Riverbank High School senior Livi Fernandez achieved a landmark goal this past month, tallying 1000 points in her varsity basketball career.
The feat pales, however, in relation to the total number of points she’s scored in her lifetime, since she started playing on the hardwood court in fourth grade.
Her milestone came somewhere in the middle of the tournament game the Lady Bruins were playing in Manteca, against Oakland High School. She has played varsity basketball all four years at RHS.
In the 2019-20 season, her freshman year, she scored 202 points. Her sophomore season, 2020-21, was curtailed by COVID, resulting in just seven games, but she was able to score 151 points then.
Junior year, 2021-22, saw 518 points added to her total, leaving just 129 points to reach 1000 this season, 2022-23, her senior year.
Her mother, Olivia, reckons that she surpassed that total somewhere early in the second half of Riverbank’s tournament game against Oakland, on Dec. 17.
With the three-game tournament played last week in Turlock, sources indicate Fernandez has a total of 1113 points now. And league play starts this week, so there’s no telling what her final total might be by the end of the season.
As impressive as this may be, it is easily outdone by her lifetime total scoring. She has been playing round ball seriously since kindergarten, when she began playing with the Modesto Magic. By fourth grade, she was playing for the Hornets of Modesto, which she continued until COVID put a stop to competition.
While in sixth, seventh and eighth grade, she played basketball at Ustach School when not with the Hornets. While there, mom noted, Ustach won the championship, every year.
After COVID, in addition to playing for Riverbank High, for about the last year and a half, Fernandez has been playing travel ball with Team Creation in Modesto, a competitive team that travels outside the state.
In her high school career, Fernandez has been coached by Janelle Luu, an RHS alum who played ball here, and was a 2019 grad at William Jessup University in Rocklin.
As for her future, mom says that daughter Livi aspires to study criminology and criminal justice, hopefully at Cal Poly Pomona, UC Irvine or maybe Sacramento State.
