After winning three straight games this week to take third place in District and earn a regional 3A tournament berth, Edmonds-Woodway Coach Rebekah Wells pointed to one factor: mental preparation.

“The middle of January, beginning of January we dropped a lot of games that we should have been able to compete with,” said Wells, whose team defeated Shorewood 43-35 Saturday to punch a ticket to regionals. “So we just worked on a lot of mental preparation. Visualizing, making our shots, doing the right thing.”

Another key has been the performance of junior Missy Peterson, who poured in a game-high 24 points Saturday after a 27-point performance Friday.

“She’s been huge,” Wells said. “A lot of times she’s come in as the underclassman — she’s still an underclassman compared to the seniors — and takes a back seat. All of our coaches have been telling her, ‘Missy, we think you can score whenever you want to.’ She knows now, ‘I can do this.’”

Wells said the tide began to turn for the Warriors (15-10) when they played Lynnwood a week ago and kept the game close with the state’s No. 1 ranked team.

“We played them well,” Wells said. “The girls were coming into that game saying, ‘We’re not scared of them. We know we could play them.’ I knew we could only go up from there.”

The last time the Warriors made it to regionals was 2014, when Peterson was a freshman. Wells said she believes the team is starting to peak and “the girls really want to go to the Tacoma Dome.”

“So they are going to keep fighting,” she said.

Edmonds-Woodway scoring: Ally Burdett 0, Mady Burdett 10, Ingrid Fosberg 0, Maddie Tudor 4, Adrienne Poling 2, Marivel Ortega 0, Courtney Simpson 3, Missy Peterson 24

Shorewood scoring: Jalyn Hizey 4, Abby Gustafson 3, Dakota Laut 4, Kaitlyn Amundsen 0, Lily Gustafson 4, Katie Taylor 6, Taryn Shelley 14

— Reporting from Doug Petrowski