Pahranagat Valley football typifies life in little-dot town

I’ve gotta be honest. The only reason I went out in the wind and the cold and the rain to watch Saturday’s Class 1A football championship game between the eight-man sides of Pahranagat Valley and Coleville, Calif., was the prospect that a lot of points might be scored.

I wanted to see Wisconsin 83, Indiana 20. No. I wanted to see even more points than that.

I wanted to see 128-74.

That was the final tally when Pahranagat Valley played Coleville in the 2008 semifinals. That’s why I put on a hoodie under my leather jacket and spent half the morning looking for a stocking cap in the bottom of my sock drawer.

I wanted to witness something special.

As it turned out, I did. It had nothing to do with the final score.

Pahranagat Valley won its third consecutive 1A title and 34th game in a row by beating Coleville, 40-6. The Panthers’ defensive front four — er, three — was dominant.

But at the end of the day, it wasn’t the nuances of eight-man football I found so intriguing. It was how these teams unify the little dots on road maps that represent them.

In Alamo and Coleville, eight-man football isn’t just something to do on Friday night. It’s a communion for the ages, by the ages. It’s the tie that binds generations after the chores are done.

Alamo is located 90 miles north of Las Vegas in unincorporated Lincoln County. Sixty-two students, spanning a 70-mile radius, attend Pahranagat Valley High School. Eighteen are on the football team. Many of the girls are cheerleaders or volleyball players or both. Everybody else, judging from the size of a crowd many times that of the student body, watches from the bleachers.

The man watching next to me at Arbor View High School wasn’t very big. But he looked wiry strong, like the home run hitters of the 1960s. He had rugged hands, with callouses. He said he owned an alfalfa farm in Rachel, another dot on the map, about 37 miles northwest of Alamo on Nevada Highway 375 — aka the “Extraterrestrial Highway.”

Rachel is the closest you can get to Area 51 without being abducted by aliens, those who believe in them or government officials who wear cloaks and carry daggers. Maybe that’s why Gary Castleton wouldn’t tell me his name. I had to get it from his daughter Rachel — no relation to the dot on the map — seated four rows below.

Gary Castleton is the grandfather of Cody Hosier, the Panthers’ quarterback/defensive back. Rachel is Cody’s mother. Only three of the 20 or so children Rachel was fawning over were hers. The rest were nieces and nephews, or may as well have been. The guy who kept yelling “See the ball!” whenever Coleville had it? Nobody seemed to know who he was. Probably one of the player’s uncles, though.

The first thing I do upon encountering people from small towns I’ve never been to is ask if they have a McDonald’s. Gary Castleton found this amusing. He said Alamo ain’t got no McDonald’s. Ain’t got no Arby’s, either. Used to have a house of ill repute (my vernacular, not his) before they shut it down in the 1970s. Only got one bar. It accidentally burned down. Twice.

“It’s a pretty redneck town,” Castleton said. It’s also a pretty religious town. The Latter Day Saints settled it.

Ken Higbee is the Panthers’ coach. His father, Vaughn Higbee, was Pahranagat Valley’s first coach in 1973. Father and son have nine state titles between them. Brian Higbee, Ken’s brother, is an assistant football coach and the Panthers’ head basketball coach. Ken Higbee is Brian’s assistant.

Family men, with family values. It’s the tie that binds the generations after the chores are done in little-dot towns.

“It’s what we do,” Higbee said after the Pahranagat players posed with the championship trophy, and every niece and nephew, every aunt and uncle, got to take a picture. “We grew up in Alamo. We love our kids. We’re gonna celebrate this afternoon. But we’ve got basketball practice on Monday. That’s the beauty of this school. My luck is I get to help my brother in basketball.

“That means I get to hang out with these kids some more.”

A short time before Higbee said that, the rain stopped and the sun came out. A giant rainbow formed beyond the north end of the field, showing the way to Alamo and Rachel and all the other little-dot towns where high school football is both king and communion.

Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352.