Nicole Villarreal, Sharyland Pioneer Coach of the Year on Saturday, March 13,2021. (Delcia Lopez/The Monitor | [email protected])

MISSION — Sharyland Pioneer’s Nicole Villarreal entered the 2020-21 high school basketball season in the Rio Grande Valley charged with finding a way to navigate an unprecedented number of obstacles.

Villarreal, who has served as Pioneer’s girls basketball head coach since the program’s debut season in 2014-15, returned a deep and talented team that was uncertain when or if it would return to action amid chaos on the court induced by the COVID-19 pandemic.

But despite multiple quarantines, limited practices and a schedule that was constantly reshuffled, Villarreal and her squad made the most of their opportunities.

She helped lead the Diamondbacks to a third consecutive district championship, one of the Valley’s lengthiest winning streaks and a historic run to the Class 5A Sweet 16 to earn The Monitor’s All-Area Girls Basketball Coach of the Year award.

“It’s a tribute to the work. There’s a lot of work that gets put in not just by myself, but by my staff,” Villarreal said. “It’s almost like the fruits of our labor are here. We’ve just got to continue the trend and I think it’s going to play forth in the culture of Pioneer basketball, Lady Diamondback basketball with kids wanting to be a part of the program because of where we’ve come from and where we’re going.”

It’s been a lengthy but steady climb to the top of the RGV’s high school basketball hierarchy for Villarreal and Sharyland Pioneer.

The Diamondbacks won only 9.4% of their games during the program’s inaugural campaign and posted a 20-78 record during their first three seasons.

That all changed quickly with the ascension of Pioneer’s current class of seniors.

That group of D’backs, the first to experience Villarreal’s system for three years at the middle school level, immediately elevated Pioneer to a playoff contender during their freshman year.

The Diamondbacks followed that with their first district championship and playoff appearance the next season and completed their first unbeaten run through district play during the 2019-20 campaign.

“I think it’s something that’s been establishing itself and brewing (for a couple of years). It’s just awesome to see at the end how well it’s turned out,” Villarreal said. “I do think it’s a tribute to the girls, really. … What we do off the court is going to show on the court, too. They definitely do love each other. They care about each other when things are not going well. They’ll say, ‘Coach, let’s pray,’ and things like that. It’s a good feeling to have kids with beautiful hearts.

Pioneer’s most recent season, however, became its most challenging to date.

The Diamondbacks were among many Valley teams that missed the offseason and preseason training due to the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.

That meant Villarreal and her staff had to find new and unique ways to keep their players engaged from afar and prepare them for a season unlike any other.

“I guess the beauty of it is that I have girls who watch film,” she said. “It’s a blessing to have and it’s very rare to have girls who actually want to go out there, watch the film and take everything in and be little sponges. They’ve wanted this really bad and they were going to do whatever it takes.

“All of them were doing remote learning, so they were spending time after class watching film and sending me messages throughout the day like, ‘Hey Coach, did you see this? Did you see that?’ It was a total group effort.

Sharyland Pioneer’s season was thrown into a state of flux at the start of district competition.

Quarantines at programs throughout District 31-5A turned the Diamondbacks’ game schedule into a constant work in progress and began to limit their practice time, too.

Villarreal and her staff soon found themselves using new drills to make the most of sporadic practices where Pioneer often had to game plan for three or four opponents at once.

“I can definitely say it was hard to keep a poker face coming out to practice. I didn’t want the girls to see the stress that I was feeling off the court. It was my job to make sure they weren’t seeing the back end of everything,” she said. “The whole practice routines had to change in order to get the girls ready for games. … It was just all about strategizing. There was a lot of thinking beyond Xs and Os that had to come into play throughout this season.”

Midway through the season, Villarreal revived a practice drill from her days as the head coach at Smithson Valley in Spring Branch that started with taking the air out of the basketball and re-learning the team’s offense from scratch.

“We deflated the ball because we knew we were going to go up through the Victorias and (Corpus Christi schools) and we were going to be experiencing the press defenses,” Villarreal said. “Dribbling is the worst thing you could do against any press and we needed to move the ball. As soon as the girls put the ball down, they said, ‘Coach, this ball doesn’t have any air,’ and I said, ‘Deal with it. How are we going to get the ball to the hole?’”

Pioneer experienced immediate results on the floor and sparked a 15-game winning streak to conclude the regular season and capture another unbeaten run through 31-5A.

The Diamondbacks tipped off the postseason with a home victory over Brownsville Pace that began an electrifying playoff run that saw them rewrite school history several times.

Sharyland Pioneer pulled off exhilarating come-from-behind wins against Victoria West and Victoria East in the second and third rounds, respectively, with superb fourth-quarter play in back-to-back games.

The D’backs rained 3-pointers and smothered their opponents with their full-court pressure defense in crunch time to clinch the first area and regional quarterfinal playoff wins in program history to advance to the 5A Sweet 16.

“In a lot of our practices when we do situations and put a situation on the clock, I don’t do any of the coaching and my assistants don’t do any of the coaching. The girls have to come up with a way to win,” Villarreal said. “It’s all the girls, I can tell you that right now. They turned it on when they needed to turn it on.”

Pioneer bowed out of the postseason after a regional semifinal loss to Georgetown, but not before elevating the program’s profile across Texas and the Rio Grande Valley.

The Diamondbacks became the first 5A RGV girls basketball team to advance to the fourth round of the playoffs since 2014 while establishing themselves as a regional power.

“It’s a great feeling and it’s something that I foresaw happening when this senior group came in as freshmen. That was our goal: get to the regional tournament,” Villarreal said. “I’ve got a great group of kids, a great group of parents and my staff. I can’t say enough about them because it wasn’t just me, it was them. It was an entire group effort and we each had our roles.”

Email: [email protected]

Twitter: @ByAndyMcCulloch

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