Sports

Red Valley Cove athletics begins at square one

By Quentin Jodie
Navajo Times

RED VALLEY, Ariz., April 30, 2011

For Lee Zhonnie, expectations were met when four athletes initially signed up for this year's Red Valley Cove High track team.

The school, which lies on the west side of the Arizona-New Mexico border, is in its fourth year and on April 23 the Miners competed in their second track meet of the year at the Page Invitational.

The four students - Gregory George, Josh Paytiamo, Cedrick Charley and Machelle Etsitty - competed in four events at the meet, but there were no official results at press time.

"I am glad these students came out to represent themselves and represent the school," Zhonnie said. "I hope for the next year the students will see what they're doing and maybe they'll do something for themselves."

As the only senior on the team, Paytiamo admitted he felt skeptical on whether they would compete this year.

"Our school is really small and I thought track wasn't going to be available because there weren't enough runners for cross country last year," he said. "You have to have a fair amount of people willing to do it."

According to Zhonnie, it took awhile before the school went from the planning phase to what it is now.

"The community needed a school and there is a long story behind it. We're excited about this new high school," Zhonnie said, who also serves as the president of the Red Valley Chapter. "But we wanted to try to keep our own kids here in Red Valley."

In the past, the students in his community were bussed into nearby Shiprock, which is 30 miles down the road, and currently some of them still go there. But eventually he's hoping future students, who attend the day school, will give Red Valley Cove a try.

"We're a brand new and I think the parents aren't sure to send their kids here because they're looking at what we have," he said. "We're working on getting a new gym, we're working on getting baseball and softball fields and hopefully someday it'll be there."

But in the meantime, Zhonnie said they had to do without as the volleyball and the girls' and boys' basketball teams played their home games at the local day school.

"We use their gym and it's just right down the road," Zhonnie said. "We played a lot of teams this year and next year we want to add a few more schools."

Currently, the Miners play an independent schedule. But in the next few years athletic director Tom Riggenbach is hoping they can become a member of the Arizona Interscholastic Association.

"We've had pretty full sports schedules and being an independent we can't qualify for state," he said. "Definitely we want to be part of it and right now we are treating ourselves like an AIA school with how they run their guidelines."

But there are positives to being an independent school as the Miners participated in a race near White Sands in Alamogordo, N.M., last month.

"We do a lot of running throughout the year," Riggenbach said. "These guys actually did a thing in New Mexico, the Bataan March, which is a 15-mile race. It's a lot different from this."

As for the track team, Zhonnie said they have no facilities to run the program like the bigger schools. And to prepare for the Page Invite, the Miners had to improvise.

"We mostly try to maintain their running, but we also have the kids do some throwing events," Zhonnie said. "For the shot put and discus we measured out a circle in the dirt and we told the kids to keep yourself inside the circle."

Etsitty and Paytiamo took part in the throwing events at a recent meet in Kirtland, N.M., and they all had different things to say about their experience.

"I thought I did really well," Etsitty said. "The discus was fun, but there were some girls that threw it a lot farther than I did."

Paytiamo, however, said he scratched on a couple of his throws and finished somewhere near the 80-foot mark.

"I only practiced it once and we did that at the baseball field so this was new," he said. "Coach just told us to give it a try."

Riggenbach said it's best they experiment with the different events because "track has an event for everybody."

"If you're big and strong you can throw stuff and if you want to run fast or run far you have it," he said. "You just have to find an event you like."

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