2004-05: High school athletics, school year in review

Nick Christensen

Thursday, June 9, 2005 | 12:06 p.m.

August: Football camp fans the flames of a hot issue

Training camp for football was barely a week old when the first big story of the season broke.

Otis Pimpleton III, a sophomore at Chaparral High School hoping to be a lineman for the Cowboys, was in the third day of "Hell Week" when he succumbed to heat stroke.

Pimpleton spent four days in the intensive care unit at Sunrise Hospital.

His father, Otis Pimpleton Jr., complained that Chaparral staff was negligent in getting medical help for his son.

"The coach had no reason to send a kid off the field incoherent," Pimpleton Jr. said at the time. "He should have called 911, and he should have sent the kid to the ER."

But Jim Porter, a spokesman for the company that provides trainers to CCSD sports teams, said procedures were followed.

"If a parent or coach tells us to call an ambulance, we will call an ambulance if the athlete is lucent," Porter said. "If they're unconscious, it's automatic."

Pimpleton III transferred to Del Sol High School.

September: Unless your name is Gorman, girls' golf coming up empty

As girls golf season reached its peak, many teams were struggling to show up. Day after day, teams -- particulary from inner-city schools, were forfeiting matches.

Compounding the problem was the caliber of play at well-off schools, such as Bishop Gorman, where LPGA amateur In-Bee Park anchored the Gaels team.

"There's not enough girls to go around for all the high schools that we have right now," said Jane Schlosser, executive director of the Southern Nevada Junior Golf Association. "We have a lot of schools having to grab girls out of PE classes, and that kind of ruins the caliber of play. A lot of girls don't know how to play golf, and the coaches don't have the time or the facilities to teach them."

Some Southern coaches proposed that fewer scores be counted so that less teams would forfeit. But a formal proposal never made it to the NIAA Board of Control this school year.

October: Valley finally has a reason to like football

Valley football spent most of the previous seasons as the laughingstock of the Northeast Division, going 3-15 over a two-year stretch.

But in 2004, new coach Jim Massey brought a talented bunch of individuals together as a team, guiding them to second-place in the Northeast Division.

"A lot of teams have come out here and said something," cornerback James Johnson said in October. "They still think we're the old Valley, that they'll come out here and blow us out."

Valley eventually did get blown out, but that was in the Sunrise championship game at Las Vegas High. The week before, the Vikings upset undefeated Foothill in Henderson to advance to the title game.

November: Truckee goes the distance to state case

Moapa Valley may have taken the road less traveled -- the Pirates were the only 3A football semifinalists not to have traveled more than 100 miles in the playoffs -- but it was Truckee that thrived in the 3A championship game at Sam Boyd Stadium.

After traveling across a state line to get to Las Vegas, Truckee pinned a 28-0 whipping on Moapa and took the NIAA football title back to the alpine California town.

"We just got outplayed and outcoached," said Moapa Valley coach Brent Lewis after the game. "That was as good of a team as we'd played.

"They took away our running game, and totally surprised us at how much more physical they were."

December: A sad passing stops the show at Palo Verde

A month of triumph ended in tragedy at Palo Verde, as the Panthers won their first football title but lost the basketball coach who had just taken the team to the state crown.

On Dec. 4, Palo Verde's undefeated football season ended with a 21-7 defeat of Las Vegas High at Sam Boyd Stadium. The Wildcats mustered just 120 yards of total offense while the Panthers had 258 rushing yards alone.

It was the second consecutive championship loss for Vegas, while Palo Verde had lost two consecutive state semifinals before finally breaking through in 2004.

Four weeks later, the architect of the school's first major championship succumbed to a long battle with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Boys' basketball coach Phil Clarke had coached the Panthers since the school opened in 1996. He was diagnosed in 2002 but still coached the team, leading it to a 2004 basketball title win against Foothill in Reno.

Clarke continued to be involved with Palo Verde basketball through the start of the 2004-05 school year, but did not coach the team during the season.

"It's just tragic," Durango coach Al LaRocque said. "He was too young for that to happen. It's a big hole and a big void in Las Vegas basketball because he was one of the more popular veterans.

"He was one of those guys that no one had a bad word to say about."

Clarke was 53 when he died on Dec. 29. Eight days later, his son Mike read the starting lineups and Palo Verde named their court for Clarke before the Panthers defeated Cheyenne.

January: Weather puts sports schedule in a snow daze

It started late in the morning on January 7, and the effects lasted all weekend.

A rare winter snowstorm blanketed the western half of the Las Vegas Valley with up to 4 inches of the white stuff, creating headaches for motorists but also for sports scheduling across the Silver State.

In the south, all non-league games that weekend were canceled and league games were postponed. Up north, the snow kept falling, causing numerous snow-outs and a dramatic reorganization of the 4A North schedule.

NIAA assistant director Jay Beesemyer said that snow days are very rare.

"More like once every 20 years," Beesemyer said. "In spring sports we deal with this all the time. It's a scheduling nightmare but we get through it. The fact that the school districts are saying if we're not going to school we're not playing basketball, it throws the schedule into a quandary."

No local athletic officials could come up with a conclusive answer as to whether local prep sports had ever been snowed out.

February: Centennial girls set marks that just might last for years

The Centennial girls' basketball team had been dominant the past few seasons, but this was something special.

The Bulldogs, led by a nucleus of five seniors who had been together through their high school years, walloped local competition, earning national acclaim while scoring a state-record 2,931 points in 2004-05.

In fact, the Bulldogs were even close to making it into the national record book for points scored in a season.

Centennial cruised to its fourth consecutive girls' basketball title at the Orleans Arena later in February as the state tournament returned to Las Vegas for the first time in nearly two decades. The Bulldogs did it despite losing the Sunset title to Bishop Gorman after losing guard Italee Lucas to injury.

"People keep saying, you're breaking records, setting records," Centennial coach Karen Weitz said after the Bulldogs first eclipsed the state mark. "I personally had no idea we were about to break a record. If it happens, it happens. We still try to do what we want to do."

March: The courtship of sports news rears its head

Apotpourri month with stories as varied as the wildflowers blooming around the Mojave Desert.

Early in the month, former Las Vegas High football standout Stanley Copeland was arrested for armed robbery in St. George, Utah. Copeland, a member of the Dixie State College basketball team, was accused of robbing a movie theater in St. George with three friends.

In Reno, McQueen student Tommy Knorr convinced the Washoe County school board to put him on the varsity baseball team, despite his not making the cut at what the district deemed a fair tryout. Knorr lasted three games before leaving the team. He did not play, but his case left many in Nevada worried about precedent.

"If that becomes a regular thing, then we've lost all control," Clark County athletic director Bill Garis said.

Finally, Foothill football coach Ray Fenton got his dream job -- coaching for his alma mater at Cypress, Calif. near Long Beach. He built a 44-21 record in the six years since Foothill opened, including a 1-8 first season record that improved to a state semifinal run in 2001.

April: After playing with the LPGA, how tough can the NIAA be?

Bishop Gorman junior In-Bee Park had already impressed the local golf scene with her state medalist title run in October's championship.

But Park did much more to build an intimidation factor for next year's golf season by standing tall with the pros at the LPGA's Takefuji Classic in Las Vegas.

Park finished in fifth at the professional event, 12-under par at Las Vegas Country Club.

"This was my goal," Park said afterward, "and I'm really happy to achieve my goal."

May: Diamond deeds the crowning for Sierra Vista

Sierra Vista has been open only four years, but has already established itself as a spring sport power.

Last year, the Mountain Lions won the boys' volleyball title. This year, Sierra Vista had two teams playing on ball-and-stick Championship Saturday.

The baseball team cruised to a 4-0 victory against Centennial in the state championship, finishing the season 34-5 and ranked 20th in the country by USA Today. The softball team lost 5-0 to McQueen in the title game that same afternoon.

"Sometimes it feels like you've cheated the system to get here in four years. Some days it feels like it's taken forever," baseball coach Nate Selby said. "We had our days being on the other side and taken our losses. It's been a community effort."

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