Boys, girls’ practices have begun
For the next couple of months, the weather outside will likely be more frightful than actually delightful.
After all, it is January and winter just started.
But on the heels of November and December’s World Cup, soccer is now officially underway at the three high schools in Gordon County with Calhoun, Sonoraville, and Gordon Central all starting workouts on Monday for their nearly-here season openers.
The first scrimmages for this spring (?) sport are also just days away with Gordon Central’s boys and girls teams, both of which have new coaches, supposed to workout with Lakeview-Fort Oglethorpe this Thursday, Jan. 19 at Ratner Stadium.
The Gordon Central boy’s team is coming off two consecutive trips to the GHSA 2A Elite Eight, but the man who was in charge of those teams — head coach Jeff Wiley — is now working at Ashworth Middle School and Sam Muenchen — who coached the Gordon Central girls last winter — is now in charge of the Warriors’ boys team.
He will have a lot of talent back from last year’s outstanding team, but also lost a highly-successful senior group to graduation, including the school’s all-time leading scorer in Charley Garcia, who had over 100 goals and is now playing at Shorter University.
The Warriors are also two-time Region champs, but will face new competition on the pitch in the current 7-2A with newcomers Murray County, North Murray, Rockmart and Haralson County all providing a new challenge.
Coosa has been the Warriors’ biggest Area threat the past couple of years, but the Eagles are now in Class A and they are expected to make a possible run at another state title over the next couple of months.
With Muenchen taking over the boys program, that means the Gordon Central girls have a new person in charge of their team and that will be Mederic Rodriguez.
Calhoun had three days of tryouts starting Monday and second-year head coach Tino Hernandez was releasing
his 2023 roster Wednesday night as far as who will be on the team.
The Yellow Jackets had their struggles last year in Hernandez’s first season at the helm, but they did make the GHSA 5A playoffs and that was one of Hernandez’s goals going into the year was to get the black-and-Vegas-gold back into the postseason.
They were 4-11-1 but basically took on the Who’s Who of the best teams in the state, facing such powers as Coosa, Columbus, Northwest Whitfield County, LaGrange, and quite a few others as Hernandez was looking to expose his players to the strongest competition he could find.
In fact, they were even scheduled to play Gordon Central as well late in the regular season, but that game was eventually called off or that would have been one more gauntlet the Yellow Jackets were trying to leap through.
They wound up being the second seed out of Region 7-5A going into the playoffs, but were eliminated by Northview High School in Johns Creek, 2-1.
The Calhoun girls have also begun workouts and are looking for another trip to the 5A playoffs this spring after they were second last year in Region 7-5A.
The Lady Yellow Jackets, under the guidance of head coach Taylor Sumrall, were 7-7-2 last year and also faced a tough schedule with over half the teams they played reaching the playoffs.
Senior All-Region goalkeeper
Tatum Bellinger is back in the fold along with other key players like senior defender Sarah Dupree as the Lady Jackets again hope to contend for a Region championship. They were 4-1 in the league in 2022 with that one defeat coming to Blessed Trinity, which is still a soccer power but now is in the 6A classification.
The Yellow Jackets fell to Decatur 1-0 last year in the opening game of the GHSA 5A playoffs.
Both the Calhoun boys and girls
teams are scheduled to begin their season on Thursday, Feb. 2 when the Yellow Jackets play Gordon Central in a doubleheader at Calhoun High School with the girls game set to kick off at 5 p.m. and the boys’ match afterwards at 7 p.m.
The Calhoun teams are scheduled to host Model Friday, Jan. 27 in a scrimmage before they start the regular season.
The Sonoraville soccer team has a number of excellent returning
starters from last year like Mateo Trujillo and sophomore Jose Garcia, but the Phoenix lost goalgetter Uriel Perez, who scored over 30 points last year in 18 games, and filling that loss won’t be so easy.
The Phoenix were 8-8-2 last year and went 5-3 in the Region 6-3A to earn the third seed and a playoff berth. Now they are in the six-team Region 7-4A and the new Region includes Southeast Whitfield County and Northwest
Whitfield County — which played each other in May of last year for the 4A state championship which Southeast won, 2-1.
Southeast Whitfield won 19 games and Northwest Whitfield won 15 while Cedartown won 12 more games and those three teams expect to be pretty good again this year, according to some preseason reports, so this new league will be a tough one for the Phoenix.
The Phoenix have a new head coach this year in Omar Jacobo, who replaces Marcus Palazzolo, and he will be looking to build on the success they had in 2022.
The Phoenix lost in the first round of the playoffs last year to East Jackson, 3-0, after they had missed the postseason for the two years prior to that.
The Sonoraville High School girls volleyball, softball, and now basketball teams have all done really well to this point in the school year and the Lady Phoenix soccer team will look to add to those winning ways with them currently holding daily workouts.
The Lady Phoenix had their issues last winter with a lot of freshmen and sophomores on the field and won just three of their 15 matches and one of their eight Region 6-3A games, but they have a lot of returning players from that group and have high hopes they can begin to reverse their fortunes.
Sophomores Charity Perez and Lilian Kindl were the team’s top offensive performers last year as freshmen.
Jonathan Fuller is the head coach for the Sonoraville girls soccer team.