GREENFIELD — The first time Zack Bell shared a soccer field with Caleb Mundell, he was impressed.
It was 2013, and they teamed up together as part of USF Real.
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Bell, admittedly, wasn’t very good at soccer in his younger days. He took longer to get there than his new teammate did.
“He has always kind of been good. He was always on the ‘A’ team,” Bell said of Mundell. “That was the first game I had ever played with the ‘A’ team back then. It was a big deal. We were in the little huddle, and I was like, ‘Man, this kid is crazy. He’s so good.’”
After a brief team-up, Mundell headed to FC Pride. The two were apart for a few years. When they teamed up for a second time, again with USF Real, a connection began to develop.
“He came to USF Real for one more year, and I had kind of developed better so we were on the same team,” Bell said. “We were both kind of thinking about each other, ‘Man, this kid is legit.’”
They became best friends. They arguably became better teammates.
It’s been a long, success-filled journey since their younger years, one filled with sectional championships — four, to be exact — and a slew of broken records between them.
Bell and Mundell, seniors who captained the 19-2 Greenfield-Central team all the way to the regional championship game this year, have shared so much together in the past six years or so. Now, they share a big accolade, as they have earned the distinction of Hancock County Boys Soccer co-Players of the Year.
“It’s just insane. We’ve been best friends since seventh grade,” Bell said. “It’s just really cool to see all that work that we put in, going to the fields alone, working on everything, fixing all the little things … it’s really cool to see it surface.”
“I would say it’s icing on top of the cake,” Mundell added. “It was a great season and a great way to go out, in the papers like that, having people talk about us.”
Developing chemistry
Once they started going to the same school and got onto the same junior high team, the two began to click both on and off the field.
They knew they’d end up on the same high school team if they kept at it, so they wanted to make sure they were as prepared as possible.
“That eighth-grade summer, I was probably at his house every day,” Bell said. “Since he lives so close to Brandywine (Park), we’d just take his bikes, go there with a bag of balls and go play. Make sure we’re ready.”
Bell seemed to always be playing in front of Mundell, so they naturally started to develop the connection that has been so devastating to opponents on the soccer field.
“When we went to the fields when we were younger, it was a lot of me passing to him and him shooting,” Mundell added. “We would work for hours on that. That coming to life in the records, breaking them, is amazing. It shows how much work we put in together.”
“If somebody were to go to the fields and see us all those years, just at the fields working on it, you’d see the exact same stuff you see there that we do in the game,” Bell added. “It’s a carbon copy. It’s just us working hard.”
Once they got to Greenfield-Central, the two found themselves immediately in the starting lineup.
Bell started every game during his high school career. Mundell started all but one game, a fact he hasn’t lived down over the years, as his teammates jokingly haven’t let him forget it.
They found success from the start, and they found themselves in the spotlight in a sectional semifinal against Shelbyville that season. The game went to penalty kicks. With a chance to win the game, Bell and Mundell were the next two up in the rotation for the Cougars.
“He was the fifth guy. I was sixth,” Mundell said. “I was on the sideline like, ‘Zack, you better make this. I do not want to take this.’”
Bell buried his shot, pushing the Cougars into the sectional championship game with what would be a regular occurrence during the next few years — a game-winning goal.
They won their first of four sectional titles one game later.
“We have known this group had the potential to do remarkable things,” said Greenfield-Central assistant coach Matt McConnell, who was the head coach in 2016. “In fact, when we were on the bus in 2016, driving to our sectional final match against Mt. Vernon, Caleb told me, ‘Coach, if we win this one, we will win four in a row.’ My reply was sort of to pat him on the head and reassure him they could do just that, but I didn’t think he had a clue how difficult that would be. Well, here we are in 2019, and they did it.”
Stepping up
Their freshman year behind them, Bell and Mundell were looking for bigger and better things.
“Freshman year, I feel like our class, Tyler Murphy, Brantley Kuntz, Trevor Sawyer, we were all really good friends, had really good chemistry on the field already … once that senior class left our freshman year, there was a lot of leadership and roles that opened up,” Mundell said. “I think that was kind of the year we stepped up and thought, wow, we can be something special if we keep doing this.”
Bell thought the same thing.
“I think sophomore year we had kind of developed over one year, had a little bit of experience, and we all just stepped it up,” he said. “We knew we had to. From then on, we knew we had something going there. It was something special.”
The Cougars went 13-3-1 in 2016, their freshman year, falling in the regional semifinal. They went 14-6-1 in 2017, this time advancing to the regional championship game.
They went 14-4-0 in 2018, winning a third sectional title but again falling in the regional semifinal. They stepped up one more time in 2019, finishing 19-2 and advancing to the state’s final eight, falling to eventual state champion Zionsville in the regional final, 4-3.
“That whole family thing we talk about a lot, that mindset, it had a lot to do with it. It’s our last year,” Mundell said. “This offseason I think we put in more workouts as a team than we ever did. I think that mindset, thinking it’s our last one with these guys, this family, I think that kind of turned up the volume a bit, the intensity.
“We didn’t take for granted the time playing together.”
The big senior class at Greenfield-Central finished with a 60-15-2 record in four years. They won four sectional titles. They were undefeated in conference their final two years, with a 25-3 record in the Hoosier Heritage Conference over the four years. They won three total HHC titles, two outright and one shared.
This year, both Bell and Mundell found their names in the school record books, too. They each set single-game marks in a 14-1 win against Greenwood early in the season, when Bell scored eight goals and Mundell notched six assists.
They each broke season marks — Bell with 34 goals and 81 points and Mundell with 26 assists — near the end of the year. And they both broke career marks, with Bell now holding the goals record at 76 and points record at 190, and Mundell leading all Cougars players with 46 career assists.
They couldn’t have done it without one another. Literally.
“I think a lot of my assists are to him,” Mundell said.
“Most of my goals were probably from his passes,” Bell added with a laugh.
Leaving a legacy
The county’s top players shared a lot of big moments this season on the soccer field, but one stands out possibly above the rest.
It’s not the sectional championship or regional semifinal win. It’s not clinching the conference title or breaking records.
It was a moment during the annual Blue and Gold game, a scrimmage during the first week of the season.
“When he got The Pan, that’s such a big deal. Having my closest friend win that, it was just … it meant so much to me,” Bell said. “I knew how much he’s worked for it, how much he deserved it. It meant a whole lot to me.”
The Pan is an annual tradition for the Greenfield-Central soccer team, and it’s one that started decades ago. It comes from the movie “Hook,” and it started when a player brought a pirate sword to conditioning and chased people around to get them to go faster.
That sword turned into a tradition, passed down year to year from the previous winner. It represents the leader of the team, and it’s always given to a senior. As part of the tradition, the team watches the movie during camp, then the graduated holder of The Pan passes it to the next recipient at the Blue and Gold game.
Mundell was this year’s recipient, something he said he’s humbled by. He is looking forward to taking part in the tradition next year and choosing the next recipient.
“He’s an excellent leader. He knows how to motivate people and keep them going, and he knows how to motivate specific people,” Bell said. “He’s also just an excellent player and good person.
“That’s why we balance out so well. He’s more the verbal one, telling people, and I just show with my actions. We work real well together.”
The leadership they’ve both brought to the Cougars has been invaluable, both on and off the field. Their freshmen year, they chose to sit right behind the coaches on the team bus on the way to and from away games, a sign of their dedication and commitment to learning and improving.
“They have been involved in so many conversations just because of proximity, and it has made them seem like another couple coaches at times,” McConnell said. “When you combine that with a high level of talent and a positive attitude, they are great teammates and great leaders.”
Looking to the future
The Players of the Year haven’t stopped playing soccer just because their senior season has come to an end.
They still have club soccer, meaning they are in the car together every day driving about an hour. They now both play for Millenium, based at North Central. That’s something they’ve done for all four years of high school, playing both club and school soccer together.
As they look ahead, they both hope to continue playing soccer at the next level. They don’t know where, yet, but they expect their options to increase as the club season continues over the next few months.
They do know that they want to stay close to home, somewhere in the Indianapolis area. Whether or not they end up at the same school remains to be seen, but they said it would definitely be a bonus if they did.
Whatever happens, they aren’t likely to be far apart. The Cougars soccer team is a family, after all, something they value above all else.
“Honestly, we’re just lucky to have the teammates that we’ve had. Our class, the kids under us, the kids above us, I think we’re just blessed to have really had a lot of talent surrounding us,” Mundell said. “That was really fortunate to have those kids come through in the time I was there. Freshman year, I would have never thought this would happen.”
While the record books have their names seemingly written all over them, Bell and Mundell have left a larger impact on the Greenfield-Central soccer program. They elevated everyone around them.
What they accomplished individually and as a team was special, but the program is set up for continued success in the future thanks in part to what they were able to bring to the Cougars.
“I often think an overlooked principle of leadership is that you have to bring people with you, and these two have brought everyone with them. They have demonstrated what hard work is, shown what a good attitude looks like, and have set the standard for skilled play,” McConnell said. “Aside from all of the records they broke this season and throughout their career, I hope that when people talk about these two, and their classmates, they are remembered as a group who made everyone better, because we coaches believe that is the most important thing they’ve done.”
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Nine other players join Greenfield-Central’s Zack Bell and Caleb Mundell on the 2019 Hancock County Boys Soccer All-County team.
Jump inside to Page BX to find out who made this year’s squad alongside the Players of the Year.
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