After absorbing an 11-1 loss to the Billings Angels on Saturday, the Powell Pioneers baseball team fought back in the second half of the doubleheader, falling 15-10.

“It’s always good to see them battling for that whole second game after the rough first one,” said Pioneers manager George Laughlin. “They came back and showed their character and how much they want to learn and want to improve and you know it really showed in the improvement at the plate and battling for the whole seven inning game.”

Angels 11, Pioneers 1

Powell managed only five hits in the first game.

“We just didn’t swing the bat very well,” Laughlin said. “We got a little tentative in the batter’s box and weren’t as aggressive as we could have been and ended up striking out way too many times.”

Things started out well, with back-to-back hits for the Pioneers. Jesse Brown was batted in by Colin Queen to give Powell a 1-0 advantage going into the bottom of the first. But the lead was short lived, as the Billings Angels scored two in their half of the inning.

“It kind of went south from there,” said Laughlin.

However, there was some improvement from the very first game of the season.

“Our pitching was a lot better; we only ended up walking two,” said Laughlin. “So that’s good.”

Queen pitched three innings, struck out three and gave up eight runs. At the plate, he had two hits and the one run batted in.

Riley Meyer came in and pitched relief for 1 1/3 innings, giving up three runs while striking out two.

“We did a lot better” in the second game, Laughlin said. He wondered if facing the Billings Halos last weekend — the older of the two Billings teams and consisting of mainly 18- and 19-year-olds — may have been a mental factor going into the first game against the Angels on Saturday.

“They [the Pioneers] were kind of sitting back and ... not being aggressive and I think just different pitching, I mean the kids were throwing strikes we could hit, not throwing super fast that we couldn’t keep up with them,” Laughlin said. Things changed in game two.

“I think they just decided to be more aggressive in the box and it turned out well for us,” Laughlin said.

Angels 15, Pioneers 10

Powell smacked 12 hits in the game — more than doubling its total from the first game.

“Billings was doing a really good job of throwing strikes and a lot of times they would throw a first pitch fastball and it took us a little while, but we started realizing that and they were being more aggressive,” Laughlin said of his squad.

Tyler Feller had three hits with one double and three RBIs and he walked twice — reaching base all five times up to bat.

Jesse Brown, Queen, and Cameron Wentz each had two hits; Jesse Brown and Cameron Schmidt each had two RBIs.

On the mound, Feller threw three innings and gave up four runs against four strikeouts.

Jesse Brown pitched 1 2/3 innings, giving up four runs with one strikeout while Nate Brown allowed two runs in one inning.

Also making an appearance on the mound was Luke Washington, who came in as a reliever for a third of an inning.

Laughlin said the team kept the Angels within reach, but each inning it seemed like the Pioneers were giving up two or three runs, and that made it hard to catch up.

Billings scored two runs in both the first and second innings to lead 4-0. Powell pushed across a run before Billings scored four more in the fourth inning to make it 8-1.

But in the fifth inning, the Pioneers rallied: they scored seven runs to tie the game up at 8. But Powell gave up four runs in the bottom half of the inning and found themselves down 15-8 going into the seventh.

Powell pushed across two more runs to make the final score 15-10.

“Just figuring out how to put teams away in innings and get that last out is something we need to work on,” said Laughlin.

The team has “started to realize that they can play with everybody out there and we’re not going to get blown out of the water by too many teams,” Laughlin added. “And so I think that confidence is starting to come and we’ve always said hits are contagious, so when one goes in and gets a hit, it kind of fires up the whole team and everybody realizes, ‘Hey, I can do this.’”

The manager also noticed improvement from the previous week’s competition.

“We really cut down on the mental errors,” he said, adding, “We didn’t throw the ball around as much — if a guy was going to get to second base, we didn’t make an unnecessary throw and let somebody else advance.”

When there are runners on first and third, “sometimes teams will try to do something tricky to trick you into throwing it down to second to get the run to score, but we handled those situations a lot better,” Laughlin said.

He also praised his team’s coverage of bunts.

“Just situationally I think we did a lot better,” said Laughlin.

Next up for the Pioneers is a doubleheader at home against Douglas, with game times at 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. Saturday.

“Looking forward to playing a team that is going to be in our level,” Laughlin said of the fellow A team. “It’s not a conference game, but somebody we’ll probably see down the road at like the state tournament, so it’ll be fun to see where we’re at far as Wyoming teams go.”

The Pioneers will open conference play on Thursday, June 1 at Lovell, with games at 5:30 and 7:30 p.m.