The Brownwood Lady Lions overcame a two-sets-to-none deficit but could not complete the comeback as the Granbury North Central Texas Academy Pioneers reeled off the final five points in the fifth-set tiebreaker to escape with a 25-20, 25-20, 22-25, 21-25, 15-12 victory Tuesday at Warren Gym.
“They played hard, and they’ve been playing hard all season, it’s just the same thing we’ve been struggling with all season,” said Lady Lions fourth-year head coach Allison Smith. “We play hard, we get some really good rallies, but we just can’t quite finish it. We’re executing at certain times, but not always at the most critical times.”
Aubrie Felux paced the Lady Lion attack with 13 kills followed by eight from Ibis Alvarado, seven from Hannah Deen, four each from Aniah Hines and Ava Choate, and three from Miranda Northcutt.
Felux also served a team-best five aces trailed by Deen, Choate and Kassidy Wooten with four apiece, and Alvarado – who also led Brownwood in assists – with three.
Defensively, Wooten logged 39 assists followed by Choate with 12, Alvarado with eight, Deen with seven, Molly Oliver with six, and Felux with one.
Hines chipped in two blocks while Choate, Northcutt and Deen were each credited with one.
Among the brightest spots of the night, Smith listed, “Our defense, our scrappiness, and we had some really good serves in crucial, hard places that we needed. But with that, we also missed a lot of serves, a lot of focus points where we just lost our focus and couldn’t quite get it back and let them go on too many runs.”
After dropping the first two sets, the Lady Lions displayed their resilience and shook off earlier mistakes to draw even in the third and fourth sets.
Brownwood overcame a slow start in the third set and took its first lead, 12-11, on an ace by Choate. The momentum see-sawed back and forth, but a hitting error by NCTA allowed the Lady Lions to grab a 24-22 edge. Wooten then served an ace to keep the match alive for the Lady Lions.
The fourth set saw Brownwood escape a 15-12 deficit and pull even at 20 on a hitting error by NCTA, followed by an ace from Felux that pushed the Lady Lions in front, 21-20. Knotted at 21, Brownwood tallied the last four points on a bit of confusion by NCTA, back-to-back aces from Deen and a kill by Wooten.
“The third and the fourth sets we executed, we did our jobs, and we eliminated our errors,” Smith said. “But we just couldn’t hang with it in the fifth set.”
The fifth set was a tale of momentum swings as Brownwood trailed 5-2, took an 8-5 edge, fell in a 10-9 hole, regained a 12-10 advantage, then surrendered the final five points of the match.
Though the Lady Lions have struggled to find the win column early in the season, Smith is pleased with the progress shown by a team that featured just one starter returning from a year ago.
“The girls are developing like crazy and I’m most pleased with our team chemistry,” Smith said. “I don’t think I’ve had a team as enthusiastic, as close and playing as a team as I have this year. I can’t speak highly enough about my seniors. The seniors in the past established that and because of that, because of the leadership from the past, my seniors this year have really taken that role and ran with it and that’s so crucial for a young team like this.”
The Lady Lions (2-7) will be back in action Friday and Saturday at the Peaster Showcase.
“It’s going to be hard,” Smith said. “I just want to see fight, the same thing we showed tonight, but I want to see us finishing and executing. The potential is there to be a very solid team this year, we just have to really dig deep and figure out how to limit those errors that are costing us.”
