{"id":70223,"date":"2016-10-13T19:27:29","date_gmt":"2016-10-14T01:27:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/lady-panthers-battle-with-bayfield\/"},"modified":"2016-10-14T01:27:29","modified_gmt":"2016-10-14T01:27:29","slug":"lady-panthers-battle-with-bayfield","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/lady-panthers-battle-with-bayfield\/","title":{"rendered":"Lady Panthers battle with Bayfield"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"Danielle
Danielle McDonald connects with the ball as her teammates look on Tuesday night against Bayfield.<\/span>Sam Green\/The Journal<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

It would\u2019ve been easy for the Montezuma-Cortez volleyball team to play timid against the Bayfield Wolverines.<\/p>\n

It would\u2019ve been understandable as well.<\/p>\n

Bayfield was ranked No. 7 in the state in CHSAANow\u2019s latest ranking, and power hitters like Maddi Foutz and Jade Pascale scattered violent spikes across the floor on Tuesday in Cortez.<\/p>\n

They had their fair share of impressive kills en route to a 3-0 sweep (25-17, 25-19, 25-18), but the Lady Panthers didn\u2019t roll over.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur plan was to attack and go at them,\u201d said M-CHS head coach Dave Robinson. \u201cThey are a great team. They really are. But I feel like when we decided mentally to play with them, we were playing with them. But then we would lose our focus, we\u2019d lose a pass or what have you and it would cost us a little bit.\u201d<\/p>\n

Danielle McDonald and Aryelle Wright challenged the Wolverines at the net to come up with blocks and kills for M-CHS, and Rylee Lindsley and Skylar Robinson dove to the floor to dig out balls.<\/p>\n

And then there was Tyra Pinnecoose, who showed off a difficult-to-return serve to tally four aces.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s called a float serve,\u201d Robinson explained. \u201cIt\u2019s like a knuckleball in baseball. The ball floats a different way each time, so if she aims middle of the court it doesn\u2019t necessarily mean its going to stay in the middle of the court. That\u2019s one of the hardest serves to try to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Panthers were swept by the Wolverines earlier this season at the Bayfield tri meet. And while Robinson said he actually thought his team played better against them in the first meeting, he still saw positives the second go-round.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey didn\u2019t let balls die, as a team,\u201d he said. \u201cWhich is really our focus right now. It\u2019s not worrying about the individual, it\u2019s worrying about the team. And the girls that are out on the court, I truly believe [they] believe that. We were working as a group of six.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now 6-12 on the year and 2-5 in the Intermountain League, the Lady Panthers will host Pagosa Springs (13-2, 6-1 IML) and Alamosa (12-5, 5-2 (IML) on Saturday for a tri meet before finishing out the regular season at Durango (7-7, 3-2 Southwestern League) on Tuesday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No. 7 ranked Wolverines too much for Montezuma-Cortez<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":70224,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[21],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-70223","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-cortez"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70223"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70223\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/70224"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70223"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=70223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}