Atascocita head coach Jed Garner reacts after being dunked with water after the team’s Class 6A boy UIL state semifinal win over Cibolo Steele to advance to the championship match at Cy-Fair FCU Stadium, Friday, April 3, 2026, in Cy-Fair.
Jason Fochtman/Houston Chronicle
Jed Garner is 0-1 coaching against his friend Jerson Carrasco in the UIL soccer playoffs.
The two once squared off on opposite sidelines during a Class 5A bi-district game in 2019. Garner was coaching Dayton at the time, and Carrasco was at Texas City.
Carrasco and his Stingarees won that match 2-0 and ended the Broncos’ season. Since then, both coaches have moved on to new programs at larger schools and found unprecedented success.
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Come 1:30 p.m. Saturday at Birkelbach Field in Georgetown, Garner will have a chance to get even. His Atascocita team will battle Carrasco’s Klein Cain squad for the Class 6A Division I state title.
It’s a matchup that pits the defending champions against the first-timers. Atascocita (21-5-3) had just four playoff wins ever before reeling off five during its current postseason run. After his team’s 4-1 semifinal victory against Cibolo Steele last Friday night, Garner watched the Texan Live broadcast on his phone as Klein Cain (18-3-5) prevailed in penalty kicks against Allen to advance.
“They’ve got a great team, and they’re the defending champs,” said Garner, who took over as the head coach at Atascocita in 2023. “They returned a lot of guys they had last year, so that experience is carrying them. They’re battle-tested. But the tough games have prepared us for this moment. It’ll be an absolute war. The kids want it, and my boys, we’re highly motivated. We’ve never experienced this before, but I think we’re built for it. I think it’s going to be an extremely exciting game.”
The soccer state championships this week, running Thursday through Saturday, will feature seven Houston-area teams — five on the boys side and two for the girls. When the UIL split the playoffs into two divisions per classification last season, it created more opportunities for Houston-area teams to break through to this stage.
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The Houston area will have a boys champion in both of the 6A divisions this year. While Atascocita and Klein Cain will battle for the Division I crown, College Park (18-3-3) and Summer Creek (21-2-6) are set for the Division II final. Houston has won nine boys state titles since the first in 1988, but a lot of those have been intermittent without any discernable pattern of dominance. That narrative has shifted recently, though, as Seven Lakes won titles in 2023 and 2024 and Klein Cain followed to extend the streak. Before the Spartans broke through, there hadn’t been a Houston-area champion in consecutive seasons ever. The closest it had come was when Klein won titles in 1997 and 1999.
Last year’s 6A Division I title game pitted two Houston-area teams as Klein Cain defeated Elsik in dramatic fashion, winning 1-0 in overtime with a goal from star forward Parker Glenn. This time around, both championship games in the state’s largest classification will feature local teams.
Dallas certainly has a case to make when it comes to high school boys soccer. But while the area’s 5A teams have captured four state titles over the past five seasons — including two by powerhouse Frisco Wakeland — the drought for 6A dates back to Lewisville Flower Mound in 2019. Taking out the canceled pandemic playoffs, that streak has officially been extended to six straight seasons.
“I think it being Houston on Houston for the second year in a row is sort of a testament to where the best soccer in Texas is being played these days,” Garner said. “Right now, it is in Houston.”
Atascocita’s Julian Sanchez (9) reacts after scoring his second goal during the first half of a Class 6A boys UIL state semifinal match at Cy-Fair FCU Stadium, Friday, April 3, 2026, in Cy-Fair.
Jason Fochtman/Houston Chronicle
What’s unique about this year’s Houston-area qualifiers is their lack of history on this stage. Summer Creek, College Park, Atascocita and Royal have never played in state championship games before.
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Summer Creek is in the midst of a massive turnaround campaign after winning just two district games last season. First-year coach Parker O’Quinn, whose hometown Forney is just east of Dallas, said his players feel an immense amount of pride in representing Houston at the state level.
“There is a lot of pride that goes behind it because these kids, all they hear is about Dallas and how good Dallas soccer is and FC Dallas and all this stuff,” O’Quinn said. “So they’re putting Houston on the map and not just on the high school scale, but on the recruiting scale. I think that’s big for these kids who are juniors and seniors and are trying to get recruited and go play at the next level. I think it’s a huge opportunity for Houston and these kids to showcase how much talent is down here and the style of play and the physicalness and the ability that there is down here everywhere.”
Summer Creek only has seven seniors, and only three of them are starters. So could this be the beginning of some sustained excellence for the Bulldogs? O’Quinn certainly believes so and said this season has revealed the blueprint for how the program can avoid the “one-hit-wonder” label.
“This season is one I don’t think that they’ll forget,” O’Quinn said of his players. “It’s a program changing season and a culture changing season. But we have good kids, smart kids, and they’re good players. So the idea wasn’t that we needed new kids. It was that we needed to build from within and really figure out an identity and a culture behind what we wanted to do. That’s what we focused on when I got here. Could we build a culture? Could we get the buy-in? And could we make the boys really enjoy each other and play for each other? Luckily, we’ve been able to do those things.”
On the opposite side of the Houston area in Brookshire, just 10 minutes west of Katy, Royal has built some solid soccer infrastructure as well. The Falcons would certainly like to put a tally in the win column for Houston, but they take more pride in representing their school, community and families.
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“I don’t think (the players) care too much about the rivalry of Houston versus Dallas or any other city,” said coach Christian Guzman, who graduated from Royal in 2013. “They’re just mainly community based and just want to make their families proud. Their pride for that is just extremely high.”
Despite those sentiments, Guzman also said it’s hard not to notice Houston’s recent prowess. Royal (28-1-1) will take on Bridgeport (21-3) on Thursday night with a chance to become the area’s first 4A soccer state champion.
“I think you can definitely see the growth that’s happening in the Houston area,” he said. “I have family in Dallas, so I go up there a lot, and when I’m in Dallas, I can’t drive five miles without seeing a soccer field. When you come to Houston, you don’t see that. But I just feel that the growth of soccer is happening, and it was just a matter of time until the Houston area started to compete with the Dallas area or the San Antonio area or Austin area. You can see that the city is starting to bridge that gap.”
While high school boys soccer appears to be on the upswing in Houston, the girls are still aiming for their first UIL state championship since Memorial won the 6A crown in 2018. Since then, Tompkins (2019), Ridge Point (2023) and Stratford (2025) have all come close to the ultimate prize before finishing as state runners-up.
Kingwood (26-0-2) and Lake Creek (17-6-2) have an opportunity to end the drought this week, but they will have to take down Dallas teams Forney (28-1) and Grapevine (18-5-6), respectively, to do so. Dallas claimed both 6A titles last year and won five straight in the unified 6A bracket before that with Lewisville Marcus, Coppell, Southlake Carroll and Lewisville Flower Mound all getting into the mix. Grapevine, Frisco Wakeland and Highland Park have all won 5A titles since 2019, and Celina will try to win a fifth straight championship in 4A this week, something that’s never been done.
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Not many state title-winning teams finish their seasons unbeaten. Kingwood, Smithson Valley (28-0) and Prosper Walnut Grove (30-0) are the only three teams, boys or girls, to enter this week’s matches without a loss. For the Mustangs, who won state titles in 1995 and 1999, the goal has been less about keeping that unblemished record intact and more about peaking at the right time.
Now they have a chance to make some history for their program and for Houston as a whole.
“For us, it’s been all about just staying together, believing in each other, being positive the entire time, especially early in the year when there’s not really a reward at the end of the tunnel,” Kingwood coach Adam Bell said following his team’s regional final win over Tompkins. “I remember just telling them, ‘Hey, just trust the process. We’re going to get there.’ It’s been a three-year build for us.”