Coach, three players selected for All-Stars
■ Crenshaw, Shull, Sifuentes and Lewis to represent Siloam Springs on June 21 in Conway.
Siloam Springs will be well represented at the Arkansas High School Coaches Association AllStar soccer games next month.
Second-year head soccer coach Brent Crenshaw, senior girls goalkeeper Anna Claire Lewis and senior boys midfielders Austin Shull and Francisco Sifuentes were selected to participate in the game, the Arkansas Activities Association announced this past week.
The girls game will be played at 5 p.m., followed by the boys game at 7 p.m. June 21 on the purple and gray playing surface at Estes Stadium on the campus of the University of Central Arkansas in Conway.
Crenshaw, who guided both the Siloam Springs boys and girls to Class 6A state championships for the second consecutive year, was announced Tuesday as the head coach of the West boys in a press conference held in Little Rock.
“The AAA goes big time on this,” Crenshaw said. “I was impressed.”
Crenshaw has coached in three all-state games in Oklahoma, which is similar to the AHSCA All-Star games in Arkansas. But taking part of Tuesday’s press conference was a different experience for Crenshaw.
“For them to bring all of us together, dressed up in a conference room and hold a press conference to introduce the coaches for soccer, baseball and softball was a new experience for me,” Crenshaw said.
Crenshaw will be joined on the West staff by Rogers head coach Stephen Peck, who led the Mounties to their first state soccer title with a 5-3 win over Springdale Har-Ber in the Class 7A state title game on May 20, Darren Chandler of Prairie Grove and Cory Sturdivant of Hot Springs.
The East Boys All-Stars will be coached by head coach Tyler Woods of Beebe and assistants Amanda Carter of Jonesboro Westside, Richard Friday of Bryant and Miguel Mondragon of Hamburg.
“It was nice to meet my coaches on staff, which I already knew one,” Crenshaw said. “It’s going to be fun and a learning experience to learn from these coaches that week.”
The head coach for the West girls is Bijan Timjani of Texarkana, whose Lady Razorbacks team lost to Siloam Springs 4-0 in the quarterfinals of the Class 6A state tournament in Siloam Springs on May 12. The West girls coaching staff will be Todd Eskola of Pulaski Robinson, Stephanie Mitchell of Prairie Grove and Michael Riba of Vilonia.
The East girls will be led by Larry Stamps of Searcy and assisted by Michael Klucher of North Little Rock, Kim Paslay of Brookland, and D.J. Vincent of Little Rock Parkview.
Crenshaw will have the opportunity to coach Shull and Sifuentes one more time after the Panthers went 21-5-1 during 2017 and won their second straight Class 6A state title. The Panthers are 37-11-1 in two years under Crenshaw with two 6A state titles, and the 21 wins in 2017 were a single-season school record.
Shull, a senior captain for Siloam Springs, scored six goals and tallied 10 assists during the season, including an assist in the 4-0 win against Mountain Home in the Class 6A state finals. Shull was All-Conference as a junior in 2016 and All-State as a senior this past year.
Sifuentes, who was thought of as the fastest player on the field for the Panthers, also scored six goals and had three assists in 2017.
Lewis, meanwhile, was a four-year letterman and four-time state champion for the Lady Panthers.
As a freshman, she split time in goal with then senior Bailei Brown before manning the position on her own over the last three seasons.
Lewis signed to play in college at Harding in Searcy. She was an 7A/6ACentral All-Conference selection as a sophomore and junior in 2015 and 2016 and an All-State selection in Class 6A as a senior for Siloam Springs in 2017.
The Lady Panthers have gone 64-25-1 with four straight Class 6A state titles over Lewis’ four years as a Lady Panther, including a 36-11-1 mark and two championships under Crenshaw.
“Obviously, the three kids that were selected to the all-star game are very deserving as far as their talent on the field, but we couldn’t ask for three better kids to represent out program and community,” said Crenshaw, who is 73-22-2 overall at Siloam Springs. “These three young men and woman representative everything that we have tried to install in our kids: Commitment, self discipline and play for the team on your jersey, not the number on your back. I’m so incredibly excited for these three Siloam Springs soccer players. I am also pretty excited to coach Austin and Francisco one more time and then be there to watch Anna Claire do her thing.”