Experienced Pirate Girls Team To Take The Court

By DAVE BELCHER

The Progress

The Moapa Valley High School Girls Basketball team are the three-time defending Region Champions. The team looks forward to defending their title and getting yet another shot at the State title.

The Pirates’ five starters have a ton of experience. But they are looking to build on that and develop depth, according to Head Coach Brandon Jones.
“We have a couple of new players coming off the bench without any varsity experience that we will need to count on if we want to defend our title,” said Jones.

The Pirates will be led by Haylie Western who made the first team all southern region team and was second team all state. She played the post as a sophomore last year.

Savanna Burt will return and run the point guard position this year. She was a second team all southern region team member alst season.

The wings this year will be Junior Andie Wood and Senior Talli Fairchild who were both on the all desert league team.

Claire Cox, who played on the varsity team last year as a freshman. will be looked to as another contributing wing player this year.

The Pirates have three other post players with experience returning including senior Savannah Aikele, junior Alyssa Jolley and senior Miriam Werner. These players will be looked at for prominent roles.
The team is calling up Sienna Neilson and Rebekah Jensen who don’t have any experience at the Varsity level. But it will be exciting to watch them develop this season.

“The Southern Region will be extremely competitive this season,’’ said Jones. “Pahrump Valley, Virgin Valley, Losee and Boulder City all return most of their starters from last year. In order to prepare for those tough league games, I purposely scheduled an extremely tough non-league schedule. I want us to be in as many competitive games as possible. We are looking forward to an exciting season.”

The Lady Pirates begin their schedule hosting a tournament this weekend. They play against White Pine on Friday, Dec. 2 beginning at 2 pm. Then they wil face Lincoln County at 5:30 pm. Tournament play will continue on Saturday.