Fresno Win Sets Fast Pace for Panthers

Starting the 2021 season at 3-0 is encouraging enough for Hartnell Men's Soccer, but having one of those wins be a 4-2 speed fest against Fresno on Sept. 4 was especially meaningful, said Head Coach Daniel Ortega.

The day before they lost to Hartnell in the final game of the two-day Hartnell Tournament, the Rams team beat Cerritos, another perennial power.

"Our coaching staff and I were saying this is the best Fresno team at this time of the year that we've ever seen," Ortega said.

To beat Fresno, Hartnell scored four unanswered first-period goals, including a penalty kick.

"We actually just really blitzed them in that first half," Ortega said. "That was pretty impressive."

In fact, he said, that aggressive offense may be the key to his team's success throughout the season. In 2019, the Panthers' last season before the disruption of the pandemic, they reached the second round of the CCCAA playoffs, with just 16 total teams, before losing to Fresno 1-0.

Ortega said this year's team is capable of that level of achievement, or better.

"We have a lot of pace up front," he said. "We're fast. I mean we just pretty much turned it into a track meet against Fresno, and they just could not handle our speed. They ran out of legs."

The pacesetter has been Allan Bedolla, a 6-feet, 1-inch freshman forward Alan Bedolla from Pajaro Valley High School in Watsonville. He has scored three goals so far, including two against Fresno, plus setting up the penalty kick in that game.

But neither is it all about him. Ortega said his roster of 26 has tremendous depth. The Panthers played 20 players in both of their first two games, a 2-0 victory over Clovis on Aug. 27 and a 2-1 win against Irvine Valley on Sept. 3 in the opening game of the Hartnell Tournament. Typically, about 15 players see action, he said.

"To go the extra five players – and just the pace that we played at, I think that is probably the style of play that we would like to continue," Ortega said, "just make it a track meet and press them really high up their field with some intensity. That really paid off for us."

The team has a lot of new talent, with just five players who were with them in 2019. One of Hartnell's other early-season scorers is midfielder Isaac Zuniga, a Monterey High School graduate and second-year transfer who started out at Feather River.

Ortega described Zuniga as "kind of like our quarterback, offensively."

"He does a lot of the playmaking that kind of sets us up in those forward positions to play those forward chances," the coach said. "He's a really good player, and he's also doing the dirty work defensively."

After the Marin game, Hartnell heads to Butte on Sept. 17 and then is back home against Allan Hancock at 4 p.m. on Sept. 21.

Ortega is trying to rein in his own excitement about his team's prospects.

"We have a lot of work to do," he said. "I don't want to peak early at all. I've been doing this long enough to know that can happen. But we are off to a fantastic start, and you can't complain about that."