Pony spikers start strong in Lewistown

The Havre High volleyball team was looking to find out some things about itself this past weekend at the Eastern A Tip-Off tournament, and what the Blue Ponies discovered is that they have a promising season ahead of them.

The two-day tournament, which started last Friday, was held in Lewistown and featured all the teams that will compete at the end of the season in the Eastern A Super Divisional. On the first day, teams took part in pool play and after going winless in pool play Friday (0-2-2), Havre scored key wins Saturday over Livingston and Lewistown, before falling to Miles City and Hardin, which eliminated the Ponies.

“I have a very positive outlook,” HHS head coach Tamecia Jarvis said. “Friday, we didn’t play our best. But, I thought we really stepped it up Saturday. Those games that we did lose were pretty close and we had all fixable errors, like net calls or being out of rotation. We ended up hitting in the negative, so ... if we can fix some of those things, we should be in good shape.”

In pool play, each match consisted of just two games, which led HHS to finish with two ties. The first came against Laurel. Havre won the first game 20-14, but lost the second 20-18, which caused the result to be a tie.

Havre then took on Central A rival Belgrade and fell to the Panthers in consecutive games by the scores of 20-8 and 20-17. In the final two matches of pool play, Havre tied Miles City with the scores 20-14, 16-20 and then fell to Hardin in two games, 20-17 and 20-17.

Saturday, in tournament play, the matches were best-out-of-three, and Havre got out of the gate strongly with a two-game victory over Livingston by the score of 25-23 and 25-10. That got Havre into the next round against Lewistown and despite dropping the first game, 25-22, HHS rallied to take the match with 25-23 and 15-13 wins to close things out.

Havre took on Hardin in a rematch from Friday and the two teams, once again, played a very competitive match. This time, the Ponies jumped in front, winning the first game 25-20. However, the Bulldogs rallied, winning the second game 25-23 and the decisive third game 15-13. Following the loss to Hardin, HHS was eliminated in two games by Miles City, which defeated the Ponies 25-17 and 25-21.

“Those teams (Eastern A) that we played, were very good,” Jarvis said. “A lot of them have size and they are going to improve as the season goes along, so I think it’s going to be a very good conference.”

Havre finished the tournament with two wins, two ties and four losses. Yet, the matches were not regulation and will not count toward the regular season record. HHS will be back in action and will take on both Belgrade and Livingston Friday in Belgrade in a pair of Central A conference matches.

“This team is getting along and has great chemistry,” Jarvis said. “They are laughing and having fun on the bench and I think they are having fun on the court. I think that we can only go up from here by tweaking some of the mistakes we made. Our hitting wasn’t great. We had a lot of service errors and hitting errors, so if we can fix some things, I think we can be right there.”