LAKEWOOD — The Lady Cougars basketball team may have underestimated the strength of the Coupeville Wolves on Tuesday, Dec. 12, as Lakewood suffered a 40-32 loss to the Cascade Conference 1A school.

The game started out rough for the Cougars as the Wolves scored first and kept on scoring consistently throughout the first half of the game. Lakewood didn’t score until the second quarter and left for the locker room with only three points on the board, while Coupeville had 17.

The Cougars rallied a bit of a comeback however, and scored almost 10 times the points of their first half total in the second, but it wasn’t quite enough to pull out a win, leaving them trailing 40-32 at the end of the game.

Coupeville’s defense kept them at bay for the first three quarters, but the Cougars still had some high scorers, including 5-foot-10 freshman Marissa Blair who scored 16 points, and 5-foot-3 freshman Hayley Senyitko, who scored five points including one 3-pointer. Senior Mikayla Holmes scored four points and one 3-pointer, while Cassidy Dvorak scored three points and Reille Jones and Eliza Wild scored two each.

The game marked the second in-league loss for the Cougars, who are a relatively young team.

“We have three players returning from last year’s varsity team, none of whom were starters,” said head coach Chris Walster. “We have five freshman on varsity this year, and they are a good group of freshman. In fact, our two leading scorers are Marissa Blair and Hayley Senyitko, both freshmen.”

Walster was disappointed in the outcome of the game against the Wolves.

“Last week we played a great game against Archbishop Murphy,” he said. “We led by two in the second half and we were only down by six in the fourth quarter. Tonight was disappointing because Coupeville was last place in the league last year and Archbishop Murphy was first place. It’s not an excuse but I think we overestimated our ability.”

He also noted that fouls were an issue for them early on.

“We got into foul trouble early with silly fouls,” said Walster. “We would have liked to put more pressure on them, but we had a lot of fouls in the first half.”

The Cougars played Granite Falls in an away game on Friday, Dec. 14, and won with a 47-36 victory. They are set to play Marysville Getchell in an away game on Friday, Dec. 21.