DON McDERMOTT / PVT Katie Redman won the Class A triple jump at the Nevada High School Track and Field Championships, contested in May at Del Sol in Las Vegas. Advertisement

Like the area in which she spent her high school years, Katie Redman operates on the gold standard ... and the goal standard as well.

This school year, one of the Round Mountain senior's objectives was prove herself capable of competing on the college level, even though she attends a school that has only 108 students and is one of the most geographically isolated in the state.

A parallel goal was to dominate the Nevada Class A Central Division in her three sports in the same manner that the past two NevadaPrep.com Greater Nevada female Athletes of the Year, Veronica Villa of Pahrump Valley and Kalee Whipple of Pahranagat Valley Alamo, made their respective leagues their personal fiefdoms.

The result: Redman was the league's Player of the Year in both volleyball and basketball, and placed in three events during the state 1-A track meet, winning the triple jump for the second straight year - all while maintaining a near-perfect grade-point average and continuing to immerse herself in her northern Nye County community, which is home to an open-pit gold-mining operation that has produced 10.2 million ounces of gold since 1977.

During the spring, she committed to play volleyball for Feather River College in Quincy, Calif., in hopes of eventually earning an NCAA Division I scholarship. And on June 4, Redman was named the ninth winner of the Florence Murphy Award as the Greater Nevada female Athlete of the Year for 2006-07. Among the nominees was Dominique Maloy, a 15-time state Class 3-A champion and a member of three state title teams in a standout career at Pahrump Valley High School.

Redman earns a $1,000 scholarship as part of the award, which is named for Florence Murphy, a Fernley native who in the 1930s was Nevada's first licensed aviatrix.

Later, as co-founder and president of Bonanza Airlines, she was the highest-ranking female airline executive in the country. Murphy, a 1929 graduate of Humboldt County High (now Lowry), died in January 2006 at age 94. Before her death, she was involved in the selection process, and the standards that she set forth are followed to the letter.

"I would like to say how honored I am to be nominated for this prestigious award," Redman wrote before she was selected as the Murphy Award winner. "To possibly be among past recipients like (2005 winner) Kalee Whipple (now a basketball starter at the University of Utah) and (2004 winner) Veronica Villa (who played in the NCAA softball tournament recently as a member of Southern Utah's squad) would complete a career-long dream and goal of mine."

Perhaps more than any other mining region in Nevada, the Round Mountain district -- which includes the towns of Carvers, Hadley and Round Mountain -- is stark testimony to the state's boom-and-bust heritage.

The Kinross open-pit operation employs hundreds and is a self-contained industrial complex, and the towns it supports have a level of prosperity rarely found in Nevada mining communities. Only a few miles away, the remains of the ghost towns of Manhattan and Belmont - both of which once supported massive mining operations and in the late 1800s had four-figure populations - corrode and crumble in the high desert wind and sand and heat.

From the time her family moved to Round Mountain five years ago, Redman competed - in all phases of her life - as if she were bent on proving there would be no Manhattans or Belmonts in her future.

She finished her athletic career with 12 varsity letters (four each in volleyball, basketball and track), and was valedictorian of her graduating class in addition to winning election as student body president. Tamara Jones, a first-grade teacher at Round Mountain's elementary school, has seen her work as a mentor and citizen first-hand.

In volleyball, Redman was recruited by a number of small four-year colleges, including Eastern Oregon, Albertson and Mesa State, and many believe she would have been an NCAA Division I recruit if not for Round Mountain's isolation.