YAKIMA — Five days ago, the Rainier Mountaineers were perched atop a mountain they hadn’t scaled in 27 years, sweeping Toutle Lake to hoist the District 4 2B Tournament championship trophy.
Fast forward to Thursday morning, and it’s the Ducks who got the last laugh.
The Central 2B League rivals met once again, this time in Yakima for the right to hoist a trophy at the 2B State Tournament. Rainier, just 10 and a half hours removed from a heartbreaking defeat in the quarterfinals to Northwest Christian (Colbert), looked flat against a Ducks team booming with energy and defensive tenacity. Toutle Lake’s 3-1 win booted Rainier out of the state tournament, sending the Mountaineers home without a trophy.
“Of course it’s going to be a little tough, but I’m still OK with where we ended up,” Rainier head coach Carrie Ooms said. “A lot of people didn’t even expect us to make it as far through districts as we did, let alone make it to state again because we lost such important players last year. It was a little tough coming in as the number one seed, but I believed in the girls.”
Rainier’s unforced errors from its two games Wednesday trickled back on Thursday, and even when the Mountaineers’ hitters got a clean look to attack, Toutle Lake’s defense was impenetrable.
Allyson Ooms and Lexi Beckman were key to putting the Mountaineers in position to win the first set until Toutle Lake broke the deadlock and pulled away by scoring six of the final eight points.
The Ducks flexed their muscles in the second set and put Rainier on the brink of elimination with a 25-20 win. Once again, with their backs against the wall, the Mountaineers found a spark against the Ducks, similar to their comeback from down 10 in the second set of the title match last weekend. Rainier at one point trailed by as many as six in the third set Thursday before wrestling back to within a point.
With Toutle Lake leading 23-21 late in the third, the Mountaineers, led by Courtney Eckroth and Beckman, scored four in a row to extend the match and their season by another set.
In the end, Rainier ran out of gas. The Ducks broke a 15-15 tie with a 10-1 sprint to put the game away in the fourth.
Under the leadership of All-C2BL first teamers Lainey Dean and Kendal Dean, Toutle Lake outplayed Rainier in just about every spot on the court not just during the final dash to the finish line, but throughout the contest. In doing so, the Ducks stood alone as the only C2BL team to walk away from the state tournament with a trophy as they later defeated Tonasket in five to place fifth.
As for Rainier, a dream season ended far sooner than the Mountaineers expected with a final mark of 17-6. Plowman, Katelyn Eckroth and Liberty Adair graduate, but the program still returns a core that includes league MVP Allyson Ooms and key contributors Courtney Eckroth, Lexi Beckman and Ellie Pringle.
“We come back with experience but we’ll still be young. Hopefully we’ll still be able to do pretty well,” Carrie Ooms said, previewing next year’s team.
