Oftentimes, when brand new sports programs take the field for an inaugural season, the school only has enough interest to field a varsity squad. However, the Fremont Firebirds received enough interest at their informational meeting during the 2025-26 school year to play their first season here in 2026-27 with varsity and junior varsity squads. 

“Fall of last year students started talking about it,” chimed Fremont Athletic Director Dan McCune. “It was brought to me essentially during the season last year, and we weren’t going to start something up midseason. But I told them, ‘Hey, turn of the semester, I’ll add flag football to our athletics site and put up an interest survey.’ I think we got something like 50 responses on that survey.

“So by the spring we had a flag football meeting and we had a big response. 40 girls attended the meeting,” continued McCune. “Sometimes you get lots of responses to the survey and then nobody turns up to the meeting. This was not one of those cases. Every step of the way, these girls have shown up.” 

On varsity this year, seniors Valerie Cuaresma and Audie Quijas are the lone representatives for the class of 2027. However, a big junior class has shown out for flag football; 12 juniors are on the varsity roster: Kassandra Lopez-Quiroz, Allison Brunnings, Sophia Rosales Victoriano, Julienne Myles Fastidio, Zahra Saleh, Giselle Barriga Barrera, Fatima Espinoza Rodrigue, Genesis Martinez-Diaz, Ariana Quijas, Essence Moffet, Asmi Baranwal and Grace Robertson. 

While the team has taken their lumps on the field as most first-year programs do, the real story isn’t what happens on the field, but rather that there is an on and off the field to even discuss. Fremont is proud that they were able to find significant interest from girls who had never previously played a fall sport, creating an even more diverse group of student athletes and an increase in awareness for girls’ sports. 

“We have put in like 10 grand towards uniforms and equipment and the girls have shown up; it’s been a pretty positive experience,” added McCune. “We were a bit worried at first about stealing girls from other sports. We’ve had really good numbers with field hockey and we’re trying to build up numbers for JV girls water polo. There were concerns about losing numbers in those sports, but so far, we have seen these are new girls coming up, not athletes switching sports. These are girls trying sports for the first time. So that has been hugely positive.”

While Head Coach Andrew Nakamatsu Pappas’s varsity team is still searching for win number one on the season, the head honcho will potentially have a huge senior class next season, and a number of JV players will have the experience needed to move up to varsity for the fall of 2028. 

Fremont will wrap up its flag season with five more games this season, wrapping up with a finale on Oct. 21 against MacDonald. 

Previous Flag Football Posts:
Girls Sports Leveling Up: Evening the Playing Field with Flag Football 
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Santa Clara Flag Football Looking to Make History Again in Year 3