Ray Hamill/HumboldtSports.com – The Fortuna Huskies celebrate their NCS win two years ago.
By Ray Hamill — The H-DNL boys soccer season kicked off last month with the same old question we’ve been asking for much of the past decade.
Can anyone stop the Huskies?
And so far, the answer is no.
And although we’ve seen a couple of close calls, the Huskies continue to find a way to win and are showing no signs of slowing down.
If anything they may be getting stronger.
It is now exactly eight years to the day since the Fortuna boys lost a regular-season game to an H-DNL opponent, when they fell 2-1 to Arcata on Oct. 2, 2013.
They did lose to the Tigers in a Big 5 playoff game in 2015 after the two schools shared the league title, but since then no one has been able to knock them off their perch.
The remarkable run stretches over 90 regular season games, with the Huskies winning 81 of those and tying the other nine.
None of the other H-DNL teams have even managed to tie the high-flying Huskies since McKinleyville did so in the regular season finale two years ago, and the Fortuna boys have now won 16 straight against league opposition.
They are not just the seven-time defending league champions — and it would have been eight had the league awarded a championship last season — but they are also the two-time defending North Coast Section champs and have claimed three of the past four section titles.
Head coach Daniel Holmes has overseen the entire dynasty and deserves a ton of credit for what he’s been able to do, even considering the conveyor belt of talent that has come through the school during that time.
This year the Huskies are off to a 10-0 start, including a 6-0 run in the Big 5, and they are charging toward another conference title.
Arcata pushed them close in one of their three losses to the Huskies last month, but Fortuna rallied from a two-goal deficit to win that game, showcasing exactly why they are the champions they are.
Every week the Huskies play with a target on their back, and every week since Oct. 2, 2013, they have lived up to that challenge.
It’s been eight years of complete dominance, and the way things are going they could keep this going for another eight.
They should thank the referee’s that ref the Fortuna games for helping the team out. It is clearly a favored game to Fortuna each time we play them. And they seem to have the same “Fortuna ref’s” at every game who also have children on the team. It is not fair. The referee’s are the refs for both teams, not just one favored team.