The District 11 basketball playoffs officially begin tonight when Pleasant Valley travels to Bethlehem to take on Liberty in a Class 6A girls first round game.

Quarterfinal games in multiple classes are scheduled for Friday and Saturday.

No. 9 Pleasant Valley (11-11) at No. 8 Liberty (10-12)

TIPOFF

... Tuesday, Feb. 22, 7 p.m. at Liberty

COACHES

... Pleasant Valley: Dan Muir, Liberty: Jarrett Carnes Jr.

LEADING SCORERS

... Pleasant Valley: Sam Merklin (12.87 ppg), Aryn Stivala (10.68), Drew Morgan (4.7), Katelyn Honadel (4.1). Liberty: Layla Orth (9.0), Emma Pukszyn (8.6), Tamia Bruce (6.3), Ruby Miller (5.9)

NOTES

... Pleasant Valley (11-11, 8-8) is the ninth seed in the 6A playoffs. “For us to finish .500 in both league and overall was a great accomplishment,” Pleasant Valley head coach Dan Muir said. “With injuries and so forth and all these different things we dealt with, it was quite a challenge.” ... PV faces Liberty in a first round game. The teams, both members of the Eastern Pennsylvania Conference, played each other on Jan. 18 - with Liberty prevailing 62-15. However, Muir didn’t let the loss bother him or his team, as Pleasant Valley went 5-3 in the last eight games. “It was the last game of a pretty rough stretch for us,” Muir said about the Liberty game. “We had some really good quality opponents and one of our main players (Merklin) was injured and thought to be out for the year, but she’s back now. We played them, we know what to expect from them.” The winner of tonight’s game will face top-seeded Easton, who was undefeated in the regular season before falling in the EPC playoffs, Friday in a quarterfinal round game ... Unlike most teams, Muir pointed out there wasn’t much of a gap from the last regular season game (Feb. 17) to the first playoff contest. PV closed out the 2021-22 regular season with wins over Stroudsburg (42-35) and Northern Lehigh (50-17) to put them at .500. The victory over the Mounties clinched PV’s playoff berth, as it allowed them to end its EPC schedule with a mark of 8-8. The game with Northern Lehigh was a makeup game from an earlier postponement ... This is Pleasant Valley’s seventh straight year participating in the District 11 playoffs. The last district win for the Bears came in 2018 when they defeated Pocono Mountain West, 50-44. PV won a district title in 2003 ... PV is getting most of its players back at a critical time. Leading scorer Sam Merklin and Drew Morgan both missed several weeks during the season and Ella Muir returned two weeks ago after a prolonged absence.

QUOTABLE

: “The competition level is pretty high in the EPC. Our biggest challenge was consistency, basically kids being like if we had an injury or a kid being sick, it’s tough for us to overcome. We didn’t have a lot of depth coming into the year. Our biggest challenge was the depth, and then the combination of the depth with the injuries/kids missing time did many things.”