Mt. Spokane places in state for first time in school history

This has been a season of firsts for the Mt. Spokane Wildcats. The team made regionals for the first time. Then, they made it to Tacoma.

Now, for the first time since the school opened in 1997, the Wildcats will be taking home hardware, as they defeated Edmonds-Woodway 58-42 on Saturday to claim fourth in state.

First year head coach David Pratt said the team’s close loss to No. 1 Bellevue on Thursday gave the team confidence moving into the consolation bracket.

“You need some moral victories,” Pratt said. “Obviously as a coach you don’t want those, you want to win them but we’re sitting there and they just said ‘hey we can do this.’ So we said ‘Hey let’s go get fourth, we’ve never been here before, let’s go get fourth.”

Junior guard Jaidyn Lyman scored a game-high 21 points as she did most of her damage from behind the arc, knocking down four of her seven 3-pointer attempts.

Lyman said her team was not intimidated by the prospect of playing in the state tournament for the first time.

“We’ve just worked so hard to get here; we know that we belong here,” Lyman said. “We knew we could do what we did.”

The Wildcats will bring back nine players next season and Pratt said he expects his team to build off the success and return to the tournament again next year.

“Come back and try and place even higher,” Layman said. “Just keep working and get better.”

This story was originally published March 5, 2016 at 2:37 PM with the headline "Mt. Spokane places in state for first time in school history."