SHELBY — Wednesday's Hart/Shelby game featured two first-year coaches familiar with the rivalry, and the most recent iteration of it was one of the more hard-fought.
A quick start by Hart helped propel the Pirates to a 3-2 win over their archrivals in a game that featured a ferocious effort from Shelby to tie the game late. The effort level by both teams was such that multiple players got banged up down the stretch and had to leave the game.
Both coaches - Guillermo Ortega for Hart and Cristian Arellano for Shelby - once wore the red and black of the Pirates in the rivalry, but for Ortega, who was playing for Hart just a few years ago, being on the winning side as a coach trumped anything he enjoyed as a player.
"It's the greatest one (I've been part of), honestly," Ortega said. "Something about doing it as a coach, every win just feels a lot better than when I was on the field. It just feels great coaching these boys. They do everything I ask of them."
"It was fun. I've never been in that type of environment," Hart top scorer Anthony Parra said of the atmosphere, which was loud and boisterous even amid the rain. "It was for sure different, and it's good to be in those environments. It gets you hyped up."
Things got started quickly for Hart (8-2-3, 5-1-2 West Michigan Conference). Ortega challenged Parra to get a shot off within the first two minutes of the game, regardless of the shot's quality. Parra didn't quite hit that deadline (his shot came 2:49 into the game), but he made up for it by launching a perfect bomb of a free kick from about 40 yards away after a Shelby foul, and his shot sailed over Shelby keeper Oliver Gorton's outstretched hands and into the net to open the scoring.
Parra later added a second goal, also from long distance, to give Hart a 2-0 halftime lead. The Tigers (7-7-1, 4-3-1 WMC) had a goal waved off due to an offsides call between Parra's tallies.
Parra is one of a slew of talented freshmen on the Pirates' team, and he said he's confident in his ability to connect from long range because he's done it before on his club team. The wet and windy weather, he said, also played a factor in the Pirates firing long shots.
"We knew that the grass was wet, so a lot of the shots that we shot from far distance, they were hard," Parra said. "(We thought) they were going to go in, so we just kept shooting and trusting our plan, and we got a lot in the back of the net."
Hart kept the pressure on early in the second half and narrowly missed adding to its lead multiple times. The Tigers hung in, though, and even after their own top scorer, Christian Llanas, left the game with a leg injury - he later returned - they managed to get on the board when Shelby turned a transition opportunity into a Cesar Cadena goal with 18:15 to go.
Hart, though, came back with another long bomb with 10:49 to go, this one by Adriel Belmares, who fired a gorgeous 30-yard shot in traffic that barely eluded a diving Gorton to make it 3-1.
The Pirates' success from distance was somewhat ironic considering how many opportunities they had to score at close range, but Ortega has complete confidence in his players' offensive strategy.
"I have full trust in everything they do," Ortega said. "We know we can hit the ball. Just being patient at all times. There's times I just let these boys play and do their thing. They can ball out. Everybody has it in them."
Shelby again did not surrender, scoring less than a minute later when Javier Cervantes got loose and fired a perfect shot of his own that keeper Kaleb Edenburn got a fingertip on but was unable to turn back.
Hart's Anthony Parra (7) and Kacen Klotz pressure Shelby's Christian Llanas during Wednesday's game at Shelby.
Every coach preaches not to give up on a game, but Arellano said his players seeing the result of that recently when they scored with 10 seconds to go to defeat Ravenna has raised their confidence in similar spots.
"We've been working on just continuing to play," Arellano said. "Don't stop...I think they're believing in themselves a bit more every game."
The Pirates aren't lacking for confidence, either, due to a very strong WMC season to date, despite fielding a team largely composed of underclassmen. Hart sits in a second-place tie in the WMC and recently played perennial league power North Muskegon to a tie.
"I tell them every day, we belong with all these teams that we've played against," Ortega said. "I keep telling them to turn heads, flip the script, and they've done excellent. These boys, they're to be proud of."
Arellano, who's familiar with players on the Pirates as well as his own team due to his experience coaching at youth levels, enjoyed the experience of coaching in the rivalry as Ortega did, but for him, the ending wasn't quite as sweet.
"I think it was a really good game," Arellano said. "I think it was a hard-fought battle between both teams. I know some of the players from Hart, and I'm happy for them, but still a little upset."
Both teams will enter the district tournament expecting to compete. In a district where almost every team has beaten one of the other top teams, the title appears to be very much up for grabs.
