Sports

The calendar flipped to 2022 and the local sports schedules wasted no time in getting restarted after the break. Sealy girls’ soccer opened their season Monday, Sealy boys’ basketball hosted Gonzales Tuesday and district play for Sealy and Bellville girls’ basketball opens Friday but in Wallis, it started Tuesday! Ain’t no rest for the wicked.

The Sealy Tiger soccer team is set to open its regular season this weekend in Giddings at a tournament with first-year head coach Joshua Kirton at the helm. Kirton is in his second year of coaching at Sealy High School and assisted on the sidelines intermittently last year where the Tigers embarked on their longest postseason run in program history.

The Bellville Brahmanette basketball team competed in the Weimar tournament last week and earned a 3-3 record where they won the consolation bracket with a 40-37 win over Schulenburg. Senior Neelie Schiel was named to the all-tournament team for her efforts.

The 2021 calendar year certainly provided its fair share of ups and downs but for the most part, seemed to get people closer to a sense of normalcy again. In the sports arenas, many Brazos Cougars excelled and represented their school at the regional and state levels and returned home with some hardware and records.

It was a record-setting year for Brazos’ state representatives where Halie Gonzalez medaled in the state powerlifting meet and Esmeralda Garcia set a school-record time in the 3200-meter run on the spring track circuit then followed that up with the school’s best individual finish at the cross country state championship.

For the most part, the 2021 sports seasons were a refreshing change from the year prior where cancellations and postponements flooded the schedules at the onset of the pandemic. Although things are still not where they were pre-pandemic, this past year of Austin County’s high school sports seemed to start giving everyone a sense of normalcy again.

After he qualified for the 2020 National Finals of Rodeo but was sent home following a positive COVID-19 test, Bellville native Caleb Smidt, and his horse Pockets, returned for the 2021 NFR in December and secured their third World Championship in tie-down roping in Las Vegas, NV.

The Sealy Tiger soccer team lost a 2-0 lead over the Splendora Wildcats within 4:13 in the final minutes of regulation and was eliminated in the regional semifinals in its first fourthround appearance in program history by a 3-2 score April 6 at Cy Park High School.

As only a freshman, Sealy High School alum Madeline Goad and her Blinn Junior College teammates competed in the program’s first appearance at the NJCAA Women’s Golf Championship in Daytona, Fla. in May. The team registered 13th place out of 19 teams at the four-day tournament played at PlantationBay Golf and Country Club.

After appearing in only one game in 2020 and six in the early portion of the 2021 spring season, Sealy High alum and Texas redshirt freshman Justin Eckhardt saw his summer opportunity in California as both a redemption tour and a coming-out party.