Smaller Carson scored in big ways for Southside

The Prep Rally: Best in the West series will highlight the all-time best players in western Arkansas as selected by the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

After one year of being a three-sport athlete at Fort Smith Southside, Wes Carson had a tough decision to make and chose to put football and basketball aside in order to focus more on soccer.

It became the right move for Carson, who became the school's all-time scorer when he played for the Rebels from 2010-13.

"Soccer started to get pretty serious," Carson said. "College coaches were starting to recruit me, and I was also on the youth national team. I was traveling a lot. Once a year, we would go to Costa Rica or Mexico or we would go out of the country and play these week-long tournaments with the national team.

"I just wasn't willing to risk an injury by playing basketball or football. And my soccer game grew pretty tremendously."

Carson started to show glimpses of his soccer talents when he scored four goals in as many games before his freshman season abruptly ended with a broken collarbone. He bounced back to score 20 goals as a sophomore on a team with its share of older players, then he scored 30 goals as a junior and a school-record 38 goals in just 18 matches his senior season.

And he did it while playing one of the more unlikely positions for a player of his stature. While many coaches prefer their taller players to be around the net for corner kicks and set pieces, there was Carson -- all 5-foot-7 and 135 pounds of him against the big boys.

"Wes was very deceiving for a player his size," said Mauricio Maicel, who was Carson's coach at Southside from 2010-12 before he took over at Northside before the 2013 season. "Nobody expected the short kid to do what Wes did out there.

"He had this unbelievable vertical leap for a kid his size. He also had the speed to pull away from players from the get-go. He was just a gritty player and very well-rounded."

The one statistic Carson enjoys sharing about his time at Southside took place during his senior season. He missed the Rebels' first four matches because of his involvement with U.S. Youth Soccer and was playing in Costa Rica, but he came back to score at least one goal in every match he played.

Carson, however, was forced to sit out Southside's first meeting that year against Northside as a result of receiving two yellow cards in a previous match, which results in a red card and an ejection. In the following match against Little Rock Parkview, Carson released his frustrations and scored six goals in limited action.

"I scored three goals in the first five minutes and the coach [Dave Marshall] took me out," Carson said. "He put me back in during the second half, and it took me 10 minutes to score three more. We ended up winning 6-0 and I scored all the goals."

"Two games before that, we were playing Conway when I received the red card, and it was a questionable red card. Because of that, I missed the game against Northside, which is a big rivalry game for us. So I was super angry. I came back against Parkview and let it all loose. My head was down, I was driven and there was no stopping."

Carson went on from Southside to play soccer at Central Arkansas, where he started 61 of the 66 matches he played and scored 23 goals. During his time with the Bears, he was named to the Missouri Valley Conference's all-freshman team in 2013, then earned first-team all-MVC honors in 2015 and second-team All-MVC honors the following year.

He now resides in Dickinson, N.D., where he works with Tradehome Shoes.

Wes Carson set a school record when he scored 38 goals as a senior at Fort Smith Southside and earned the Gatorade boys soccer player of the year for Arkansas in 2013.