Pahranagat Valley saves winning streak

Football coaches can dream up all sorts of scenarios that might doom their teams in a close game.

Pahranagat Valley coach Ken Higbee survived one of those nightmares Friday, as the team from Thacher (Calif.) received a fifth down as it drove to try to beat the Panthers in the waning seconds.

Pahranagat Valley stopped a double-reverse on what essentially was fifth-and-12 from the Panthers 25 with four seconds remaining and escaped with a 34-30 victory to extend its winning streak to 83 games.

"Our kids came and played, they did some really good things," Higbee said. "I'm real proud of our kids stepping up. Thacher, they're one of the top schools in the state of California."

Higbee says he's never dreamed up ways his team's streak, which started Aug. 29, 2008, might end. He says the streak isn't important. And when he says it, you actually believe him.

"The streak is completely secondary to everything we're doing," said Higbee, who took advantage of the trip to California to spend Saturday afternoon on the beach with his players.

"It's more than football here. That streak is what it is, but to be real honest with you, it's just a matter of watching these good kids do good things. And streaks are made to be broken."

It almost ended Friday when officials failed to switch the down marker with the Toads driving deep in Pahranagat Valley territory with less than a minute to play. Higbee said his staff noticed, but couldn't persuade the officials that Thacher might receive an extra down.

"We did, but we couldn't convince them of that," Higbee said. "We kept saying that should have been second down, and they switched it back to first down on that second down. That was the mess-up, and it was pretty major."

But that's as close as Higbee will get to being critical, to conceding that someone else's error might have cost his team a shot at continuing the nation's longest active winning streak.

"It was a well-officiated game," Higbee quickly added.

Character means a lot in Alamo, a town of just more than 1,000 situated 95 miles north of Las Vegas. As part of the trip to California, the team visited the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library on Friday. And his team's behavior there was more important to Higbee than the win that night.

"We had people at the Presidential Library just amazed at how good our kids were," Higbee said. "We had one guy say there's hope for the United States with kids as good as this. That's what we're teaching. The winning is secondary.

"They represent themselves, and their parents, the school and our community in an amazing way."

Higbee said the team left Thursday night to make the 420-mile trip to Ojai, Calif.

"We're on a yellow bus, the coaches drive the bus," Higbee said. "We left Alamo at 6:30 Thursday night, got there about 1 in the morning. For us to travel like that and compete against a team of that caliber says a lot about our kids."

Since the Panthers avoided the scare at Thacher, they have a chance to make history later this season. The national record winning streak for eight-man football is 92 by Shattuck (Okla.) from 2003 to 2009.

The Panthers have seven more regular-season games, and an unbeaten trip through the postseason would mean three more games. So if Pahranagat Valley wins out, the Panthers would break the national record in the state championship game.

"These tests are so valuable to us," Higbee said. "And it's important for us to be in these big games. And we've got a big game this weekend coming up. And that's all we think about. At the end of the day, we want that competition to prove what these kids can do."

— Contact prep sports editor Damon Seiters at 702-380-4587 or dseiters@reviewjournal.com. Follow him: @DamonSeiters