Lady Tigers take shot at Pronghorns

Even after Friday’s win against Farson-Eden, Encampment’s Lady Tigers took in a three-game losing cat-fight Saturday against a different team of Lady Panthers, who hailed from Cokeville this time.

The Lady Tigers are still doing well in the state, with season records of 15-6-1 (non-conference) and 6-2-0 (conference), but they lost against their fellow southwest conference cats with 13-25, 18-25 and 13-25. Encampment did, however, win Friday’s match against Farson-Eden with 25-21, 25-22 and 25-16, marking their third match victory against the Lady Pronghorns.

Coach Robin O’Leary said Cokeville was one of the harder teams they had to play this season.

“Cokeville places at state every year and is just a great team,” she said. “I think we needed to start out stronger than we did. We kind of started out slow, and then throughout the second and third game we came on a little stronger. Then we just got tight.”

O’Leary said the team tends to get nervous and tense when faced with a hard team.

“When we play hard teams with hard hitters and hard servers, we kind of tend to get really tense, and then we don’t play as well as we do when we’re relaxed,” she said. “We just need to try and work on staying relaxed against hard hits and hard serves. However, I think they stayed focused and rebounded from some difficult things really well, and they didn’t let things get in their way.”

Senior middle-hitter Kaylyn Wessel said they could have worked on serves received, but that there were plenty of things done well enough during the game.

“I think serves received was probably our biggest thing that we had a problem with, but we did well at getting better and working together, as well as getting our momentum up,” she said. “We didn’t start off the best, but we definitely ended more as a team. There’s always something for us to work on and we can always get better, so I would never say that we’re at our best because you can always get better.”

Before regionals and state begin, the Lady Tigers have two home games this weekend. They play Little Snake River at 4 p.m. Friday, and HEM at 12 p.m. Saturday.

O’Leary hopes the girls can score at least one more conference win out of their next two games.

“Next Friday we play Baggs here, and it will be our ‘parents night,’” she said. “We still need one more conference win to guarantee that we’re not in the pigtail game.”

West regionals this year are set for Oct. 25-26 in Lander, and the state tournament is Oct. 31-Nov. 1 in Casper.