DON McDERMOTT MORE COLUMNS Advertisement

Usually, this column appears on Fridays, but some of the things said here couldn't wait another couple days. In fact, in some respects, it is months late in being written.

There are two troubling situations surrounding Southern Nevada sports in general, Pahrump Valley in particular, because Trojan teams are either directly affected -- or could be -- in both instances.

First, Pahrump Valley's girls soccer team could be playing in the winter Clark County Class 4-A League in the 2009-2010 school year. There isn't much the Nevada Interscholastic Activities Association can do about it; the decision to play girls soccer in the winter in Las Vegas is a decision dictated by the Clark County School Board.

The CCSD and NIAA don't want another Title IX suit, as they had to face last summer. You remember. A Green Valley High School student didn't want to make a choice between volleyball and soccer, so she had her attorney dad file a suit.

She got to play volleyball in the fall and soccer in the winter. More tha 600 girls who wanted to play soccer in the fall ... well, they didn't matter. That group sort of included Pahrump Valley's girls. They made a choice to play another fall in the Southern Nevada Class 3-A League and what a season it was. The Lady Trojans, for the first time in school history, qualified for the state tournament.

There are enough lawsuits jamming up the courts now, so we would never advocate some Pahrump Valley parent seeking a solution to the Lady Trojans' plight by suing. But we won't object if someone did.

Second, last weekend, we went to the Nevada state basketball tournament at The Orleans Arena in Las Vegas. That's where it was bad news emerging.

Unless the NIAA does something -- like NOW! -- about the plight of Class 3-A in the Silver State, we may have seen the last of that division as a viable entity in state tournaments.

* Pahrump Valley was shifted to 4-A this school year.

* Faith Lutheran is moving into Class 4-A at its own initiative, because Crusader administrators didn't want to be part of a four-school league.

* Which means the Southern 3-A League is going to be down to three schools in 2009-2010.

"Can you imagine that on a Friday night, Virgin Valley and Boulder City will be playing each other ... and we will be sitting at home in a dark gym because we have no one to play?" asked Dallas Larson, the coach of the Moapa Valley boys' basketball team. "Three teams in a league? We couldn't even have a regional tournament.

"This is something I have been thinking about for months," said Larson, whose team lost 62-46 to Boulder City in the state 3-A championship game Saturday at The Orleans. "What is happening is not right."

The NIAA is meeting today and Thursday in Henderson. It behooves that organization to alter its agenda and make the 3-A situation a primary topic of discussion.

The bottom line: suspend the rules and open up this subject for some major interaction and exchange of logical decisions.