Rough Week Gives Lady Pirates A Hill To Climb

By GANNON HANEVOLD

Moapa Valley Progress

The regular season had been a breeze for Moapa Valley High School Girls Basketball team,up until last week. It was then that the Pirate team finally saw the wind blow back.

The week started with a road game against the Boulder City Eagles on Tuesday, January 29. Earlier in the season, the Pirates topped the Eagles by just three points. This time around, though, playoff implications were on the line.

In the first quarter, the Pirates simply couldn’t put the ball in the basket. Shot after shot narrowly missed. But their strong defense kept the game close. Ten forced turnovers in the first quarter were an accurate representation of the Pirate defensive effort. But only four points on the scoreboard in the first definitely hindered their confidence.

Trailing 12-5 in the second quarter, the Moapa offense finally got moving. A pair of threes by Lainey Cornwall and Peyton Schraft, followed by another layup from Schraft gave the Pirates a 13-12 lead.

The Eagles responded with an and-one and a three at the buzzer to make it 18-12 at the intermission.

It soon became clear that the rough conclusion to the first half would carry into the rest of the game.
“That gave them (the Eagles) some momentum and it just felt like our girls let our bad offense affect the other parts of our game,” said MVHS head coach Brandon Jones.

“Eventually, that kind of frustrates the girls. When you just can’t score. You start to force and take bad shots. It was just a snowball effect where we got worse as the game went along.”

The snowballs kept flying in the second half. The Eagles outscored the Pirates 13-5 in the third quarter, and 13-9 in the fourth.

For the first time this season, Moapa Valley was held to single digits in each of the four quarters. Schraft, Cornwall, and Kaitlyn Anderson were the only three to put points on the box score.
The final score was a Boulder City win of 44-27.

With a home game two days later, the Pirates hoped to bounce back against Sunrise Mountain. Moapa Valley defeated the Miners team earlier this season 55-40. This time around, the Miners came out determined to capitalize on the Boulder City loss still in the back of the Pirates’ minds.

Trailing 20-10 after the first quarter, the Pirates appeared stunned.
“We let that hangover affect us to start the game,” Jones said. “Giving up twenty points in the first quarter was definitely not part of the plan.”

In the second quarter, the Pirates began using their full court pressure to force turnovers and slowly crawl back. They’d trail 28-25 at halftime, and seemed relatively unshaken.
Cornwall led the team with an impressive 20 points in the first half. She would finish the game with a season high of 29.

The third quarter kept things close, and when it came down to the final period, the score was tied at 38 apiece. Late in the fourth, the Pirates finally took the lead 52-51 with just under a minute remaining.

As thirteen seconds shined on the scoreboard, Markaila McCurdy of the Miners was rewarded two free throws on a shooting foul. Despite the roars of the Pirate fans, McCurdy confidently made them both. Jones called a timeout.
“We wanted to get the ball to Kaitlyn up top and have her be able to attack,” Jones said.

“If they collapsed, we had Lainey in the corner and [Andalin Hillstead] on the backside.”
It worked just as Jones envisioned. With two seconds remaining, Anderson found Hillstead near the basket. But her layup was simply not meant to be. It ricocheted off of the rim and fell short.

The Pirates fell 53-52, speechless on their way to the locker room. Faced with adversity like they’d never seen, Coach Jones hoped to turn the tides with a rare team activity.
“When we left the locker room, there were some long faces, myself included,” he said.

“We were all feeling down on ourselves,. My wife suggested that I invite the girls over for dinner the next day. The rule was that we couldn’t talk about basketball.”
Jones hopes the team bonding exercise will reunite the team at a critical juncture in the season. “It was really nice to see everybody laughing and smiling and enjoying themselves again,” he explained.

The Pirates’ ability to overcome this adversity will likely encapsulate the season as a whole. They just might look back on an unconventional Friday team dinner as the moment the season was put back into their hands.