Pahrump men’s basketball team played division leader and lost

The Pahrump Valley Trojans men’s basketball team finished a brutal home stand last week where they lost three games in a row.

The Trojans started with Bonanza on Monday 81-65, Faith Lutheran on Wednesday 68-33 and Clark on Thursday 75-20. The team falls to 1-5 in conference and is in fifth place.

Faith is the fourth place team and Clark is the first place team. Bonanza is a Division 1 team that was 0-5 in their conference when the two teams met last week. The Trojans played Bonanza hard in the first quarter but gave up too many turnovers after the half. Bonanza by far played Pahrump’s best game of the week.

Trojans Coach John Toomer said Faith beat them with size and speed.

On Wednesday night, Pahrump faced a 2-3 Faith Lutheran team. Faith came in with a 2-3 zone defense and trapped the Trojans for most of the first half. It was 19-3 at the end of the first quarter. The Trojans offense just could not penetrate inside on Faith. By the end of the half the score was 37-13 and Faith finished the Trojans off with a score of 68-33.

“They were bigger than we are and faster than we are. We just have to work at being over the trap before the trap was set on us. Part of the problem was we were trying to go through the trap instead of going over it and that hurt us,” Toomer said.

With the Clark Chargers, it was more of the same but Clark was even bigger. Clark is the number one team in the division and possibly the number one team in the state. The Chargers only had their first-string team in for the first five minutes of the game and still beat the Trojans by 55 points.

When asked if it was hard to stick to the game plan when playing teams like Faith and Clark in the same week, Toomer replied, “We have the same game plan, it just is a matter of how well we execute it. When we execute well it works fine and when we don’t, it can go south on us and we struggled.”

Toomer was also asked if he was going to change anything against Cheyenne he replied, “We are going to stick with the same philosophy against Cheyenne. It’s a little late in the season to change things. If we can just put the first part of the Bonanza game together for a whole game that would definitely help us out. Our biggest problem right now is the confidence level. They are saying, ‘We can’t.’ They just need to think, ‘Yeah, we can.’ We just need to work twice as hard as everyone else. If you look at every team we played we are a lot shorter than them. We are still getting good shots.”

The coach has been calm pretty much throughout the season. He said he is here to stay and plans on bringing consistency to the team, but during the Clark game he had to let off some steam against the referee.

“I screamed at the referee, ‘Why was that not a ‘T’?’ He did not like that so he said, ‘Here is your T.’ I was just frustrated because we have all these slam dunks and the other teams hang on our rim as if to say, ‘Ha, ha look what we just did.’ So far not one official called a technical for hanging on the rim. They don’t give that technical if the player is protecting themselves. The ref said he felt the player was protecting himself and yet my three guys were far enough behind to not be a threat,” Toomer explained.