COULEE CITY — The ACH Warriors softball team was defeated on the road 8-3 by the Brewster Bears. However, according to head coach Faye Butler, this was an important learning experience for a young softball team.  

“So, it's definitely a rebuilding year, I think last year the schedule was a little bit easy. So, I said for all my non-league games, I want harder teams to just get that competition level a bit higher,” Butler said.  

Adding the Bears to the non-league part of their schedule was to challenge her team to improve. Despite the outcome, she feels this game did exactly as intended. With postseason play expanding from four teams to eight, Butler is trying to build a mentality amongst the team that they can make it to state championship and go far. After all, they placed fifth and just missed out last year.  

“I really do think that they are buying into that, and they're seeing and believing in themselves that, yeah, they can go far at states,” she said.  

In their matchup against the Bears, it was small errors and mental mistakes that allowed the game to get away from them, Butler said, but moving forward there is a larger understanding of minimizing those situations for the Warriors.  

“They just really said, ‘no, okay, we’ve got to correct this,’ and they really did, they really worked hard for the rest of the game,” Butler said.  

For what is considered a rebuilding year, Butler is sensing a lot of improvement as the season goes on and builds confidence each game for what they can accomplish in postseason play.  

The Warriors look to keep learning as they head into a double header against Omak on April 12.