IOWA CITY, Iowa – One down. Five to go.

It took longer than expected for the No. 1 seed Iowa women’s basketball team to assert its dominance against Holy Cross on Saturday.

But after a sloppy first quarter in which Iowa only led by two points, Caitlin Clark and her cohorts started clicking in the second quarter and would go to win 91-65 in the first round of the NCAA Tournament at sold out Carver-Hawkeye Arena.

Clark struggled with her shooting, but the 6-foot senior from West Des Moines still finished with 27 points, 10 assists, eight rebounds and three steals.

Iowa hadn’t played a game for nearly two weeks, and that could have contributed to the slow start.

But Holy Cross also was aggressive on both ends of the court to begin the game.

“I thought they made a lot of shots. I thought they competed really well,” Clark said of Holy Cross on the ABC post-game interview. “You’ve got to give credit to them. I don’t know if we played our best basketball there, obviously, a little rust.

“I thought we could have just executed our offense a little bit better. But I thought we responded really well. We always had an answer.”

Iowa (30-4) will face West Virginia in the second round on Monday at Carver-Hawkeye Arena.

West Virginia defeated Princeton 63-53 in the other first-round game that was played Saturday at Carver-Hawkeye Arena.

Monday’s game will be the final appearance at Carver-Hawkeye Arena for Clark, and for teammates Kate Martin and Gabbie Marshall.

Martin scored 15 points and grabbed 14 rebounds in Saturday’s victory.

Iowa is on a much-anticipated mission to improve on what it accomplished in last year’s NCAA Tournament.

However, that would take winning the national championship for the first time in program history as Iowa finished as the NCAA runner-up in 2023.

It also would take winning six games to go where no Iowa team has gone before in the NCAA Tournament, and victory No. 1 is now in the books.

Iowa made 8-of-16 shots from 3-point range in the first half and led 48-30 at halftime.

Clark led Iowa with 13 points in the first half, but she only made one field-goal attempt and also had six of Iowa’s nine turnovers in the half.