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Newspaper and Travel Guide
for Pecos Country of West Texas
Friday, August 24, 2007
Pecos makes changes to 9th grade schedules
The Pecos Eagles freshman football team has changed a couple of games around and added a few ‘B’ games to their 2007 schedule, due to the increased number of players on the team this season.
The ninth graders have had about 38 players at preseason workouts, going into Thursday afternoon’s final preseason scrimmage against Midland Greenwood. The Eagles were scheduled to open their 2007 season in Fort Stockton next Thursday, and that game will go on as scheduled. But Pecos will also play a ‘B’ game in Iraan on Sept. 1, at 11 a.m.
The ‘B’ team will host the Braves’ two weeks later, on Sept. 13 at 4 p.m., prior to the originally scheduled freshman game against Kermit. Coach Chris Henson said two other games added would be against Kermit on Oct. 11 at Walton Field, and on Oct. 25 at Eagle Stadium.
Henson said two games that had been scheduled, on Sept. 29 at Crane and on Oct. 25 in Fabens, have been cancelled. The schedules for Pecos’ junior varsity and varsity teams remain unchanged.
Bears to face Grandfalls, SB in scrimmages
The Balmorhea Bears football team will be in Grandfalls on Friday to scrimmage the host Cowboys and Sierra Blanca Vaqueros, after splitting their opening dual scrimmage last weekend against Fort Davis and Sanderson.
Playing in Fort Davis, the Bears beat the Indians and lost to the Eagles, coach Debiasie Mendoza said. “We went 2-0 on Fort Davis and then Sanderson went 3-0 on us,” he said. “We looked real good early, and then got a little overconfident.
“Anytime you can go down and score on Fort Davis means the offense was really working well, and the defense was confident,” Mendoza said. “Against Sanderson, that showed us we still need to work on a lot of the basics, and concentrate on executing our plays.”
The Bears are trying to improve on last year’s 2-7 record, which included losses to Fort Davis, Sanderson and Sierra Blanca. Balmorhea was down to just 13 players a year ago, but will have 17 this time around, while Mendoza looks to replace four starters from the 2006 squad.
Friday’s scrimmage is schedule for a 5 p.m. start. After that, the Bears will open their 2007 regular season by hosting Fort Davis in two weeks, and close it out with their final District 1-A Division II six-man game at home on Nov. 9 against Sanderson.
Gent to serve dual role as new girls hoops coach
Pecos-Barstow-Toyah ISD members agreed to a temporary solution to the problem of having no varsity girls basketball coach on staff to start the 2007-08 school year, when they agreed in a split vote to allow varsity girls track coach Donna Gent to handle the basketball job as well during the upcoming season.
Board members were faced with the vacancy when Debbie Garcia resigned from the job in late June to take on a new position with the district’s “Lead Teachers, District Wide” program, which is designed to help with curriculum, programs, and instruction at P-B-T schools.
Gent was junior varsity coach for the Eagles last season, along with serving as head track coach for the past two years. “The board voted 4-3 to let us have a coach do two varsity sports,” said P-B-T athletic director Chris Henson.
“I approached her to do it, and she said she would in this situation,” said Henson. “She’s a great person and would do anything for the district.”
Last month, school board members turned down a recommendation that former Monahans High School girls basketball coach Treasure Thaggard take over as the new head coach.
Garcia and Thaggard’s teams tied for the District 2-3A title last season, with Monahans winning a playoff for top seed. Both teams advanced to the area round of the Class 3A playoffs before being eliminated.
The situation is similar to the one Pecos found itself in two years ago in volleyball. The Eagles did not have a coach in place just prior to the start of preseason workouts, and Garcia was promoted from junior high to varsity head coach after board members rejected a request by then-AD Patrick Willis to allow varsity girls softball coach Tammy Walls to also serve as temporary head coach in volleyball.
Garcia served one year as head coach, before taking over as head basketball coach following the resignation of Lisa Lowery. Helen Kimbrough was named new head volleyball coach prior to the start of last season.
Henson said that Gent was head basketball coach at Fort Hancock before coming to Pecos in 2005, and the plans for now are to keep this only as a temporary situation so that basketball-only players can begin workouts at the start of the school year.
“I don’t want to say this is an interim job, but we will be searching next year for a head coach just for basketball,” he said.
Cantaloupe tourney undergoes changes
The later start for classes in Texas schools this year will mean a different schedule for the 2007 Pecos Cantaloupe Classic, which began with freshman play on Thursday morning and runs through the varsity finals on Saturday at the Pecos High School new and old gyms and the Crockett Junior High gym.
The Eagles, who improved to 5-3 on the season on Tuesday with a pair of wins over Van Horn and Marfa, will host 11 teams in the varsity bracket, which starts at 8 a.m. on Friday. The opening day of play will be divided into three four-team brackets, and will be double-elimination play to determine seeding for Saturday’s championship and consolation finals.
Pecos will start off against Sierra Blanca at 8 a.m., with the winner facing either Midland Classical or Odessa High’s junior varsity at 11:45 a.m. The two opening game losers will play an elimination game at 10:30 a.m., with the championship set for 2:15 p.m., and an ‘if necessary’ match at 3:30 p.m.
The other opening round matches have Fabens facing Andrews at 8 a.m. and Marfa taking on El Paso Ysleta at 9:15 a.m. in the new gym, while over at Crockett, Wink will take on Fort Stockton and Fort Davis will face Presidio in opening round matches.
Coach Helen Kimbrough said the third bracket’s matches were late additions, when several teams dropped back into the tournament after dropping out.
“Fort Hancock dropped out, and at first Fort Stockton wasn’t coming and Fort Davis wasn’t coming, but now they are,” she said.
Pecos swept both of their matches on Tuesday in Van Horn, downing the host Eagles by 25-14, 25-12, 25-15 scores, and then beating Marfa, 25-9, 25-10, 25-12. Kimbrough said coming off the Canyon Invitational last weekend, where the Eagles went 2-3, helped make things easier for Pecos against the other group of Eagles and the Shorthorns.
Pecos lost to Dumas, which went into the tournament ranked No. 1 in Class 4A, along with Canyon Randall and Amarillo High’s JV while beating Perryton and the Amarillo Rockets, a team made up of home school students from the Amarillo area. But they swept through their matches on Tuesday after struggling with Marfa and Van Horn in recent years.
“When you play the kind of teams we played over the weekend, you’ve got to be ready to play,” Kimbrough said. “They saw all those big girls hitting the ball down on them. Marfa has some big girls and so does Van Horn, but they’re not as athletic as the people we played over the weekend.”
Kimbrough said all of her players were able to get into the matches. “We did get to run our offense and see if we could run it right. We looked pretty good, but we’ve still got some kinks to iron out, and when you get to play against 5A, 4A and 3A schools, you can’t make those mistakes.”
“After we played Van Horn, we played very, very well against Marfa. We started using strategy and placing the ball where it needed to be placed,” Kimbrough said. Jasmine Rayos had 18 kills and Gabby Garcia and Ashley Ornelas 14 apiece in the two matches.
In the past, only the early round games of the freshman tournament were held on Thursday. But with school not starting until next week, the 10-team tournament will be a one-day event. It started at 9:30 a.m. with Pecos’ ninth graders taking on Marfa and Midland Lee playing Presidio. Alpine faced Monahans, Midland High took on Andrews and Crane played Fort Stockton in the other matches, with the finals scheduled for 4:45 p.m. at the new PHS gym.
The JV tournament will run Friday and Saturday in the old PHS gym and will have nine teams, after Crane’s JV ‘B’ team dropped out. That left the Eagles as the team with a bye, and Pecos won’t play their first match until 9 a.m. on Saturday.
Andrews faces Midland Classical in the opening game, at 8 a.m., followed by Monahans against Marfa. The winners of those matches will play at 3:30 p.m., and the winner there will face Pecos on Saturday. Fort Stockton faces Odessa High and Presidio takes on Crane’s purple team in the other opening round matches Friday morning. The championship match is scheduled for 11:45 a.m. on Saturday in the old PHS gym.
Pecos Enterprise
York M. "Smokey" Briggs, Publisher
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