CHILDRESS – The Guyer Lady Wildcats have had the recipe for a great volleyball team, which has allowed them to complete a remarkable turnaround from not winning a district game two years ago to going undefeated in district this year.

Guyer (35-8) also made its first postseason appearance but wasn’t able to find the right ingredients as its deep playoff run hit a wall Tuesday night at Childress High School. The Lady Wildcats lost to defending 4A state champion Dumas, 25-20, 27-25, 26-24.

Guyer’s trademark looseness and almost carefree approach was absent, and it cost the Lady Wildcats dearly.

“I just think we played really tight and never really let go,” said Guyer head coach Jennifer Bramlett. “Volleyball’s not a game that you can play really wound-up. You have to be loose and fluid and let it flow and play together, and I never really saw that. It almost looked mechanical tonight. I don’t want to say we played scared, but we just didn’t play our normal aggressive volleyball.”

In most of Guyer’s matches this season, it would build leads and show a killer instinct in closing, but that didn’t happen Tuesday.

The first two games saw Guyer take big leads early, leading 8-3 in Game 1 and 10-2 in Game 2 before Dumas (28-13) called timeouts and regrouped.

“As soon as something bad happened then that tightness creeped back in,” Bramlett said. “You just can’t play tight. I think we did a great job and it was a great season. I just think their [Dumas’] experience caught up with us.”

Dumas has 11 players that were on last year’s state-title team while Guyer had no playoff experience prior to this season.

Though the Demonettes’ best players on film were their middle blockers, Julie Causseaux and Alison Bonner, Bramlett said, another player stepped up big for Dumas as senior outside hitter Lindsey Miller finished with 14 kills.

Miller’s big night was set up by Dumas’ quick-set scheme where the ball is set right at the top of the net and the hitter kills the ball quickly before the opposing block can get fully set.

“A lot of that [Miller’s performance] is because we were blocking a lot of one-on-one because they were running the quick and that’s just part of volleyball,” Bramlett said. “It [quick set] opens up the outside hitters.”

Game 2 seemed to be the toughest to take for the Lady Wildcats. They led 10-2 before Dumas head coach Jack Wilson called a timeout and the Demonettes proceeded to go on a 10-2 run. Guyer had a game point at 24-23 before Miller had three straight kills to give Dumas a 2-0 game lead.

“I honestly don’t feel like it was Dumas that beat us,” said Bramlett, whose team committed nine service errors. “I feel like they did a great job of putting us in that position and finishing us off when they had that opportunity. But for the meat of the game, we’d get them, make a big run and we just let them string together too many points in a row.”

Guyer made its own big run in Game 3 after falling into a 20-11 hole before fighting back to a 24-24 tie, and Miller got her 14^th kill to send Dumas to the regional final to play the winner of Tuesday’s Aledo-Canyon Randall match.

The Lady Wildcats were led by seniors Erin Garvey, who finished with 10 kills, and Hannah Ingram, who had five kills and six blocks.

Junior Alyssa Hanley finished the night with six kills and 12 digs, and sophomore setter Kaylee Fifer had 20 assists, seven kills and seven digs.

Bramlett will have the majority of her team back next year, losing just three seniors (Garvey, Ingram and Syndi Sumners), but she said it’s not that cut and dried.

“I think that saying we’re only losing three [players] is quite an understatement because it’s a big three for us,” she said. “I really think we can attribute a lot of this season to those three because they showed us what leadership was about and that’s something that they will leave with our girls. They started a legacy, hopefully.”

Despite coming off her team’s first loss (not counting warm-up matches) since Sept. 14 against Mesquite Horn, it wasn’t too soon to reflect on a historic season for her program.

“We’d never made the playoffs and we made it to the regional semifinals,” she said. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of about that.”

ADAM BOEDEKER can be reached at 940-566-6872. His e-mail address is aboedeker@dentonrc.com.