The Battle Mountain High School softball team made the trip along I80 to Lovelock this past weekend for the Pershing County tournament. The Lady Longhorns open Northern 2A play this weekend at Silver Stage.
The Battle Mountain High School split four games as part of the Pershing County tournament to start the 2025 season. Battle Mountain traveled to Winnemucca on Thursday, Feb 27, and beat the Lowry JV 9-1.
There’s nothing like the end of a Pershing County High School sports season. Last week, on winter sports awards night, Lovelock families gathered in the high school auditorium to honor the spirit squad, the boys and girls basketball teams and wrestlers. The 2024-25 sports year was loaded with firsts, almost and dramatic moments. For the first time, the spirit squad cheered not only for basketball but for wrestling.
The NCAA Football Rules Committee announced Friday it would propose that a team be charged with a timeout if one of its players falls to the ground on the field because of an apparent injury after the ball is spotted for the next play. Feigning injuries, sometimes at the coach’s instruction, has become a tactic defenses use to slow down tempo offenses or as a way for an offense to avoid a delay-of-game penalty or get an extra timeout.
The spring weather lasted just long enough for Lovelock to host its three-day softball and baseball tournament last weekend. Visitors included the Elko and Lowry JV teams, Battle Mountain, Oasis Academy, Dayton, White Pine, Yerington, Quincy, and Sparks. The Pershing County High School baseball team went 2-2 over the weekend, beating Sparks 9-7 and the Lowry JV 13-10.
With the spring sports season starting earlier and earlier on the calendar, one never knows what to expect weather wise. In the past, the Lowry High School track and field team did its best to avoid rain or snow in beautiful northern Nevada in early March. The Buckaroos changed that all up and headed to Patterson, Calif., this past Saturday to open its season with the 6th annual Tiger Rustbuster Invitational.
The Lowry High School baseball team packed its bags and gear up and made its way to Needles in Southern California last week to begin the year at the Colorado River Invitational. The Buckaroos were competitive all weekend, picking up one win in four games and are 1-4 after a busy three days in the California desert.
It was long days and seemingly later nights but the Lowry High School softball team accomplished what it needed to during the Colorado River Invitational in Needles, Calif. The Lady Bucks left last Wednesday for southern California and didn’t finish play until late Saturday afternoon, reaching the bracketed semifinals before getting eliminated. Lowry, with some new faces in the lineup, along with some veterans, went 4-2 in six games. One of those new faces, freshman Makinley Hislop threw a perfect game against Elko.
The 2024 election may be over, but the legal battle about how long Nevada can count mail ballots — a proxy battle over the future of mail-in voting — remains ongoing. On Thursday, the Democratic National Committee asked a federal appeals court to deny an appeal filed in a nearly yearlong legal case brought by state and national Republicans seeking to end Nevada’s practice of accepting mail ballots as many as four days after an election, as long as they were postmarked by Election Day. In May, the Nevada Republican Party, the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee filed a lawsuit alleging that Nevada’s practice of accepting those mail ballots violates federal election law. That lawsuit was dismissed in July by U.S. District Court judge Miranda Du, on the grounds that the plaintiffs lacked standing.
Some officials are claiming that the termination letters that dismissed 2,000 probationary, non-firefighting employees of the U.S. Forest Service mean fewer people and less resources will be available to help prevent and fight wildfires. The Forest Service firings are part of a wave of federal worker layoffs, as President Donald Trump’s cost-cutting measures reverberate nationwide.
On Valentine’s Day, thousands of probationary federal employees — typically those who have been in their current role for less than a year — received similar notices that they were being fired for “performance”-related reasons. The firings were swift and often confusing, with employees being locked out of their government emails before they could get any answers. Federal agencies have not released data on firings by state. But in a state where the federal government owns more than 80 percent of the land, job cuts coupled with the federal hiring freeze implemented by President Donald Trump could lead to a slowdown of services everywhere from wildfire management to veterans’ hospitals to nuclear research.
In a response to rising traffic fatalities throughout Nevada, state lawmakers are proposing to increase traffic penalties and authorize harsher enforcement. But laws already exist to punish reckless driving, and legislative efforts being considered this session won’t address the underlying conditions that make roads hazardous, argue critics of the proposals. Nick Shepack, the Nevada state Director of the Fines and Fees Justice Center, urged lawmakers to consider ways to make roadway infrastructure better to increase safety and reduce speeds.
Bills in Brief —
RENO — Researchers at the University of Nevada, Reno have unveiled 200 sorghum varieties that could be a game-changer in the food, brewery, dairy feed and biofuel industry. Preliminary research underscores their exceptional drought tolerance, with some varieties also exhibiting record levels of protein and digestible starch. The breeding program for the sorghum varieties was established in 2017 at the University’s Experiment Station, a unit of the College of Agriculture, Biotechnology & Natural Resources, to develop water-efficient crops suited for the semi-arid Western U.S.
CARSON CITY — Optimism among the nation’s small business owners dipped slightly in the latest monthly Small Business Optimism Index from the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), but it was still above its 51-year average and for a third consecutive month. “That it came in above its 51-year average for the third month in a row is huge,” said Tray Abney, state director for NFIB in Nevada. “For 34 consecutive months prior, it always registered below the 51-year average. What it means is that the optimism we are seeing coming from Main Street entrepreneurs might become the permanent feature we need to finally have a robust economy extended over time and not an occasional occurrence. Something Congress could help by not letting the 20% Small Business Deduction lapse at the end of the year and the Nevada Legislature could support by resisting any proposals to tax and regulate more.”