Carpet capital Dalton becomes soccer mecca amid Hispanic population growth

The carpet mills deserve some credit. Many of the county’s star players are Hispanic children of families that have moved to Dalton to work in the carpet industry.

Now, there’s a multi-school soccer dynasty in town.

“It’s something everyone is really proud of, especially in the Hispanic community,” said Dalton’s 32-year boys soccer coach, Matt Cheaves, whose Catamounts have won seven state championships, the most recent in 2023. “It’s something that brings the community together, and not just the Hispanic community. There are a lot of others, fans of the Catamounts that come out to support us, whether there’s a kid on the team or not.”

More titles could lie ahead.

Dalton’s boys are ranked No. 1 in Class 4A entering this week’s first round of the state soccer tournament. MaxPreps ranks Dalton’s boys No. 7 nationally.

Northwest Whitfield’s boys (13-2) are No. 4 in Class 3A, and Coahulla Creek’s boys (9-4) are No. 9 in 2A. Southeast Whitfield (10-5) is also a boys state qualifier.

The girls’ teams also are good, though they haven’t won a state title yet. Dalton’s girls (12-1) and Northwest Whitfield’s girls (9-5) have top-10 rankings, and Coahulla Creek (12-6) and Southeast Whitfield (9-7) have winning records.

While most Whitfield County sports programs endure waves of success and hardship over the years, soccer has become a constant.

It wasn’t too long ago when Dalton’s football team was in the midst of 50 consecutive winning seasons, the only program in the country making such a claim.

This season, Catamounts football finished 0-10 for the first time in school history. Southeast Whitfield football went 1-8 with a non-region schedule, and no Whitfield County school won a playoff game last year.

The shift to soccer

Whitfield County’s shift to soccer is a trend unlikely to reverse anytime soon.

With Latino immigrants staffing the carpet mills over time, Cheaves has seen a gradual, steady demographic shift. His first season coaching Dalton came during the 1993-94 school year. The county’s population was overwhelmingly white then, with less than 4% minorities, according to a report released in June 1994 by the University of Georgia’s department of community affairs.

Today, 37.5% of the county’s 105,070 citizens are Hispanic or Latino, according to Census.gov.

Cheaves said in the early 2000s, the Catamounts shifted to a mostly Latino program. By 2003, the Cats won their first state title, in Class 4A which they split with Heritage from a bordering county, Catoosa.

During those early years, current Southeast Raiders coach Miguel Garcia played under Cheaves, graduating in 2001. He was part of those first all-Latino teams at Dalton that put Whitfield County on the soccer map.

“It started in youth soccer,” Garcia said. “I moved here in eighth grade, growing up in Southern California, where baseball was the preferred sport in my area. When I moved here, everyone was playing pickup soccer games, and so I switched to soccer. From there, there were Hispanic youth leagues that had been developing since the 1980s, so we joined that in middle school. We spent our whole youth playing in those leagues. We weren’t traveling like an academy, but we were competitive.”

Garcia describes those local Hispanic soccer leagues as being organized by parents in the community. He’s watched it grow over time, adding more age groups and divisions. In addition, there was a Hispanic church league that provided an opportunity for the older youth to play against adults.

“That’s what really sharpened our skills,” said Garcia, who took over the Raiders in 2023, after a run that saw the program win three 4A titles between 2017 and 2022.

By the late 2000s, the soccer talent spread beyond Dalton and to other Whitfield County programs. Coahulla Creek opened in 2011-12, but the boys teams have had only one losing season compared with two state championships, winning 3A in 2021 and 2023 under Aurelio Jacobo.

“All the coaches in the area, outside of Dalton High, saw those 150 to 200 kids trying out for the team, and a lot of players were left off the team,” said Jacobo, who took over the Colts in 2018. “Us coaches were saying that if we can have that group bleed out into the other schools, the area would be dominating a lot more than you see because there’s so much talent.”

In addition to Dalton, Coahulla Creek and Southeast’s 12 combined titles, Northwest Whitfield’s boys won 4A in 2018, Christian Heritage, a private school, won class A Division II in 2023, and Dalton Academy won class A Public in 2022.

Dalton Catamounts football is still big on Friday nights, and the school made a big hire this offseason, getting Chris Prewett from Roswell to rekindle its glory years.

But is it fair to say Whitfield County is a soccer town now?

“Don’t crucify me, but I’m going to say it is,” Garcia said.

Todd Hudgins is in his fourth season hosting “Monday Night Futbol,” which airs locally on Optilink and streams on YouTube. The show spotlights the players and people behind what they refer to as “Soccertown, USA.” He said when the idea of a show was presented, local sponsors were immediately interested.

MNF has an arrangement with Coahulla Creek, Dalton, Northwest and Southeast where those schools play an in-season, round-robin schedule to determine the Soccer City Cup, which Dalton has won all four years.

“The sponsors realize who their constituents are,” said Hudgins, a Northwest Whitfield Class of ’96 alumnus. “This demographics change started over 20 years ago, and the sponsors and everyone else are now catching up. They recognize the value in a show like ours. ... When the recreation departments started focusing their resources on the communities they serve, it went from 100 players having to share a single soccer field to having multiple soccer fields to play on. Then the academies came in, and now everything is geared toward soccer.”

The numbers grow

Whitfield County Recreation Department athletic manager Ryan Hollingsworth said registration numbers have swollen from 250 kids when its soccer program began in 2015 to 800 to 1,000 kids now. Hollingsworth also estimated Dalton’s recreation leagues register between 2,500-3,000 kids each year. Finding enough volunteer coaches to run the growing leagues has been a challenge, he said.

Conversely, the recreation department has seen football rec league numbers drop from 1,000 kids a year to 450 this year, but the latter number includes flag football participation.

The Hispanic youth and church leagues still exist today, but they don’t hold the relevance they once did, Garcia said.

“Around 2015, maybe a little earlier, we became more of an academy-driven community,” Garcia said.

Garcia and Jacobo said they have players on campus who could help the program but choose to play for academies full time.

Another reason the area’s soccer dominance probably won’t die down soon is that a lot of the players return to the area after college. All of Cheaves’ assistants once played under him. Jacobo played for nearby Murray County in the early 2010s.

“You have all of these immigrants who came here strictly to work at the carpet mills and who built up the community,” Jacobo said. “Their kids are staying involved in the community and are coming back to the high schools to help. You have siblings who have older siblings participating in these different championship runs over the years.”

As Hudgins pointed out, some area stars stay local in college, with seven of the 26 players for Dalton State, which just won the 2024 NAIA men’s soccer national championship.

Dalton also is home to a pro soccer team founded in 2018, the Dalton Red Wolves of USL League Two, an affiliate of the Chattanooga Red Wolves, a League One club.

“It’s just pride,” Garcia said. “That’s the best word to put out there. Pride and togetherness and positivity.”