Lady Hawks lose tough match at home

Matt Unrau

After losing their first two games, the Thompson Falls Lady Hawks were on the verge of an improbable comeback that would give them their first win of the season at home on Friday night.

It was 12-12 in the fifth game with each team refusing to allow the other to break through trading points back and forth with the Lady Hawks usually gaining the lead first with Eureka tying them seconds later on the rally scoring. But, just when it looked like they were going to break through Eureka rattled off three consecutive points to finish the game and win the match 3-2 causing senior Kyla Molzhon to crouch down to the floor holding her head in her hands.

After the match she remained positive about her team despite the emotional loss. “We’re strong,” says Molzhon. “We’re really small in height and numbers, but we’re coming along.”

Molzhon echoes these sentiments more so than the rest of the team as she routinely leads her team in kills, but is the second shortest player standing at 5 feet and 5 inches. Molzhon had 28 of her team’s 64 kills.

The senior also led her team in digs with 35 of her team’s 99 total. This included several remarkeable diving digs, which prompted the Eureka coaches to exclaim, “wow, that was beautiful.”

The Lady Hawks lost with scores of 19-25, 21-25, 25-22, 25-18 and 12-15. However, the team can take away a lot from this tough loss by rallying around the fact that they never gave up and showed tremendous grit to even bring the match to five games. “We can do it,” says Molzhon. “We lost five games in a row and we played pretty hard ones. We can battle.”

Despite their winless start stretching to 0-4 in conference and 0-5 overall Thompson Falls saw great improvement in their freshman class as Hope Reid shared the lead in blocks with Jessica Wadsworth at 2 and tallied five kills of her own. With Reid and fellow freshmen Kelsey Fitchett and Allison Vaught improving with each game, the fortunes for the Lady Hawks may be drastically different in the future.

Molzhon for one still hopes to make it to the divisonal tournament. Last year the Lady Hawks placed third in the divisional tournament barely missing out on the state meet.