Russellville boys soccer wins 5A state title

Russellville’s Walker Payne, No. 12, heads the ball during the Class 5A state-championship game May 18 at Razorback Field in Fayetteville. The Cyclones beat Siloam Springs 1-0 to win the state championship.
Russellville’s Walker Payne, No. 12, heads the ball during the Class 5A state-championship game May 18 at Razorback Field in Fayetteville. The Cyclones beat Siloam Springs 1-0 to win the state championship.

RUSSELLVILLE — Jared Fuller is just 38, but his Russellville Cyclones presented him with a fifth Arkansas state soccer championship last weekend.

The Cyclones won the Class 5A title, knocking off Siloam Springs, 1-0, at the University of Arkansas’ Razorback Field.

The latest trophy will join Class 6A hardware from 2012, ’14, ’15 and ’18 in the Fuller/Russellville trophy case.

“They definitely get harder to do, but the ability to do it two times in a row when nobody thinks you can because you’ve lost 10 seniors [from last year] made this one very special,” Fuller said. “I told them before the final that they’d already exceeded my expectations, but I think that fueled them more. They thought I didn’t believe in them. I told them, ‘No, I just meant you’ve already done a lot, and I want you to play relaxed.’”

They did — and this one was special.

The Cyclones, who finished 19-4-1, avenged two close regular-season

losses to Siloam Springs with the 1-0 championship win. The two teams played in the title game four times in the past five years; this was Russellville’s third win in that series.

Wesley Robinson’s goal provided enough offense for the Cyclones. Fuller praised the defensive work of junior keeper Jorge Mendoza and senior defender Shea Collins.

The Cyclones, who graduated 12 seniors off this team, had lost seven starters among those 10 departed seniors from the 2018 championship team. Fuller knows he’ll have another rebuilding project for 2020.

“It gets harder after two big classes in a row,” he said. “We won’t have the depth, but we will definitely have a strong starting 11 in place.”

• • •

Fuller grew up in North Little Rock, where he played on North Little Rock High School’s 1998 state-championship team.

While he’d played soccer since he was 3 and went on to play at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway— and his parents were educators — he hadn’t necessarily planned to coach.

He’d done sports medicine in high school and earned an athletic-training degree at UCA. He volunteered with the Russellville program for his internship in 2004, working under the tutelage of former coach Gary Stratton, whose son had been Fuller’s UCA teammate.

“Stratton told me, ‘I plan on retiring next year; do you want this job?’” Fuller remembered.

So Fuller became a Cyclone.

At that point, Arkansas high school soccer had fewer classifications, and Russellville was in the largest, along with bigger schools such as Rogers and Springdale, prior to their splitting into two high schools.

“We were the little guy,” Fuller said. “That was the hardest part then — we’d play teams who had 80 or 90 show up for tryouts, and we’d have 50 trying out. That first year (2005), we missed the playoffs, but every year since, we’ve made it. But going into the state tournament as a third or fourth seed, it was always difficult to advance.”

As more schools added soccer, the classifications expanded. Russellville has competed in Class 5A, 6A and 7A.

“In 2010, we had the best year [of the schools in Class 7A], but we got beat in the final by [Little Rock] Catholic, who we’d beaten three times that year,” Fuller remembered.

The Cyclones dropped to Class 6A in 2011 and reached the championship but fell again. In 2012, they won their first state title.

• • •

The Cyclones’ strength in 2019 was resiliency, Fuller said.

“They had the ability to not let anything bring them down and to learn from the things that happened,” the coach said. “Our weakness was a lack of maturity, but then we developed that throughout the year. Those two things go together.”

Besides the two losses to Siloam Springs, Russellville also lost to De Queen and Rogers Heritage and tied Conway. Russellville’s benefit game ended in a tie with Springdale, which went on to win the Class 6A title.

But Fuller said this time last year, he wasn’t so sure of his team’s chances to defend its title.

“We always want to set those goals,” he said. “We do 10 summer workouts to check on the guys along the way; then after school starts, we have offseason every day until tryouts in November.

“I don’t think all the pieces were there until after tryouts. Until then, I didn’t see the football guys or the progression of a couple of players.”

He mentioned several of those pieces.

“I give credit to [senior] David Bonilla, a football player, who was that missing piece,” Fuller said. “He’d played every year, but he won our Most Improved Player award. He changed his body and his mindset and became a dominant midfielder.”

Robinson, another senior, was named MVP of the state tournament.

“He moved over from Dardanelle at the end of his 10th-grade year, and he was a huge asset for us,” Fuller said. “He had the foot skills and the size and the speed when he got here, but he definitely developed as an overall player after he got here. He became a big team player.”

Senior Justin Fuentes was important as team captain.

“He’s a great tie between the Hispanic and the white players,” Fuller said. “He really believes in me and the educational system. Some guys who get here later in their academic careers don’t care as much about academics. Soccer is what pushes them.”

Fuentes, along with several other Cyclones, is being recruited by the University of Arkansas Community College at Rich Mountain.

He recalls another conversation with Fuller that turned into a game-changer.

“After one conference game with Siloam Springs, he told us we pretty much had to step it up, that we weren’t as good as past teams, so that’s something that added to the chip on our shoulder,” Fuentes said. “We wanted to work harder to prove him wrong.”

Another motivating factor, he said, was to become the first team to win both conference and state titles for Fuller.

“Nobody had ever done that for him before,” Fuentes said. “They’d won either one or the other, but not both.”

Fuller also praised the work of Bryan Nava and Osmin Herrera, who returned for their senior seasons after not playing as juniors.

“They came back this year and found their places,” Fuller said. “Overall, the dynamics between certain players changed — they understood they had to talk to them, had to pass them the ball more instead of being so selfish.

“You grow up and mature as a team and as a person. Some guys had that mindset, ‘It’s all about me.’ Then they realized how close it was, and at that point, it became all about the team and the goal we had.

“Really, I didn’t think it was possible until midway through the season, when I saw some players becoming unselfish and fixing the problems we had.”

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