PRINEVILLE — Twenty years ago, in the early stages of his basketball coaching career and long before taking over the girls basketball program at Crook County, Bob Boback received a grim phone call from his doctor.

What was supposed to be a routine check up turned much more dire when a CT scan revealed that his right kidney was 90% covered in tumors.

“The doctor said: ‘Drop everything you are doing, go to your urologist right now,’” recalls Boback, a waterfront Teamster in Tacoma, Wash., at the time. “‘You might die if you don’t get this done.’”

He had his tumor-laden kidney removed on Oct. 20, 2004, and then was back coaching the Gig Harbor High School girls basketball team just a few weeks later.

Now he’s in his 22nd season as a coach, his fifth at Crook County, and the cancer has never returned.

It’s fitting that on an evening during which both Crook County basketball programs wore “Pink Ribbon” jerseys and the student section dressed in pink to honor breast cancer survivors, that the Cowgirls, a team that began the season with high hopes before losing their best player and losing games in bunches, all but secured the program’s first league title in more than three decades.

“I’ve had better teams,” said Boback, who picked up his 300th career win in the first game of the season in a 39-24 victory over Marshfield. “But this team just keeps on fighting.”

The 48-9 win over Estacada on Monday night was Crook County’s eighth consecutive victory. The Cowgirls have a perfect record in Tri-Valley Conference play and have a two-game lead over The Dalles with two games remaining.

One more win against either Madras on Friday or Gladstone next Tuesday will clinch the first out-right league title for the Cowgirls since 1992.

“It is surreal,” said Crook County senior wing Chloe McKenzie. “The basketball program hasn’t been the best over the years, but it has been building. Even with the setbacks we’ve had, it’s going to continue to build.”

The Cowgirls came into the season with aspirations of reaching the Class 4A state tournament for the third time under Boback.

They returned sophomore Anna Bales, who burst onto the scene and proved to be one of 4A’s top players as a freshman, earning all-state honors. McKenzie returned from missing the previous season with a knee injury. And there were talented incoming freshmen in Hayden Kecker and Hanna Zapf, both eager to make an impact.

All was going according to plan until the second game of the season. The Cowgirls were up big over Baker when Bales drove toward the basket.

“I went to drive to kick the ball out and I stepped wrong,” Bales said. “I felt my bones shift. I hadn’t felt anything like that before. But I didn’t think it was that bad.”

It was bad. An MRI showed a torn ACL and meniscus in her right knee. The nine-month recovery meant that Bales season was over just as it was getting started.

Then came five straight losses for Crook County — granted, three of them came against teams currently in the top-10 of the 5A OSAA rankings — and four more losses in its next seven games.

Entering Tri-Valley play, the Cowgirls had a 5-9 record, 2-9 without Bales.

The three games before starting league play were a low point for the Cowgirls. They lost by 19 to La Grande. The next day, they lost to Baker — a team they had beaten earlier in the season with Bales — also by 19. Then they capped off the non-league schedule with another loss to a team they had beaten earlier in the season — a 64-48 loss to Mountain View.

Boback had to take some of his own advice.

During the fall, he was asked to give a presentation at the Oregon Basketball Coaches Association’s Nike Coach of the Year Clinic on how to use different defenses to slow down opponents. For instance, how to slow down a player like Courtey Vandersloot, which he had to do while coaching against the future WNBA champion and All-Star in Washington.

But the main point he hoped the coaches on hand would take away was to not try to force a square peg into a round hole.

“One thing that I’ve learned is that you have to do what you have to do,” Boback said. “Not what you want to do.”

Through the first 14 games, he was trying to force a square peg into a round hole by running the same offensive and defensive schemes they would use with Bales still on the floor.

Their press and zone defenses weren’t as effective, and they were getting gashed in transition. The offense wasn’t effective.

“I had to walk my own talk,” Boback said. “And stop doing what I want to do and start doing what I have to do.”

The offense became more simplified, moving players around into different roles and in turn, the Cowgirls began to show improvement. Seemingly, a new player leads the team in scoring each game.

“He had to find a new way to coach to help all of us,” McKenzie said. “In doing so, it helped everyone’s individual game develop and in the long run it helped everyone play together.”

What seemed like a lost season just a couple of months ago is turning into a banner year for the Cowgirls.

“When Anna first got hurt there was a lot of unknown about how the season would play out,” McKenzie said. “We found our togetherness throughout the adversity through working hard. With how league has gone, it has really shown us how far we’ve come.”