The Steamboat Springs High School volleyball team’s season ended Saturday, though that wasn’t quite official until Monday when the Class 4A state volleyball regional tournament pairings were announced.

The Sailors were left out of the 36-team field for the first time since 2012.

Steamboat, 11-11 on the season and 6-6 in the Western Slope League, did manage to close its season with a win, going on the road to knock off Rifle on Saturday in three sets, 25-17, 25-16, 25-18.

That win capped off what was a strong finish to the season for the Steamboat squad. The Sailors won six of their final eight matches and climbed from the cellar of the Western Slope League, where they were mired at midseason, to fourth place.

Four league teams did make the field.

Glenwood Springs is the highest-seeded Western Slope team at 14th. Palisade is 15th, Eagle Valley, which split league champ honors with Glenwood, is seeded 21st and Battle Mountain was the last team in, seeded 36th.

The regional tournament was decided by the Colorado High School Activities Association RPI rankings. The top 36 teams made the cut. Steamboat lived on the bubble for much of the second half of the season, but a five-set loss last week against Eagle Valley made the math complicated for the Sailors. Saturday’s dominating win at Rifle wasn’t enough to change things.

Steamboat finished at No. 39 in the RPI standings.

“There are definitely some amazing takeaways for these kids as far as how they handled themselves from being in the cellar to finishing the season off,” coach Wendy Hall said. “They were able to turn it around and were able to stay positive and stay together through all of that, and that says a lot about their character and it says a lot about the heart with which they played the second half of the season.”