CHOCOWINITY — The little things make a big difference. Southside learned that when it was tossed into the fire after a prolonged start to the season. It started with trips to 1-A Coastal Plains Conference opponents East Carteret and Jones Senior. The team returned to Beaufort County to meet Oakwood, Washington and Bertie in the Northside Christmas Tournament.

The Seahawks knew, for the most part, what they wanted to do on offense and defense. It was just a matter of execution. They quickly realized that one bad pass or one player out of place could derail an entire possession.

That’s why coach Sean White was excited to get plenty of practice time during the holiday vacation. He knew what needed to be worked on, but didn’t have the time to do it.

Each practice starts with a period focusing on fundamentals that lasts about 45 minutes. The focuses are passing, rebounding, dribbling and shooting forms.

Passing was the first thing the Seahawks got down to work on. White was pleased with the way the boys used their speed on offense, but poor passing hindered some scoring chances.

“It seems like, especially in the tournament, some of our plays in our motion offense, some of the passes were just terrible,” he said. “I was constantly on them about bad passes, correcting them and telling them to get the ball up. That’s probably the biggest thing we’ve worked on in the last couple of days.”

After some fundamental work, White sets out to fix the other minor, but costly details that have been detriments at times this year.

“We need this time. It’s going to help us a lot,” White said. “Right now we were just running our press break. There were some guys out of place and that’s what we had problems with in our first two games against East Carteret and Jones Senior — breaking the press.

“Now that we’ve court time to go out there and show guys the positions and where they need to be, they know one guy out of place and it’s not going to work. You have you middle relief guy who may be covered because he’s not in the right place … We have one-on-one time with the guys to iron out the mistakes we’ve made.”

Southside has looked sound on defense thus far. Even so, some of those marginal errors have hampered its effectiveness.

“I was very pleased with our press,” White said. “Other than one or two mistakes where we were out of position, it worked really well … That really worked good because we’ve got some fast guys … That’s probably the biggest thing I took from the tournament — how well we ran our motion offense, despite only two days of practice, and also our press.”

Other than the press, the Seahawks have put some effort into fine-tuning their half-court defense. That, too, often came down to being in the right place.

Southside returns from the layoff on Jan. 4. The Seahawks will host Lejeune in their home opener. They’ll host another league foe in Pamlico County on Jan. 8, with a trip to Washington on Jan. 6 sandwiched between the two.

The Christmas Tournament provided Southside an opportunity to scout Pamlico County. The half-court defense will need to be on point to negate the opposition’s sharpshooting guards.