The Emmaus football team will be going to back to the basics this week at practice after suffering it’s first loss of the season last Friday night.

Nazareth quarterback Travis Stefanik took advantage of five Emmaus turnovers and led the Blue Eagles to a 41-21 Eastern Pennsylvania Conference victory over the Hornets.

The Blue Eagles scored twice to open the game and kept momentum on their side.

Stefanik threw for 238 yards and four touchdowns, which included setting the school record for career passing touchdowns.

“The turnovers were really big,” said Stefanik. “We’re winning those battles and capitalized on them and that’s what we’re doing right now. This is huge. The past couple of wins aren’t the best quality of teams out there, but this shows that we can play with anyone in the league.”

In the second quarter, Sone Ntoh made some nifty cuts in space and ran for a 25-yard touchdown for Emmaus, which cut the deficit to 13-7. The Hornet offensive line was moving people early on as the rushing attack averaged 4.5 yards per carry.

But the Nazareth lead grew to three scores and the Hornets had to abandon the run, as Derek Sheaffer was forced to throw 32 times.

“As of late, we were playing well up front,” said Emmaus head coach Harold Fairclough. “We have two good young running backs. We just hurt ourselves with holding and jumping offsides. We had a few missed assignments and we just kept shooting ourselves in the foot.”

The last regular season game that Emmaus lost was a 35-12 defeat to Parkland last November.

What happened the following game? The Hornets hung 61 on Williamsport in an Eastern Conference playoff match up.

“We want to win as many games as possible, taking it one day at a time,” he said. “It sounds cliché, but we bought into that and that’s what got us to this point.

“We ultimately need to play how we practice. That’s on me. We’ll get that squared away. The message was to just stick together. We’ve worked too hard to let this thing fall apart here. We’ll see how they respond.”

Coincidently, the last team to score at least 41 points on the Hornets was the Blue Eagles, who scored 49 against them last season.

Fairclough and his squad won’t have an easy practice this week, and the Hornets are staring at a remaining schedule that still has Liberty, Easton, and Parkalnd left on it.

However, sometimes the simplest things produce the greatest result- and the Hornets will look to tighten up on both sides of the football this coming Friday. The Emmaus coach wants his team to be the hungrier one on the gridiron.

“We can’t beat anyone turning the ball over fives times,” Fairclough said. “We had some crucial penalties and we couldn’t tackle anyone. We just had too many breakdowns in communication. We looked like we never practiced tackling before. My hat goes off to (Nazareth). Those kids came out and executed. They outplayed us, outworked us, and they just wanted it more than we did tonight plain and simple. We’ll get it squared away”