Adna Wins Round 4 With Toutle, Clinches Trophy

YAKIMA — Wake-up call for the Adna volleyball team Friday morning came long before the sun was up, with team breakfast at the hotel coming bright and early at 6:05 a.m. By 7:05, the Pirates were on the bus to the Yakima Valley SunDome, for their 8 a.m. loser-out match against Toutle Lake.
And by 9:30, they guaranteed that their season would last just a few more precious hours, after downing the Ducks in four sets, 25-19, 19-25, 25-15, 25-21.
In so doing, Adna also guaranteed a bit more, playing its way back to the trophy round for the second fall in a row — something head coach Wendie Dotson and her staff reminded the girls of while they were still rubbing sleep from their eyes at the crack of dawn.
“We have not had back-to-back trophies, ever,” Dotson said. “This will be the first time we’ll have back-to-back trophies, which was an incentive for us.”
The Pirates’ early-morning assignment came against a side they know as well as anyone else, facing the Ducks for the fourth time this fall. Adna won the non-league version of the match in September, Toutle Lake came back to take a league clash in October, and the Pirates downed the Ducks in the District 4 third-place match last week.
But familiarity didn’t change anything for Dotson and her staff, going into a match that meant far more than the previous three combined.
“We watched them last night, and we thought we had a really good matchup with their blockers, but then they changed their lineups,” she said. “We just stuck with our gameplan.”

That gameplan saw Kendall Humphrey go off for 20 kills and 17 digs, pacing the attack at the net, while Danika Hallon had 20 kills.
But the offensive spark came from a bit of an unlikely source; after Toutle Lake tied the match up at a set apiece, it was setter Brooklyn Loose who showed up big-time in the kill column for the Pirates, racking up four of her six kills in an all-important win.
And from there, the Pirates cruised. After logging six hitting errors in each of the first two sets, Adna had just two in the third, and one in the fourth.
“They believed, and they encouraged each other,” Dotson said. “They did it on the court. We’re pretty non-excitable. We don’t really yell at them, I don’t think that really impacts them a lot. They really picked each other up.”
Loose also had 17 assists, with Gaby Guard racking up 26, and a team-best 20 digs.
Adna will face Lind-Ritzville-Sprague-Washtucna-Harrington in the fifth-place matchup to wrap up its run in Yakima.