Lady Hawks volleyball gets first win of the year last week

Matt Unrau

If the Lady Hawks volleyball season finishes off at all like their individual matches have played out it wouldn’t be too far fetched to see the Lady Hawks hosting the state trophy this year.

Thompson Falls rarely plays up to their potential early in a match, and all too often finds themselves in a hole that they then must dig themselves out of. Senior Karli Cavill credits it to the team’s nerves, which she says will likely disappear with more wins.

The season hole that they had dug themselves in was five straight losses to open the season before the team finally broke through last Tuesday with a five-game marathon win over Florence.

“It’s huge. It feels so good,” says Cavill. “We can relax now. It’s a confidence booster.”

The confidence is likely to help the freshmen on the team the most and other inexperienced varsity players in which Cavill sees a lot of improvement from the beginning of the season.

“We’ve improved on, really everything. Our team chemistry is coming along because we have a lot of young players…our passing is coming along and we’re hitting harder,” says Cavill.

Despite the early week win, the Lady Hawks then had two straight non conference matches against two extremely tough opponents in A-school Polson and Deer Lodge.

Thompson Falls played Polson on Thursday at home and found themselves struggling against the taller players for Polson who blocked many of the Lady Hawk kills and found gaps in the defense to gather many kills of their own.

After a rough first game that saw the Lady Hawks lose 25-11, the second game was better, but still found the big front line of Polson dominating the action as the closest the score was in the game was 2-1.

However, as was typical for the Lady Hawks they finally came alive in the third game as they began to return the favor as they blocked many of Polson’s attempted kills at the net behind strong play of Hope Reid and Kelsey Fitchett. At the same time many of their kills started finding their way through the hands of the Polson players.

Thompson Falls found themselves closing in on Polson as they brought the score to 16-20. However, the two teams traded rallies with Polson getting the necessary five points for a final score of 25-20 Polson.

Kyla Molzhon had six kills and seven digs in the match. Reid and Fitchett both had two blocks in the match.

On Saturday, Thompson Falls fell to Deer Lodge with scores of 17-25, 20-25 and 11-25.

The JV squad fell to Loyola and Eureka last week. Reid had nine kills and five blocks against Eureka and had three kills and two aces against Loyola. Allison Vaught also chipped in 17 digs and 8 assists against Eureka.

Editor Matt Unrau can be emailed at editor@VP-MI.com