Varsity boys’ basketball faced off against Justin Sienna on January 21.Tam went up early 15-9, but couldn’t hit many shots in the clutch, leading to a 44-49 loss to Justin Siena.

Watching the tall Braves team hit the court, it seemed as if Justin Siena was going to dominate inside, but because of a good game plan by Tam and bad shot attempts by Justin Siena this wasn’t the case. The Hawks came out wanting to take advantage of their smaller size and outrun their bigger opponent. “Our mindset coming into this game was that we needed to run. They are a slow team, they’ve got some big guys and we just wanted to take advantage of that,” junior point guard Asher Wenig said. “We definitely thought we could out run them on the court today,” After the first quarter Justin Siena’s Alex Aquino was able to make critical plays for the Braves. “He (Aquino) was a big part of their game plan. He got into the lane a lot, which was the cause of a lot of open passes,” Wenig said. “He got easy shots, we need to play better defense on him. He was really the key of their team.”

Tam went into the fourth quarter trailing 34-31, and found it easy to get extra possessions, but had a hard time taking advantage of them. Power forward Brendan Austin finally did, when he hit a critical acrobatic layup with 1:20 left in the game, to bring Tam within two. Tam got the ball back with 37.1 remaining, but couldn’t capitalize on the possession, so they were forced to foul Aquino.  After making both free throws, Justin Siena went up by four with only 26.1 left in the game. Tam small forward Lorenzo Jordan was fouled with just 13 seconds left, but he missed both free throws sealing the win for the Braves. “I thought we played sub-par today,” Tam head coach Michael Coffino said. “We need to get better at playing 32 minutes of basketball.”

You can watch the full TBN broadcast of this game, commentated by Randy Shapiro and Riley Kuffner, at the top of the page.