NISH's Otis Anderson (13) rises above the crowd to secure a rebound against Carencro. 

Carencro High came into Tuesday’s District 3-5A matchup with New Iberia Senior High looking to extend the Jackets’ season-high losing streak to three games.

And for a while, the visiting Bears were doing just that as they held NISH to zero points while taking a 7-0 lead with 2 minutes left in the opening quarter.

Coach Chad Pourciau called a timeout to settle his team down and, coming out the timeout, NISH proceeded to “flip the switch” and outscored Carencro 33-6 over the next 10 minutes of game time and went into half with a 33-13 lead.

It was all the Jackets needed as they cruised the rest of the way for the 60-36 win to end the losing skid and improve to 36-3 overall and 8-1 in district with one game left, Friday night at home against Acadiana.

“They started the game on a 7-0 run, we call a 30 second timeout and then we went 33-6 the rest of the half,” Pourciau said. “It was all about energy and effort.”

“We started with no energy and effort and there was no floor connection between our team. After the timeout, we hit a 3 and we started clicking after that.”

On offense and defense the Jackets held the Bears to six points over the 10 minute stretch while scoring at will.

Christian Walker scored 11 of his 13 points in the first or second quarter while Wayne Randall-Bashay scored 8 of his 12 points in the second quarter. Sophomore Otis Anderson had 12 of his game-high 25 points in that remarkable run in the first half.

“I don’t know what it was,” Pourciau said. “We were down two starters tonight and we just came out slow and then we caught fire after that.”

“It was fun to watch. It was a stretch of basketball that was really fun to watch.”

And one that was needed after consecutive losses on Friday night to Southside and Saturday night to St. Thomas More.

“Any time you come off of a loss you want to bounce back,” the NISH coach said. “We wanted to do that Saturday and came up short. We knew how important this was. We had two left and we knew if we could win them we could lock up one of the two top seeds.”

Speaking of which, heading into Tuesday’s game NISH still was the top seed in Division I Non-Select even with the pair of losses over the weekend.

The once more than one point lead over second seed Ruston shrunk to just over one-half a point according to geauxpreps.com but the win over Carencro and a win over Acadiana Friday during Senior Night should lock up the top seed and two home playoff games for the Jackets when the brackets are released next week.

“We just want to get to state,” Pourciau said. “Once you get there anything can happen.”

“I’ve been fortunate to get there twice (with Breaux Bridge).”

“Once you get there, all bets are off because it’s a neutral site and I just want to get there so our kids can experience that.”