Fremont Firebirds Cooled Off by Los Altos Eagles

The Fremont Firebirds fell to the Los Altos Eagles 53-38 on Jan. 13, a tough loss after a hot start to the season.

The Fremont Firebirds basketball team came into its Tuesday, Jan. 13 road matchup with the Los Altos Eagles scorching hot. One might even say that Fremont was, like its namesake suggests, on fire. Fremont entered the evening 8-5 overall and 3-0 to open up league play. Meanwhile, the Eagles seemingly flew into Tuesday’s matchup through turbulent skies, holding a 3-9 overall record and a 1-2 mark in league.

The Firebirds were the clear favorite heading into the match on paper, but as we know in sports, they don’t play the games on paper. In actuality, the Eagles ended up cooling off the Firebirds to the tune of a 53-38 victory for the home team. Perhaps the visitors came in overconfident?

“I think we spent too much time looking at the standings,” admitted Firebirds Head Coach Jason Townsend. “We try to avoid that, but the kids know for sure [where each team is in the standings] 100%. And tonight, we just didn’t come to play. We laid a big egg. That was frustrating to watch. We will go back, we will practice tomorrow. We have a game against Lynbrook coming up, who I think is the best team in our league.”

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Fremont fans will hope their team gets back on track quickly, as the El Camino league appears to be much stronger than in seasons past. No team can be overlooked. In this particular loss, Townsend pulled his starters just over a minute into the second half after the Eagles extended the team’s nine-point halftime lead to 13. Reserves off the bench then played the remainder of the third quarter and only fell further behind by a single point by the end of the third. Fremont entered the fourth quarter down 14.

While the starting lineup didn’t have the performance it would have hoped for, coach Townsend was complimentary of two of his role players off the bench. Senior Matthew Ramirez and junior Tomer Hadas each did their part in keeping the game within reach. After falling behind as much as 17 in the third, the Firebirds briefly cut the deficit to nine in the fourth quarter.

“Matthew is super committed, does everything really well, and is very athletic. He’s the only guy on the team who can dunk,” chuckled Townsend while praising Ramirez. “He’s a really good guy, really good student and probably our best pure score guy who can go in and do it. I need to find more minutes for him.

“Tomer is probably one of my favorite guys; I love him personality wise. He’s just got to lock in a little bit tighter with some of the stuff we are running,” remarked Townsend. “But he can score and he can shoot it. He was able to find that scoring touch tonight.”

Fremont will need its bench stars to keep their scoring touch and their starters to find that scoring touch when they host Lynbrook this Friday, Jan. 16.