La Mirada High sophomore Gene Roebuck (left) and senior Julien Gomez are the scoring machines that are helping the Matadores remain as candidates for the CIF-Southern Section Open Division playoffs next month. La Mirada currently sits at 17-4 with seven games left in the regular season. PHOTO BY LOREN KOPFF.
January 14, 2025
By Loren Kopff • @LorenKopff on X
If one is a lonely number, then for the last season and a half, neither La Mirada High senior Julien Gomez nor sophomore Gene Roebuck have had to worry about being alone on the court. The two scoring machines have made the Matadores more of a thorn in the side of opponents last season and this season as the team is banking on a spot in the CIF-Southern Section Open Division playoffs, which begin next month.
It wasn’t easy in the beginning for La Mirada head coach Randy Oronoz, who admitted he had to build their trust in each other when Roebuck set foot on the campus, knowing that Gomez was already making a name for himself as one of the prolific boys basketball players in Southern California in two seasons with the Matadores.
“It wasn’t easy,” said Oronoz. “I would say it took a year. This is the year that they’re finally realizing a little bit more that when we play these big time schools, [they’re] going to need each other. We forget about guys like [senior] M.J. Smith, who wants to play college basketball and is growing into a role as well. It’s a great blessing to have guys who want to strive to be better. But they just have to trust what we’re doing. At the beginning of this year, I said it’s not about your points, Gene; Julien, it’s not about yours. This is basically only about winning this year. It should always be about that.”
It also wasn’t easy in the summer of 2021 for Gomez and Oronoz as an ankle injury right after eighth grade graduation sidelined the future star until the fall season.
“To be honest with you, I wasn’t really too bummed out because I always had the faith I was going to come back stronger, and my mom kept telling me that while I was hurt; that I was going to get better,” said Gomez. “I didn’t take [the injury] too bad. I just had a positive mindset; it really didn’t phase me.”
“For me, you look at the kid and you don’t think he’s very special; you just don’t know, he’s a freshman,” said Oronoz. “He checked into school maybe one day after school started. So, we didn’t know if we were going to get him or not get him. I’ve never seen him play before.”
Oronoz recalls Gomez ended up playing a little pickup game at John Glenn High as La Mirada’s gymnasium was being renovated. It was during a random fall practice where the team was working on a three-on-three drill when Gomez and two other players were working on a certain type of formation and those three won the drill.
“I went home, and I told my wife, ‘I think our freshman could lead us in scoring this year’,” he remembered. “It was an hour and a half practice, and he just shot it really well. I think I’ve been doing this for a long enough time to see…now, I didn’t know he was going to be this special. But I knew he would probably lead us. We had good pieces that year, too; we made it to the CIF championship that year as a matter of fact. It wasn’t like he was coming on a rebuilt team. This team had been building up.”
Gomez’ debut was a scrimmage against Esperanza High and in just a half, because Oronoz wanted to get other players some playing time, he scored 17 points. Gomez remembers he was out of shape but was surprised he had scored that many points and admitted he thought he had scored around 10 points.
Growing up, Gomez spent half the time living in Norwalk with his father and in Huntington Park with his mother, and in fact, he has lived in La Mirada for only a couple of years. Gomez and Roebuck didn’t know about the history of La Mirada boys basketball until setting foot on the campus, meaning neither knew of former standout Derrick Williams (2006-2009) until they were freshmen. Williams ended his high school career scoring a little over 1,700 points in three seasons at the varsity level.
“I think we’ve done a pretty good job of evaluating the kids’ talents here,” said Oronoz. “Remember, I do skill developments on some of my staff as well. So you can find out pretty quick who’s the guy and who’s not. With that class, it was his cousin, [senior] Chris Perez, it was M.J. Smith, it was [senior] Jarrett Cole. Those are the guys that we’ve had for a long time, and [senior] Jaydin Cox came in his sophomore year. Hopefully, we were helping them grow as players and mainly young men of character.”
After scoring 500 points as a freshman, Gomez turned it up a notch the next season, eclipsing the 1,000-point plateau as he scored over 30 points 13 times, including a career-high 44 points against St. Anthony High a few games into his sophomore campaign. Still, there was little mention of Williams or any comparisons of two of the best to have ever worn a La Mirada uniform.
“I never get any comparisons, maybe because we’re two different ball players,” said Gomez. “He’s like a 6’6” slasher; built really tall and I’m like this smaller guard, more finesse and not really physically dominant, I guess. We just have different games.”
Gomez said reaching the 1,000-point mark in less than two full seasons didn’t hit him as much, and in fact, he treated that game as just another day. Even to this day, it still hasn’t hit him that he is currently the school’s all-time scoring leader.
With seven regular season games left in the playoffs, plus a handful of playoff games left in his high school career, the next player to possibly surpass Gomez is Roebuck, who has a different beginning to his time as a La Mirada player. He was indecisive as to where he was going to begin his high school days and admitted La Mirada wasn’t one of the big schools or one of the bigger options he had.
But last season, he bettered Gomez’ freshman season by scoring 658 points, posting a career-high 44 points on Dec. 28 against Branson High and had half a dozen other games of over 30 points. Like Gomez, the 6’5” Roebuck also cracked the 1,000-point mark as a sophomore, doing that against Basha High two weeks ago in the Nile Tournament of Champions Tournament. Including a 25-point performance against Rancho Cucamonga High last Saturday, Roebuck currently has 1,075 points.
“I warn my freshmen that are elite like Julien and Gene that there is a sophomore slump,” said Oronoz. “I do warn them. You have to remember, Julien’s first game, we played Capo Valley Christian at St. John Bosco, [and] we lost in overtime. He was getting boxed-and-one by a Division 1 player who played at Pepperdine and Julien had 27 points in his first game of his high school career. We knew he could have big games, and it was almost unfair for him in his freshman year because when he wouldn’t have a big game, our coaches would get on him.
“That sophomore year, he really built his consistency of averaging 24 or 25 points a game,” Oronoz continued. “He had a lot of games over 30 points; a big credit to our point guard, Sean Cervantes at the time who was just phenomenal. Sean, I think, led the state in assists that year, and a lot of it had to do with Julien.”
Oronoz’ brother, Johnny, was the third leading scorer at La Mirada. He averaged 22 points as a sophomore, 23 points as a junior and 25 points as a senior and had the scoring record before Williams.
“I tell people this all the time, when you pass 1,000 points in high school, you’re a really good high school player, said Oronoz. “When you do it your sophomore year, now it’s just, ‘can you get to 2,000’? He has a natural gift to score, and he does it in a variety of ways-shooting three’s, floaters, attacking, mid-range. He’s definitely gifted and special, and I’m so happy he set the record while I was coaching him here.”
Cole, Cox, Gomez, Perez, Roebuck, Smith and [junior] Tristan Partida all went to junior high together, so Oronoz had seen them before they entered La Mirada and Oronoz had coached Smith’s sister at the travel ball level. He recalls asking Roebuck, when he was in the sixth grade if he was going to play at La Mirada. Roebuck’s response was a quick, ‘yeah, you wish’.
Despite the two-year gap, Gomez and Roebuck were pretty close to each other in junior high, which was Veritas Preparatory Academy, and even closer now.
“When I got there in sixth grade, Julien was the man at Veritas,” said Roebuck. “He was the best player. Just looking up to him, then finally being able to play with him in high school was big.”
“I think the beauty of this team is it’s a blessing and a curse,” said Oronoz. “These guys fight like brothers, but they’re close like brothers, too. Gene comes in and plays one tournament with us in the summer. I didn’t promise him anything; I just said ‘you’re going to be coached hard. We’ll put you on a platform and get exposure and you’re going to learn and get better’. That’s what I tell any kid who comes to La Mirada.”
Oronoz reflected on the time he saw Gomez and Roebuck play one-on-one, and Smith, after an AAU game one time and Roebuck was scoring on Gomez. At that time, Oronoz was thinking that Roebuck was better than he thought, and that’s after not seeing him since the sixth grade.
Gomez and Roebuck agree that there was never any animosity or competition between the two of them when it came to who was going to score more than the other. Gomez says it’s more like whoever is rolling in the game; whoever is feeling it, they’re going to give each other the ball.
“We’re brothers and we want to see each other win,” said Gomez.
“As good as it sounds, I knew it wasn’t going to be an easy transition,” said Oronoz. “You have two alpha males; guys who this and that. So, complements to Julien. Losing our point guard, [junior] King-Riley [Owens] last year, where he couldn’t play. It made Julien handle the ball more and it took away from his scoring where he had to do a little bit more. But I think it helped him grow in the long run.”
Gomez has already surpassed 2,000 points for his high school career, but Roebuck will find it harder to reach that due to competition that he has played opposed to the teams Gomez faced his first two seasons with the Matadores. In fact, when Gomez hit the 1,000-point mark, it was at The Classic at Damien and when Roebuck reached that milestone, it was also at the same tournament.
“We played Roosevelt in a preseason game last year and I went off in that game,” recalled Gomez. “A huge reason why I went off is because Braydin Burries was guarding [Roebuck] the whole game. I had the weaker defenders on me the whole game and I was able to score off the weaker defenders. Playing with [Roebuck]…he definitely takes away the bigger, more physical, more dominant defenders. That’s how he complements me for sure.”
“A lot of times growing up, the other teams knew I was the best player [on my team] and their defensive scheme would be [to double up on me]. When you play us [now], you can’t double us because the other one is going to go off,” said Roebuck. “For Julien to do his thing, it takes a lot of pressure off me.”
The competition that Oronoz has scheduled in the past, especially this season, has made Gomez, Roebuck and the rest of the Matadores that much better as their record has vaulted to 17-4 with seven games left in the regular season. So far, Roebuck leads the team with 417 points while Gomez has scored 359 points with a season-high of 34 against Brophy College Prep on the second day of this month. Half of the losses have come to St. John Bosco High by a combined 40 points while the other two setbacks have come to out of state teams by a combined 13 points.
“When I first came here, they said ‘you’re not going to get the recognition, you’re not going to see the big teams, you’re not going to get that spotlight’,” said Gomez. “But coach Randy did a good job of getting us into games where we’re playing teams from out of state. We’re up there with the big dogs, so going out [to Arizona and Illinois] was a good experience. We’re just there to show we can compete with them.”
Gomez has committed to the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley while Roebuck has received offers from California State University, Northridge, University of California, University of California, Los Angeles, University of Kansas, University of San Francisco, University of Southern California and the University of Washington, among others.
Gomez and Roebuck still have other goals to reach before the end of this season, one of which is to go undefeated in the Gateway League and the other is to make the make the CIF-SS Open Division playoffs, which is the highest level anyone can go.
“Mine would be to definitely win a CIF championship, and then a state championship,” said Roebuck.