Just more than a year ago, Little Rock Central's results might have seemed like a fluke.
An 11-2 victory against Little Rock Hall. Then a 15-0 win over Little Rock McClellan. Twenty-nine goals in three games en route to a 3-0 start for a team that had won just four games during the previous two seasons combined.
The Tigers never got to see where that unbeaten start would take them. After beating eStem 3-2 on March 9, 2020, the coronavirus pandemic canceled the rest of the spring sports season.
But 358 days later when the Tigers knocked off a Little Rock Christian side that's currently 5-0 in the 5A-Central, second-year Central Coach Andrew Cates and his team realized they're further along than even they anticipated.
"They have a sense of the history, and they know that we've been on the downhill side of things," Cates said. "A lot of these guys played when they were freshmen and sophomores, so they've been through it and taken it on the chin for a couple of years.
"They understand how hard it is to win in this conference. Now they expect excellence. They're expecting to win."
The Tigers hold a 9-1-2 record and are unbeaten in their past 10 games, including a 5-0-2 mark in 6A-Central play.
The most notable of their results came eight days ago when they tied Conway 2-2 in a game that Central led 2-0 early.
"When we went away from playing the 14th-ranked team in the country [Conway] and we were kind of upset at the time, I knew that we were where we needed to be," Cates said.
Cates pointed to the Tigers' senior leadership as the key to building on last year's short but fiery season. Three-year starter Johnathan Coulter, one of Central's two captains, leads the state with eight goals and nine assists, and classmate Eli Sanders has six scores.
Central had struggled for several years and had not won a playoff game since 2012. Enter Cates, who did not play the sport but had been a head soccer coach twice previously.
"It's really been [mutually] beneficial," said Cates, who also serves as the defensive coordinator on the Tigers' football team. "They're getting a little football discipline and a little football toughness, and then a little bit of intensity that I bring as a football coach."
Going into the season, Central believed it could snap its nearly decade-long postseason victory drought. Now the Tigers believe a 6A-Central regular-season title is within reach -- something that could set them up for a deep May run.
"Their soccer IQ is through the roof," Cates said. "They just needed some of the finer things as far as winning goes."
BENTONVILLE GIRLS
Tradition continues
Bentonville has been a force in recent years, making five consecutive semifinal trips and winning Class 7A state championships in 2016 and 2017.
Much of that success is a credit to former coach Kristina Henry, who racked up more than 300 victories, seven state titles and a run of 12 regular-season conference crowns.
When Henry retired last April and moved to California, it was a fair question to wonder whether Bentonville could sustain its dominance.
The Lady Tigers have answered that in the affirmative thus far.
Bentonville (9-0-1, 6-0-1 6A-West) enters the final three weeks of its regular season unbeaten, with its lone draw coming against Fayetteville, who is also unbeaten at 9-0-2.
New Coach Steve Porter, a Briton who jumped to Northwest Arkansas after spending his first two-plus decades in the United States around Little Rock, said the Lady Tigers were the only team for which he would've made the move.
"This was the best opportunity," Porter said. "The school district is really strong, the athletics are really strong, the facilities are amazing, and it was just too good of an opportunity to turn down."
He's been rewarded with a young group -- there are just two seniors among 36 combined varsity and junior varsity players -- that has given up just three goals and held its opponents off the scoreboard in seven of 10 games. Porter starts five freshmen including Star Chesshir, who scored twice in Friday's 3-0 win against district rival Bentonville West.
"We're all new," Porter said . "[With] the program that Coach Henry established ... I wasn't going to come in and change a bunch of things. But having said that, with so many young players, it was easy to help reestablish the standards that already been set."
RUSSELLVILLE BOYS
Waiting for conference test
Russellville would've loved to play Friday.
The Cyclones (8-3, 6-0 5A-West) were set to take on an 11-0-1 Van Buren team before the game was canceled due to the threat of thunderstorms.
Russellville has encountered the Pointers in past battles -- both in and out of league play. But the scheduled conference matchup could have been a reminder of why the Cyclones are two-time reigning Class 5A state champions.
Nonetheless, Coach Jared Fuller remains excited about his team's prospects.
"We really thought it would be a rebuilding year," Fuller said of a team that graduated seven seniors in 2020. "[It's a product of] the program we have in place and the intensity with which we do things. We did a lot of focus in the offseason in the weight room, trying to get some kids that were going to be sophomores bigger and stronger."
That's helped replace the likes of 2020 Gatorade Arkansas Boys Soccer Player of the Year Dylan Rice, now at the University of Central Arkansas, who scored 27 goals and logged 38 assists in 2019.
Although Russellville has just four returning starters, senior captain Caleb Gray has given the Cyclones a lift on the offensive end. In six of its eight wins, Russellville has scored three or more goals.
"The rest of the conference is struggling a little bit this year," Fuller said when asked what his team needs to do to win a third straight state title. "We need to continue to challenge ourselves."