DAVID LARKINS, Wesmen Athletics
WINNIPEG — The Winnipeg Wesmen are winding things down, while the Alberta Pandas are just cranking things up.
The Wesmen women's volleyball team, playing in its penultimate conference match, hit .069 for the night and watched as the Pandas scored a 3-0 (25-20, 25-18, 25-18) Canada West conference victory Friday night at the Duckworth Centre.
Ashleigh Laube had 12 kills to lead the Wesmen, who fell to 4-19 on the season and will close out their conference season with a return match against Alberta Saturday (6:45 p.m.).
The No. 7-ranked Pandas, meanwhile, hit .248 for the night and made just seven errors in improving their record to 17-6 on the season.
Kory White, who is second in the conference in kills per set, had a match-high 15 for the Pandas. She hit .250 on 48 swings with three errors.
Julia Zonneveld added eight kills and a team-high 16 digs and Vanessa Jarman also had eight kills.
"We try to keep our errors to a minimum and I thought, certainly in the first two sets, we did a good job of that," Pandas coach Laurie Eisler said. "Overall I'm happy with the performance.
"... I think (setter Mariah Walsh) has been doing a good job of (spreading the ball around) the last couple of weeks. We leaned really heavily on Kory early in the season and Mariah's finding ways of getting everyone really involved in the offence, which is really helping a lot."
The Wesmen, meanwhile, gave away 26 points on attack errors, a number head coach Diane Scott knows is not going to help win many matches.
"That first set I thought we played extremely well and we were on point but we had 11 kills and nine attack errors," Scott said. "Attack errors has been our Achilles heel throughout the entire season. We work hard, we played great defence, we passed well for the most part and we missed three serves at the end in terms of target and we missed three block assignments. ... If we win that first set, maybe it's a different conversation."
Emma Parker had eight kills and 10 digs, and libero Madison Fyvie had 23 digs.
Photo: David Larkins/Wesmen Athletics