Girls basketball: RCMS has successful year

The Rosemary Clarke Middle School girls basketball team finished up their season with their last tournament over the weekend called the “Whitney Mesa Shootout”, where the “A” team finished second in the consolation round.

The “A” team, which is composed of seventh and eighth grade girls finished up their season at 9-5 and the “B” team which is made up of sixth graders finished at 11-3.

Lance Englund is the coach for the team and said the year was highly successful.

“The year was great and the girls have improved and stayed eligible,” he said.

Englund is an elementary school teacher at Floyd Elementary School where he teaches health and physical education. This was Englund’s first year back as a coach. He had coached middle school 15 years ago. He also coached with Bob Hopkins at the high school during the championship years starting in 2004.

He enjoys coaching the younger kids and says prior to this year he was working at the elementary level with the Junior Trojans Elementary School basketball program.

“The Junior Trojans program is great,” he said. We gave them an exposure to basketball and the practice and the drills.”

He said the RCMS team is not in a league because of the distance Pahrump is from other schools. The teams in Las Vegas played on a Tuesday and Thursday evening and if RCMS did that the team would get home too late on a school night.

Some of the teams they played as an independent were: Boulder City, Moapa Valley, Sandy Valley, Amargosa and Faith Lutheran. The farthest they traveled was to White Pine where they also played against Pahranagat Valley.

Englund said the middle school does a good job of covering the fundamentals so that the high school is not covering the basics all over again. The hardest concept to teach at the middle school level was the team concept.

“It’s hard to get the individual game out of them and trying to teach them the team game,” he said. “They need to watch more college basketball instead of the NBA to get the team concept down.”

He believes the majority of the eighth graders will go out for basketball at the high school level.

“I think all the girls on the team will be trying out for basketball,” Englund said. “They seem to have a desire to get better and I think they are a great group of kids. I have some kids that will go through a wall for you.”

He said he has one tall kid named Savannah Fairbank at five foot nine. “You can’t teach height,” he said.