LARAMIE – Losses can be more valuable than wins early in the season.
 
That is how Kaylee Prigge felt after her Wyoming volleyball team completed a nonconference schedule, which the fourth-year head coach designed to prepare the program to compete for the Mountain West championship.
 
The Cowgirls (7-4) opened the campaign with an impressive victory over Texas Tech and are coming off a confidence-building trip to Pocatello, Idaho, that included a five-set win over former conference rival Boise State, a sweep of host Idaho State and a four-set win over Pacific.
 
Two of the teams UW has lost to, Long Beach State and Colorado State, are in the top 25 of the RPI rankings. Utah is No. 52.
 
"We held Utah's two best players to under their season average. We did not get the result we wanted, and I think we learned something valuable in that we made some nice adjustments on defense to be able to do that," Prigge said. "We have a statistical goal board in our team room, and there are six categories statistically we feel like are really correlated to winning. We say if you get three of the goals, you've put yourself in a position to win. Against Long Beach, we got four of our statistical goals, but we came up short in the fifth set, which was not how we would want a fifth set to go. We played a very similar team in Santa Barbara about a week later, we achieved the same four statistical goals, and we completely flipped the script on the fifth set. …
 
"CSU is having an incredible season. They're receiving votes in the top 25 and from an RPI standpoint they are 25th in the country. We had an injury in that match, we were missing a starter in that match due to her brother's wedding, so we had some adversity that we had to face. I thought that was a turning point for us emotionally. Everyone top to bottom on our roster was extremely engaged throughout the entire match even though we were getting our butts handed to us and our circumstances were crappy. The lesson there was that must be all the time, that's a choice and it must be all the time."
 
The Cowgirls will host UTEP, the preseason MW favorite, to open conference play with matches at 6:30 p.m. Friday and 6 p.m. Saturday in the UniWyo Sports Complex.
 
UW has won seven consecutive matches and leads the all-time series 13-4, but the two programs haven't met since Nov. 6, 1997, when they were in the WAC.
 
The Miners (8-4), who have been in the NCAA Tournament the last two seasons, also went through a tough nonconference slate that included losses at No. 13 TCU and No. 18 Baylor.
 
"Right out the gate, let's just get going and see where we're at," Prigge said. "What's interesting about UTEP is in our conference we're super tight in every statistical category. I think we're holding teams to .197 (attack percentage) and they're holding teams to .198. They're a significantly better blocking team than us right now. Statistically, we're a significantly better digging team. Our ace percentage is right on each other, our hitting percentage is right on each other.
 
"It's going to be a really cool matchup. I have a lot of respect for (UTEP coach) Ben (Wallis). Their team is a little bit younger than they've been in recent years, but he's done a really nice job with that program, and I'm excited that in their first time in the Mountain West they get to come here."
 
The Cowgirls' matches with UTEP are scheduled around UW's homecoming football game against Hawai'i (1 p.m. Saturday).
 
The road to the MW title for UC Davis, picked second in the preseason coaches poll behind the Miners, and Hawai'i, the conference's highest-ranked team in the RPI, also goes through Laramie.
 
"I love being home on homecoming weekend. It happens maybe every other year," Prigge said. "People that aren't always in Laramie that are here maybe end up in the UniWyo. That is awesome for us, and we hope to introduce them to volleyball in an environment and an atmosphere that is second to none."
 
Follow Ryan for more stories on Wyoming athletics on X at @By_RyanThorburn on Facebook at Wyoming Athletics and Instagram at wyoathletics. Also follow him at Pokes Insider at Gowyo.com/pokesinsider.
 
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