The Shelbyville Central Golden Eagles Boy’s Soccer team under head coach, Chris Fritz, is in the midst of a multi-year run that the program has not seen for some time. The defending District 9-3A champions are a little more than two calendar years removed from the first state tournament appearance in school history, but are optimistic that won’t be the last either. 

“In the past few years, things have really turned. We obviously made state two years ago, and I think we are headed back in that direction, but really it’s the character of individuals on the team,” Coach Fritz said. 

Shelbyville Central went 10-8-5 according to MaxPreps this past spring, but their season ended in a closely contested 1-0 loss to perennial state power, the Brentwood Bruins, in the Region 5-3A semifinals. Unfortunately, the Golden Eagles were supposed to host that game since they were district champions, but heavy rainstorms early that evening forced the two teams to move the game to Siegel High and play on a turf field instead, essentially eliminating any home field advantage Shelbyville was supposed to have with kickoff taking place after 9:00 p.m. 

Despite all this, Fritz was able to recognize the massive growth in the program with his takeaways from that game.

“We try to play Brentwood every year, they are the hub of travel ball in Middle Tennessee, and my first year here we lost to them 9-0. There was no mercy rule, I can’t remember if there was a running clock or what, but I do remember that horrible feeling afterwards,” he said. “Then, this past season, yes Brentwood dominated the run of play, but I felt like we actually had quite a few dangerous chances in the second half where we felt like we could tie this thing up. We had so many juniors on that field. We do lose some big players out of that group, but our program has gotten to where, yea, we’ll have some ups and downs, but the program itself will kind of guide us through those years when maybe the talent isn’t as high. What we can do now is compete, and that is a great feeling.”

Fritz is about to embark on his 12th year in charge of the Golden Eagles soccer program, and despite the extremely successful seasons on the field recently, he definitely still remembers where he started, and when he wasn’t able to compete so regularly. He himself is an alum of Shelbyville Central, and he got his start coaching soccer as an assistant coach here in Shelbyville under the former Coach Gordon. Fritz remembers a moment early on that helped lay out a potential vision of his future.

“I went to SCHS, and I was an assistant already in the program when I started, and Coach Gordon, who was here for a long time before and built up all the facilities, said to me in the middle of my first year, ‘I’m only doing this for a couple more years this is probably going to fall into your lap and I want you to be ready and really consider if this is the life you want,’ and it was tough.”

After a year or so had passed with Fritz not having come to a decision one way or the other, he experienced something extremely meaningful that improbably set him on the path he is on today.

“The uniqueness of this program is that you get to know each other really well, it’s always been this way,” he explained. “My mom passed away in either my second or third year as an assistant coach, and we had a game that night. I almost never miss games, but we knew for this that there were some decisions that needed to be made. We kept the team updated and were transparent about what was going on, and on the way back, the very first call I got was from a player on that team after they tied a team that was supposed to run them off the field, saying, ‘Hey Coach, I just wanted to let you know that I love you and the only reason I played so hard was because I know what you’re going through.’”

“When he said those words, that changed my whole path,” Fritz emphasized, “For a long time it was all about winning, and I love winning, but there’s also this larger picture here of how many of these people are going to come back in the community. The connection with every individual person is something that you don’t always necessarily see at a bigger program. For example, a lot of these upcoming seniors, I coached them in travel when they were 6, 7, 8 years old, and so seeing them get to finish their local journey? I got to see them in the beginning and the end which is really neat, but in a bigger town I wouldn’t be that connected. I wouldn’t know every kid, like ‘Hey, I saw him when he was six, and now he’s a senior!’”

Shelbyville Central is in the biggest school classification in the state – 3A in soccer for example – but still has the feel of a small town school, at least in the community, despite the immense growth both in the town of Shelbyville itself and the school over the years. 

All that growth seemed to culminate in 2022 when he led the Golden Eagles to the Boy’s Soccer program’s first ever state tournament berth. Ironically enough, they were drawn to matchup with Brentwood in the first round.

“2022 is the only time it’s happened in boy’s soccer here. “Those guys were workers,” Fritz said. “We practiced in the summer, and they came to every summer practice. We had guys that were laying concrete working with their dads and they would come into practice with mortar and concrete mix on their hands and they’d wash their hands off, put their cleats on, and get to practice. They were all very tight with each other but also very great leaders. It was a special group.”

“They definitely changed the course of things and the expectations here.”

The only student-athletes left in the program from that 2022 team are soon-to-be seniors that were freshmen that season. Fritz explains that he played almost 20 guys in that state tournament game total, something he has never done before in any other year – except for any blowouts of course – because the freshmen were that talented and committed. Now, they are the leaders of the 2024/25 team with a journey that still has quite a few chapters left to be written, starting in this summer.

“Right now, in early days, we are looking at the commitment level of guys. Not everyone obviously because we have some playing football, so we’re not going to demand that, but we are going to see who is working hard, who is getting extra touches, and who can play where,” said Fritz.

This year, there will also be some time in the fall semester to reconvene and train some more before the calendar turns to 2025.

“For the first time, TSSAA is allowing us two weeks of fall practice, kind of like how football gets some time for spring practices,” Fritz explained. “We are  still working through the dynamics of what we are allowed and not allowed to do, like we know we can practice but is it like football where we can have a jamboree? What is the limit? So that will be brand new, but we hope for everyone to hit the field in the beginning of November.”

That extra work will be crucial to help bridge the gap for not just some talented incoming freshmen, but also players that played football and had to miss out on the summer training sessions. These summer training sessions have been extremely beneficial for members of the team that are available as they learn the scheme and playstyle that Fritz likes his team’s to try to play.

“Something unique that we have kind of done is that we adapt to what we have. Some coaches have a set scheme, I’m more of a style of play guy rather than a scheme guy. We have a set style of play that we will try to play in, but if that doesn’t work with what we have, I’ll pivot to something else,” Fritz continues. “The actual system varies, and this summer we have added some really unique pieces out wide. Used to be where we really only had one dominant wide player, now we have multiple quick and technically sound wingers. Midfield is mostly returning outside of Alex Sebastian, who was so important to us last year. Our backline will be a little fresh with us having to replace both starting center-backs, and our goalkeeper situation is a little fluid at the moment.”

Sebastian was at the crux of everything the team was doing on the pitch; he was the segway from defending to attacking, and a master at controlling the tempo of the game. He played what Fritz calls the “quarterback of the team” in that central defensive midfield role, but Fritz thinks some younger guys are more than ready to step up and he loves the tenacity from the rest of his team overall.

“This summer, the level of energy I’ve seen from our captains, they’ve brought so much energy this year,” he said. “Several of them got minutes in the state tournament game in 2022 as freshmen, and they want to succeed in the region. The freshmen coming in had a dominant season at Harris, and seeing them come in and add to the mix is good too.”

“We’re checking the temperature of the team, and right now it’s pretty good.”

One other interesting thing about the program that Fritz has noticed is the family ties to former players at Shelbyville Central.

“We’re hitting a group of players, like this season we have a senior whose father played at SCHS, and we are about to get a whole slew of those kids, at least seven or eight of them over the next few years,” he said. 

Lastly, Fritz recognizes the growth of the sport in the county as a whole, and not only welcomes that, but he relishes it as long as the county remembers its roots.

“Cascade has obviously been on the upswing getting close [to the state tournament] the last few years, and I think that’s because we have much better youth soccer here,” he said. “I want everybody’s apple to be shiny in Bedford County because we’ve worked hard. Soccer is a hard world to crack into [in the United States] because you have established programs, and unfortunately it’s not just all about athleticism, there are so many technical things as well.”

“This family/community environment is also something we can’t let disappear. We’re a bigger town and county than we have ever been, but at the end of the day we still have a lot of ties. Bedford County is a place people want to be.”

With the dawn of a new school year on the horizon, Fritz won’t be able to hold practice with his players until the beginning of November. After those two weeks, he’ll next see his team in early February to get ready for what promises to be another exciting season at the Eagles’ Nest.