven rebounds.
 
Katie Upham came off the bench to lead Calgary with 15 points.
 
The Cougars will now prepare to face Saskatchewan in the Canada West championship game for the fourth consecutive season. They'll be hoping to buck a trend that has seen the home team win the first three editions of this matchup, with Saskatchewan winning in both 2016 and 2017 in Saskatoon but the Cougars responding with a victory in Regina last season.
 
NOTES: The quarterfinal win over the Dinos is the third time in program history that the Cougars have won a best-of-three series on the road ... the two other times were in 1989 (Great Plains Athletic Conference final over Winnipeg) and 2015 (Canada West play-in series over Fraser Valley) ... the Cougars will be playing in their 13th Canada West championship game despite this only being their 18th season in the conference.