After a trio of games last week, the Sealy Tiger basketball team entered this week at 2-2 with three games left to play before the new year and three more in January before the district-opening contest in Wharton on Jan. 12.

Sealy beat Columbus 60-31 Dec. 8 but fell to Madisonville 41-32 on Friday and Schulenburg 62-57 on Saturday to even its record through the first four non-district matchups. The latter two was the first action of the season for head coach Cody Carruthers who missed the beginning two weeks of the season after a member of his household tested positive for COVID-19.

In his final game as the interim coach, Austin Kilman said he didn’t love the practice that preceded the Columbus contest but was pleased with the end result.

“I was really impressed with their efforts in the second and third quarters, I was disappointed in how we practiced on Monday, to be honest, so I was a little worried, but they played great,” Kilman said after the Tuesday win.

The Tigers took an early lead and was ignited by a dunk from senior Jacob Gajewski that set the tone en route to a 31-14 halftime lead. In the second half, classmates Nick Martinez and Draper Parker rounded out their 15-point performances and Gajewski finished with seven points but was unable to finish the game after a shoulder injury and missed the latter two games in the week.

Gajewski joined other key players on the bench due to injury but Martinez continued his scoring pace and led Sealy with 18 points in the Friday night contest against Madisonville. The Mustangs’ Casey Holiday finished with 19 points and provided consecutive threepointers that served as the dagger to extend the visitors’ lead after the final quarter started scoreless for the first three minutes.

It was a unique situation for Carruthers who hadn’t even been at a practice with his new team before they faced a Madisonville team that presented some new difficulties.

“They were an athletic group and that gave us some problems, our press wasn’t really the problem – I think the press saved us in my opinion – but their athleticism gave us fits,” Carruthers said Friday night. “And we had too many turnovers and really when it comes down to it, those small things like blocking out and turnovers, we’re in the game if we do those things. We gotta go back to the drawing board and work on the little things.”

The head coach still saw things the team did well which made him feel better despite Sealy ending up on the losing end.

“My main message was if you don’t learn from this, then we’re going to keep seeing this and I preach all the time that if we do the little things, that’s what’s going to define us and tonight we did not do the little things well,” Carruthers said. “Somehow we were still in the game for most of it which is encouraging because it really felt worse than it was. So I haven’t been at one practice yet and we just made a list of things that I need to work on with them and the problem is we go right back at it tomorrow.”

It was indeed a quick turnaround from a 5:45 p.m. tipoff against Madisonville Friday to a 2:30 p.m. tipoff against Schulenburg on Saturday but senior classmates Lane Holley and Donte Beasley both returned on Saturday after missing the previous game to give Carruthers a couple more options to work with.

The Tigers and Shorthorns went back and forth and traded runs and baskets while the lead flipflopped to either side of the scoreboard until the fourth quarter. Schulenburg started to pull away only to have Parker nail a threepointer and make it a one-point game with less than a minute to play. However, Sealy was unable to convert its final possessions and was eventually forced to foul the Shorthorns to try and stop the clock to no avail.

Martinez scored a season-high 22 points and Holley contributed 18 points to the Tigers’ scoring efforts and Parker added nine points as well. Although both Friday and Saturday ended with losses, Carruthers felt different after each night, more encouraged than the last he said.

“There was never a point in the game where we were doing everything we needed to do to win the game. We battled and made it a game but there was never a moment that I was happy with where we were at,” the head coach said. “The press was good, we allowed some points and that’s going to happen, but we caused some pressure, got some 10-second calls, got some 5-second calls; but we still struggled at times converting that to points. We missed a lot of free throws, we missed a lot of close shots and we were just talking last night, and my brother (football offensive coordinator Chris Carruthers) actually made the comment that you can’t fix it overnight. Which, last night was frustrating, but today the effort made it enjoyable to watch.”

Of course, it’s still early in the Carruthers era and he looked forward to finally participating in a practice session.

“We have things to fix just like we had things to fix last night and so what I told them was that this is like our second practice where we still haven’t gotten to have an actual practice,” Carruthers said Saturday evening. “I enjoyed the game because of their effort. We’ve gotta go to work on Monday at our first official practice where I can break things down and fix some things.”