When Mike Floyd talks about Pahrump Valley High School, it sounds less like a place he attended and more like a place that helped shape almost every part of his life afterward. A 1983 graduate of PVHS, Mike was a multi-sport athlete, a small-town kid in a tiny graduating class, and a young man who would eventually circle back as a business leader, school board member, and proud parent of three Trojans of his own.
In the early 1980s, Pahrump Valley High School was small enough that everybody knew everybody. Mike’s class had fewer than 60 students. Friday nights revolved around football, spring days belonged to baseball, and the teachers and coaches were as much a part of the fabric of life as classmates.
“We only had, what, 59 kids in our class,” he recalls. “It was small. Everybody knew everybody.”
Football was his first love. As a sophomore, Mike was pulled up to the varsity squad—no small thing for a small town school that took a lot of pride in its program. That year, the Trojans made a deep playoff run. They fell to Moapa in the game that would have sent them to the state championship, a memory that still sticks with him decades later. It didn’t end the way they wanted, but being that close to a state berth in a tiny rural community cemented how special the program was.
After that season the Trojans moved up in classification, into what was then known as Class 2A. It meant bigger schools, deeper rosters and a tougher road. Those years weren’t easy, but they were formative. Mike kept grinding away at running back, taking hit after hit behind small-school lines against bigger programs.
By his senior year, he had his moment. In the final game of his high school career, against Tonopah, the hard work came together. That night he piled up enough yardage to briefly become the leading rusher in Pahrump Valley High School history.
“Took me all that time to get there,” he says with a laugh. The record would eventually fall to another Trojan—and at another point, his own son—but in that moment, it was an exclamation point on four years of hard running in maroon and gold.
Baseball season brought a different kind of success. The Trojans were small but scrappy on the diamond, and Mike was right in the middle of it. PVHS reached the state tournament his sophomore and senior years, the kind of consistency that puts a team on the map. Along the way, he set the school RBI record in a season and delivered at least one grand slam that still makes him smile when he talks about it.
Back then, PVHS didn’t yet have the on-campus baseball complex that exists today. The team played its games at Petrack Park, and the first week of every season wasn’t about batting practice or infield drills—it was about work.
“The first week of practice was fixing the field,” Mike remembers. “If you didn’t do that, you didn’t even get to play.”
Players dragged the infield, filled holes, reset bases and did whatever it took to make the park playable. There were no multiple levels in those early years, either. For much of his time, there was only a varsity team, and kids who didn’t make it got cut. By his senior year, there were finally enough players to field a JV squad and the Trojans had moved onto a field on the high school campus, though even there the players helped finish the job and make it usable.
On the walls at the old field house, longtime coach and teacher Mr. Poteete once kept records posted—RBI totals, batting averages, milestones from seasons that meant the world to the kids who set them. “Mr. Poteete used to have all those records on the wall,” Mike says. “But they’re all gone now.” He hopes some of those artifacts survived are in the local museum, a quiet nod to the history they built.
Football gave him one more distinction. Mike became the first PVHS player ever selected for the Sertoma Football Classic in Reno, an all-star game played at Mackay Stadium. The recognition caught him by surprise.
“Clark County had their own all-star game, and I was floored when I got selected for that game in Reno because I’d never even heard of it,” he says. When he arrived, organizers weren’t even sure which side to put him on. Nobody quite knew where to place Pahrump on the state’s mental map. He ended up on the East team; future Trojans chosen for the game would be assigned to the West. In Reno, he ran into players from Bishop Manogue—the same group his PVHS baseball team had just beaten to advance to state a month earlier. The competitive tension could have lingered, but it didn’t.
“That was pretty cool,” he says. “And we didn’t hate each other.”
Beyond the fields and stadiums, Mike remembers the staff who kept that tiny high school running: Coach Giannotti, Mr. Poteete, and Mr. Asmus. In a class that small, teachers were more than just names on a schedule; they were mentors, personalities, and sometimes targets of teenage grumbling. “Everybody liked him,” Mike says of Asmus, “except for Deanna,” he jokes.
He even found himself on the homecoming court, another little snapshot of a school where almost everyone was involved in something. It wasn’t a place with dozens of clubs and sprawling activities calendars—“we didn’t have many clubs back in the day,” he says—but it was a place with deep connections.
After graduation in 1983, Mike headed north to the University of Nevada, Reno. While he was there, he and his former classmate and friend Deanna were just that—friends. They had never dated in high school. But something about the distance from home changed things. Both of them had left Pahrump, and in those pre-email, pre-text message days, staying in touch meant actual letters.
They began writing back and forth. The friendship deepened and quietly turned into something more, one envelope at a time. Within two years, the two PVHS grads were a couple, and in 1985 they married. They returned to Southern Nevada, with Mike transferring to UNLV to finish his degree.
What followed was a grind most young families would recognize. In the Floyd household, work and school had always gone together. Mike had started working for his dad at 13—“in our family, when you turned 13, you had to go to work during the summer,” he says. He spent summers and breaks laying pipe, working construction with his father and brother. Coming back from Reno was no different. He went to work full-time, then shifted to a schedule that would let him finish school: classes two days a week, work the other three.
It was brutally demanding. There were long days at job sites, nights of studying, and babies at home who needed both mom and dad. What should have been a straightforward degree stretched out; he didn’t walk across the stage until 1991. But when he finally sat down with his credits, Mike realized he was close to something extra. With just a few more classes, he could graduate with two majors rather than one. So he extended his time just a little longer and did exactly that.
He earned a double degree in finance management and business management from UNLV in 1991—credentials that dovetailed perfectly with the family business he was already immersed in.
“After I graduated, I moved into the office and I’ve been kind of an office guy ever since,” he explains.
By then, Floyd’s Construction was already decades old, started by his father and built piece by piece in the valley. Mike had grown up in the trenches, laying pipe and learning the trade under his dad and older brother Bruce. When he moved into the office, it didn’t mean the work got easier. It just changed shape.
For a time, he bid nearly every job, handled the billing, managed accounts payable and receivable, and oversaw the financial side of the company. A secretary’s sudden illness and passing once forced him to learn payroll in two days so employees could get their checks on time. His mother stayed in the office for a few years after his father’s heart attack in the mid-1990s, but from then on, the responsibility has largely rested on Mike’s shoulders.
He kept one foot in business and one in education, serving three full terms—12 years—on the Nye County School Board. For a kid who’d rushed for yards on a rough dirt field and played baseball on a park diamond he helped drag himself, improving PVHS facilities became a personal mission. He helped spearhead the sod project that transformed the Trojan football field, then later supported major upgrades through the community’s “roof tax” fund, including the all-weather turf and new bleachers that changed the look of Friday nights in Pahrump.
But the center of Floyd’s life has always been his family: his wife Deanna and their three children—Katelyn, Kyle and Ande—each of whom carved out their own path through PVHS and beyond.
Katelyn, the oldest, is the one they jokingly call the quintessential “Floyd girl.” It’s a label that stretches across generations of strong women in the family—Mike’s sister, cousins, nieces—and Katelyn fits right in.
“They’re tough girls,” Deanna says. “They come from tough stock. They have to be.”
Katelyn’s toughness and competitive fire showed up early. Before there was established girls’ softball in town, Mike insisted his daughter play baseball with the boys. She stayed on those teams until she was 12, learning how to handle hard fastballs, rough infields and dugouts full of boys. When girls’ softball finally arrived, she transitioned over, bringing a level of competitiveness that had been forged on the baseball side.
Her swing was so smooth and powerful that her father still talks about it. Then longtime PVHS softball coach Rich Lauver convinced her to do something almost unimaginable to Mike: switch to hitting left-handed so she could become a slap hitter. It felt like tearing down a masterpiece, but by the end of that season she was laying down perfect bunts that died a few feet up the line, beating throws with her speed and set a run scored record (~47 runs). She became one of those players opposing teams circled on their scouting reports.
An injury her senior year could easily have ended her season and soured her on the game. Instead, it revealed a different strength. Unable to play, she turned her focus to mentoring teammate Darla Hopkins, who had just transitioned from track to softball to fill in at second base. Katelyn spent hours at practice helping Darla learn positioning, footwork and timing. By the end of the season, Darla was a first-team All-State second baseman. Katelyn never got the senior season she’d imagined, but she helped someone else reach their potential—a different kind of legacy.
She remained as strong in the classroom as she was on the field, later earning a degree in nutritional science from the University of Nevada, Reno. Unsure exactly where she wanted to go next, she followed her brother’s lead into the military, joining the Air National Guard in Reno. The only job available when she enlisted was as an aircraft mechanic, so that’s what she became—one of the people responsible for keeping massive aircraft in the sky.
From there, she kept finding new ways to serve and stand out. She identified a gap in their welding certifications and volunteered to go to Pensacola to become the unit’s certified aircraft welder. Later she transitioned into aviation roles, working her way up to flight engineer and then flight navigator. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she was assigned to the testing center in Reno and ended up essentially running the operation. Her work drew praise from both Air Force and Army leadership, and today she serves as a first lieutenant navigator in the Air National Guard, aiming to complete enough years for a full retirement.
Katelyn and her wife Kris, who works for the City of Reno and has a background in marketing from Ole Miss, share their home with a small dog named Peanut—a social-media star whose Instagram presence has helped raise tens of thousands of dollars for animal shelters across the country. In true Floyd fashion, even the family dog has become a way to give back.
Kyle, their middle child, inherited his father’s competitive streak and his mother’s speed. Like Mike, he was moved up to varsity football as a sophomore—and like his dad, he took his share of hits. In one early varsity game, a missed block left him exposed and a defender crashed into his hand, breaking his thumb. He finished the game but ultimately needed surgery and missed most of the season.
Knowing he’d need to come back stronger, the family built their schedule around his training. At a time when PVHS didn’t yet have a fully developed weight room program, Mike and Deanna took Kyle to the gym at 4:30 a.m. for two straight years. They lifted with him before school, day after day, all the way through his senior season. The result was a running back who could outrun and outmuscle most defenders he faced. By the end of his high school career, Kyle had rushed for well over 2,000 yards in a single season and broken whatever rushing record his dad had once held. “It took me four years,” Mike laughed. “He did it in one season!”
Kyle’s baseball journey took a different turn. After years of playing, a casual but stinging comment from a coach—wishing aloud that he had “a whole team” of another player—left Kyle feeling like he’d never truly be valued on the diamond. He came home and told his parents he didn’t want to play anymore. Mike and Deanna didn’t argue about the emotion behind it; they just made one thing clear: he wasn’t going to sit on the couch. If he wasn’t playing baseball, he would run track or work.
He chose track, and it turned out to be the perfect fit. Under coach Nick Moore’s direction, Kyle became one of the fastest sprinters in the state. As a junior, he became a state champion in the 400 meters and finished runner-up in both the 100 and 200. His natural burst made him a weapon in relay events as well. For all the training and medals, though, his parents still joke that he was a pure sprinter—dominant for a lap, then completely spent.
He also wrestled, often giving up significant weight to opponents as he bounced around classes to help the team. At 180 pounds, he sometimes wrestled in the 215-pound class, relying on speed, leverage and sheer toughness to survive.
After high school, Kyle continued his football career at Chapman University in California, where he met his future wife, a college athlete and now a doctor. Today, he works as a graphic designer, balancing a creative career with his favorite role of all: dad. He and his wife, Jaclyn, have two daughters—three-year-old Charlotte and baby Madelyn, born in March—who have thoroughly claimed Mike and Deanna’s hearts and given them their favorite new title: grandparents.
Their youngest, Ande, is four years younger than Kyle and grew up chasing both his older siblings and their standards. Like his brother, he played football, wrestled and ran track at PVHS. His football years came during the school’s time in the larger 4A division, facing big Las Vegas programs with college-sized facilities. The first time the Trojans walked into Bishop Gorman’s stadium for a game, Mike remembers all the parents and kids looking around wide-eyed. It felt more like walking into a college environment than a high school matchup.
On the wrestling mat, Ande carved out his own name, but his toughness showed long before he ever stepped on the mat. During one of his 4A football games, he carried the ball an astounding 49 times—a workload that might still stand as a school record and a testament to how hard he ran and how much his team relied on him. That same grit carried over into wrestling, where he finished second in state as a junior.
The following year, facing a deeper 4A bracket with nearly 20 wrestlers in his division, he battled through a long, grueling day of matches and ultimately finished fourth in the region—a heartbreaking placement, since only the top three advanced to state. He had already beaten the opponent who eliminated him earlier in the day, one of those tough reminders that in competition, nothing is ever guaranteed.
His commitment to the sport showed up in extreme ways, too. After finishing football one year at around 185 pounds, he wrestled his first match just a couple of weeks later at 160, having cut 25 pounds in an incredibly short window. In a different household, there might have been pushback. In the Floyd family, the parents kept a close eye but also understood the culture and dedication of that tight-knit wrestling group, led by coach Craig Rieger and supported by parents who didn’t coddle their kids.
Ande also spent time in track, sometimes reluctantly. There were days he’d be running laps at practice while his buddies hung around the parking lot, and his parents’ answer was simple: you either play a sport or you work.
After high school, he spent a year at the University of Nevada, Reno before enlisting in the Army National Guard. He completed basic training, returned home, and went on to study at PIMA Institute. Today he works as an X-Ray technician, applying the same discipline he once showed on the mat to a technical profession. He completed his six-year commitment to the Guard without being deployed overseas, timing that his family considers a blessing.
Both Kyle and Ande have been inducted into the PVHS Hall of Fame, a point of quiet pride for their parents. And while Katelyn has yet to receive that honor, her family and former teammates hold out hope that one day she’ll be recognized for the impact she made—as a standout player, a dedicated teammate, and a leader who helped shape the program’s success.
Through it all, Mike and Deanna have kept their marriage at the center. They recently celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary, a milestone that stretches all the way back to those handwritten letters passed between the college adventures life took them on in the mid-1980s. Their lives now are full of granddaughters, grand-pets, adult children with careers and service records, and the daily work of a still-busy construction company.
It all traces back to a small high school in a small desert town, where a young running back got pulled up to varsity as a sophomore, played baseball at a park field he helped groom himself, and met the girl who would become his wife. Decades later, the lines on the fields are sharper, the bleachers are bigger, and the town has grown—but the heart of Mike Floyd’s story is still rooted at Pahrump Valley High School.
