Loses to three Division IV teams, but a win over a Division III team, were the fortunes of the Pahranagat Valley girls basketball team at the Comstock Classic in Virginia City last weekend.
PVHS lost 32-31 to Eureka, 39-37 to Smith Valley, 68-38 to McDermitt, but beat Battle Mountain 49-33.
“We got in foul trouble early on in our first game and didn’t manage the clock well at the end,” said Panther coach Amy Huntsman. A low scoring game, the Pahranagat girls were not able to score more than nine points in any one quarter.
Senior guard Jamie Hansen said, “We got into major foul trouble in that game. We just weren’t playing very smart.”
Against Smith Valley, it was a match up of many of the same players that had faced each other in the state volleyball championship, when PVHS surprised the Bulldogs with a come-from-behind 3-1 win.
“We struggled in the first part of the game, and were coming back, but just ran out of time,” said Huntsman. Hansen said she and Kali Hosier were on the bench quite a bit of the time in foul trouble. “There was a post player (junior Kelli Rogaczewski), and we just couldn’t shut her down.”
A loss to McDermitt followed, but on Saturday Pahranagat scored a 49-34 win over Battle Mountain.
“All the girls played well,” Huntsman said. “We’re young, we have a lot of work to do and have not settled on who some of our consistent starters are going to be.”
Hansen said she thought the team could have done better in their first three games in the tournament, and they are still learning how to play well with one another. However she said, “When we played Battle Mountain, it all kind of came together, everything kind of started clicking for us, we figured out better how to play as a team.”
This week, Pahranagat (3-5) had a non-league game with Lincoln County, and now have four games in a row at home, starting with Eureka (8-0), Dec. 27, and Division III Southern League leader White Pine (7-0) Dec. 27 and 30, then Mountain View (3-4) and Wells (7-2) on Jan. 2-3.
