Jones takes control for Bentonville West

The hottest player on the hottest team?

That’s freshman forward Tianna Jones of Bentonville West, which will carry an eight- game winning streak into today’s Class 6A state championship game at 10 a.m. against Fayetteville.

Bentonville West (12-6-2) is the No. 4 seed from the 6A-West Conference while unbeaten Fayetteville (16-03) is the league champion and No. 1 seed.

Jones has five goals in three state tournament games for Bentonville West, which beat Conway 1-0 in overtime to advance to the championship game at Benton. Jones had two goals each in wins over Fort Smith Northside and Bryant and she broke a scoreless tie with a goal in the second half against Conway. Bridget McSpadden then won it for Bentonville West in overtime after Conway scored with nine minutes left in regulation.

Jones, 15, is not a typical freshman. Both of her parents are soccer coaches and Jones has extensive experience on the club circuit while playing in Tulsa and Kansas City, Mo.

“Tianna is an experienced and savvy player,” Bentonville West coach Alex Castillo said. “She not only has the physical ability, but she has the cognitive ability as well with her thinking to affect the game out there.”

Coaches in the 6A-West Conference took notice of Jones in her first season as a varsity player. Rogers coach Oscar Cardona compares Jones as a freshman to one who developed into a star player for the Lady Mounties.

“Tianna reminds me a lot of Jourdan Badely as a freshman,” Cardona said of Badely, who’ll play next season at Arkansas State. “She is driven and motivated when she plays. She has shown maturity on the field and proven that she can play with whoever. She stepped up to the plate when her team needed her the most. You don’t see a freshman doing that very often. Tianna will definitely be a player to watch.”

Jones leads Bentonville West in scoring with 10 goals despite missing five games with a fractured fibula in her left leg. She credits much of her emergence as a freshman to her parents, Tiffany and Chris Jones, both of whom are coaches, and to getting started early in soccer.

“I started playing soccer when I was three years old and competitive soccer on a team when I was eight,” said Jones, who plays in the summer with Sporting Blue Valley Elite in Kansas City, Mo. “My mom and dad helped me a lot with soccer growing up. They taught me the basics.”

Bentonville West lost twice to Fayetteville during the regular season and the Lady Wolverines’ 1-3-1 start included a 4-1 loss to the Lady Bulldogs on March 16. But Bentonville West has overcome plenty of adversity beginning last year when Castillo spent 10 days in the hospital and missed eight weeks of schools after testing positive for covid-19. Castillo eventually recovered and Bentonville West began to roll in conference play, capped by a 1-0 victory over rival Bentonville High, its first win in the short, five-year history between the schools.

West then defeated Springdale Har-Ber 4-0 before winning its first-round state tournament game 3-1 against Fort Smith Northside.

“We were pretty much a new team at the beginning with a bunch of girls that hadn’t really played together,” Jones said. “But that Bentonville win gave us a lot of confidence and showed that we were really, really improved. From there, it’s been full on with a lot of momentum.”

Fayetteville squeaked past Mount St. Mary 2-1 before beating North Little Rock 4-0 in a semifinal game at Springdale Har- Ber. The Lady Bulldogs are an experienced team with nine seniors on the roster, including star forward Maddie Wilburn and goalkeeper Haley Woodward, who signed with Houston.