Poteete Advertisement

EDITOR'S NOTE: Rod Poteete grew up in the Los Angeles area, played baseball at Stanford University, as well as in the Los Angeles Dodgers organization for two years and was a grad assistant at UNLV for Jerry Tarkanian and the Runnin' Rebels. The following is a first-person account of those early years at Pahrump Valley High School.

My life was forever changed when Principal Don Worden hired me to teach at Pahrump Valley High School and be the first varsity baseball coach for the Trojans in 1974.

My wife Jean and I drove out to Pahrump on a Saturday morning in August 1974, to see what was going on and we were half way to Johnnie before we realized that we'd missed Pahrump -- no one had told us to look for the waterfall and turn left.

About the only thing I knew about PVHS were the football and basketball scores I had seen in the Las Vegas papers, and Pahrump was taking quite a beating.

My first impression of PVHS was that I had never seen a school with classrooms that had half a wall facing to the hallways, instead of a door. This was remedied the second year.

I was also the boys junior varsity basketball coach for the first six years. I was amazed as players, on several occasions, crashed waist deep into the structure.

Apparently there were no building codes and the cheapest, thinnest plywood had been used. When this happened, janitor Roy Vaughn would replace the section with new thick plywood as soon as possible.

We only had eight classrooms in those days, and eight teachers for the whole high school and junior high school, both of which were housed in one building.

There were about 85 students at the high school and 150 at the junior high school. Later, PVHS twice added classrooms the new junior high school was built.

However, the new junior high school did not open until after Christmas break because even though it was completed, they could not get toilets for the bathrooms. This meant we had to share the high school building because the teachers were already hired.

So, we had junior high school from 7 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. and then high school from 12:30 p.m. until 5.

We started the varsity baseball program that first year and had very little budget. With the help of Worden, we were able to get started. We first considered wearing Levis with a Pahrump shirt or jersey but were eventually able to get $9 uniforms.

To simplify things, I was taking our coolers home to Las Vegas to fill them with ice and water for the games but soon found out that the players did not approve of Las Vegas water and we had to change to Pahrump water and ice.

In boys JV basketball and varsity basketball we did not fare very well the first year. In basketball, we were pretty much limited to half-court practice or else teams would have to practice late at night or very early in the morning.

The first year I coached JV basketball, we were 1-15 in league play. In baseball, we were playing at the community center and they were just converting to a sprinkler system from the old rolling field crop watering system.

The company putting in the sprinklers did not always fill in the holes everyday and the players and I would be out there at 6 a.m. to fill in the trenches that were a danger to the players especially on game days.

Carl Kaucky, Dave Edsall and Winky and Butch Neth put in many hours shoveling and raking dirt.

The second year we started to turn things around. The boys JV basketball team won the fist league championship in PVHS history. My wife started making victory cakes or cupcakes for the players on the following Monday.

The cheerleaders picked up on this and started bringing the victory cakes to the games and the team had to win to get the cakes. It did seem that the rewards did motivate players as we won the league.

We also did the victory cakes in baseball and actually did challenge for the league for a while. I coached varsity Baseball for 12 years to 1986 and we did develop a strong program.

We won league championships in 1978-79-81-83-85. We went to the state finals three times and the 1981 team had a .403 team batting average which at that time, was recognized as one of the top 10 team averages in the history of high school baseball in the United States.

Ron Allison pitched the first game in PVHS baseball history against Alamo. Butch Neth caught the first game and was the winning pitcher in the second game of the double-header. Rory Smith hit the first home run. Pete Sevilla pitched the first no-hitter in 1979. Carl Kaucky was the first ever league MVP. Later, Dick Empey pitched five no-hitters and Charles Stevens struck out 19 batters in one game against Tonopah.