Lady Panthers lose to Granite, Lincoln

The Alberton Panthers finished out

their season in district play this last weekend with games against

Granite and Lincoln.

The girls started play on Friday with a

game against Granite, a team they’d played earlier in the season.

Coach Rachel Clevenger felt that the girls handled the game pretty

good and said that they played Granite closer in terms of

points.

“We played them closer than we ever

had,” Clevenger said.

The team lost the match 3-0. Clevenger

said that the Panthers didn’t serve particularly well against

Granite, though some girls served a few aces against the fierce

team.

“Our serving wasn’t there and we

weren’t very quick to get things on the floor,” Clevenger said.

“Our passing struggled. I was surprised with some of the attacks we

got off the pass considering our passing wasn’t that great.”

She said that overall defense coverage

was better, but still lacked.

After losing to Granite, a team who

wound up second in districts, the girls moved on to play

Lincoln.

“We lost in three,” Clevenger said. “We

did not serve well, we had very few kills and again our passing

wasn’t there. We had hardly any digs.”

The Panthers lost to Lincoln 25-14,

25-10 and 25-16. Clevenger said that she believes the girls were

wore out from the day and also the four games in six days from the

prior weekend still was taking a toll.

“It was a long day and they were just

kind of tired,” Clevenger said.

Alberton had 10 kills, three blocks, 19

digs, nine assists and six aces during the match against

Lincoln.

Clevenger said that overall it was a

hard season for the girls who lost most of the games they played.

She said at times the girls were frustrated.

“After you lose several games in a row,

you can kind of just go ‘uh,’” Clevenger said. “They saw what was

in front of them and they were playing some really good teams.”

Clevenger said that despite the long

season that was filled with losses rather than victories she said

she was proud of the girls for giving each game an attempt.

“They were good about sticking with

it,” she said. “We talked a lot about working hard, coming out not

and giving up. In the end there we really struggled, and I thought

they did come out. It was a long haul right at the end of the

season and they stuck with it.”

Next year, the team is losing all the

seniors it has. Clevenger said the team will have one junior, about

seven sophomores, plus the freshman.

“We’re going to be super young next

year and I think we’re going to struggle,” Clevenger said. “The

biggest thing is going to be to try and improve skills. They’ll

know the type of offense I run and defense and it will just be

slowly getting them to be quicker and learn how to read

situations.”

Clevenger said that next season they’ll

be playing a lot of the same girls on the teams they saw this

year.

As for accomplishing the goals that the

team set forth at the beginning of the season, Clevenger said that

they didn’t really improve each game as they had hoped.

“Our serving sort of stayed the same

all year and our passing really hurt us and part of that is

quickness and reading the situation,” Clevenger said. “We struggled

on defense and we really only had some good attempts at hits.”

Clevenger said that the team did have

some bright moments. She said that it seemed that in tournament

play there were times where the girls played teams like Drummond

13-15 and split games with others.

“There were different times we played

well,” Clevenger said, “and things were clicking. But in the longer

games it seemed like we couldn’t hang with it.”