March 3, 1994

Two local former high school basketball stars, Bobby Hopson of Bridgehampton and Scott Smith of East Hampton were to have played in conference tournaments this week that could lead to berths in national championship tourneys.

Hopson is a Wagner College senior, and Smith a New Hampshire College freshman.

As of Tuesday, Hopson was in seventh place on Wagner’s all-time scoring list with 1,514 points, just 19 points shy of fifth place. The 5-foot-10-inch senior, who has captained his team since his sophomore year, is averaging 17.1 points, 4.2 rebounds, and 2.4 assists per game.

March 10, 1994

Joe Landi is in his fourth year a dart player, and is as enamored of the traditional pub game as most golfers are of golf.

The East-West League at Southampton’s Treasure Inn is one of three that Landi, who has a dartboard hanging not far from his store’s checkout counter, throws in. . . . “They still throw nails in England and Scotland. It’s like any sport. You step in the box, you watch the ball, and, with practice, you get better.”

Having taken up a solid position at the toe-line, seven feet and nine-and-one-quarter inches from the board, one should hold the shaft of the dart between thumb and first finger, Landi said, with the second or third finger along the point. The arm should be parallel to the floor, and the thrower should sight along the flighted stem. 

“Aside from the forearm, nothing moves. People who score well, their bodies don’t move. You take a full breath, let out half of it, and hold your body still. No, you shouldn’t snap hour wrist — just let it go. Be careful not to push.”

As this writer can testify, it’s a lot harder than it looks, a lot more challenging, and a lot more fun.

—

“We try to stress the fundamentals of the game, not so much winning,” Scott Rubenstein, who’s helping Joe Marciniak coach East Hampton’s 9-and-10-year-old Biddy basketball team, said during a recent practice session at the John Marshall Elementary School.

“If Scott had his way, it would be nothing but drills,” said Marciniak. “If it were me, there’d be nothing but scrimmages.”

Tom Mac, Sag Harbor’s Biddy coach, said during a telephone conversation later in the week, “The main thing we’re trying to teach these kids is that good sportsmanship and good teamwork enable you to win. I’m getting tired of what I see at these high school games — the temper tantrums, the posturing. . . . We’ve got a friendly, competitive rivalry going with the East Hampton team. We tell the kids that after the game it’s okay to talk to the other guys.”

Of the dozen or so who played for East Hampton’s Biddy team in 1970 and ’71 — Howard Wood, the best-known alumnus, could not play because he exceeded the former 5-foot-6-inch height limit — seven wound up playing on East Hampton’s 1977 state championship team that went 22-1, said Rubenstein.

“There was Kenny Carter, Eddie Petrie, Tony Gilliam, Randy Strong, Jerome Jefferson. . . . We played in national tournaments in New Orleans and Puerto Rico.”

Wet courts caused Friday’s scheduled boys tennis nonleaguer with Half Hollow Hills East, one of the top teams in the county, to be postponed until yesterday, but Kevin McConville, East Hampton High’s coach, said during a conversation Saturday that he and his players were very much looking forward to it.

“It should be really good,” the coach said of the showdown, inasmuch as going into it both teams had done similarly well versus other top-notch teams, namely Half Hollow Hills West and Westhampton Beach, East Hampton’s archrival in league play.

Hills East and the Bonackers each defeated Hills West 4-3. East Hampton bageled Westhampton 7-0; Hills East defeated the Hurricanes 6-1. 

East Hampton, in another recent match, also shut out Shoreham-Wading River, a league foe, but the 7-0 win over Westhampton was harder to come by.

Jonny De Groot, the Bridgehampton senior who has a booming serve and a variety of shots, enabled the Bonackers to complete the rout at home on March 19 by outlasting Westhampton’s number-one, Josh Kaplan, 10-7 in a super tiebreaker that came about after each of them had won a set.

McConville said the strategy employed against Kaplan, a very good baseliner with a punishing forehand, was to take him out of his comfort zone with feathered shots low to his weaker side whenever the opportunity arose, either off second serves or relatively early in rallies.

That kind of play served De Groot well in the first set, although, in the second, after Kaplan had put a couple of successful shots at his feet, De Groot — whose hard, high-kicking serve into the body (“just one of the serves he has”) gave Kaplan trouble all afternoon — tended to get sucked into long rallies in the second set. 

In general, though, McConville said his four singles players — De Groot, Ravi MacGurn, Luke Louchheim, and Max Astilean — were, when faced with strong baseliners, changing it up very well, their more varied games accounting in large part for the team’s early success.

It was Astilean, an eighth grader who was a Ross Tennis Academy student last year, who caught McConville’s eye in the season-opening match at Hills West. 

“It was Max’s first varsity match, and he was so impressive,” McConville said. “He had the clinching win. He was down 4-1 in the first set. I walked over and got him settled down. He was going for too much and missing. After that, he took the other kid’s backhand apart, that being his weaker side, and the other kid started breaking down, and lost confidence. Max took him apart tactically. He wound up winning the first set 6-4, and the second 6-4.”

De Groot’s was the only match to go the whole way versus Westhampton as MacGurn, Louchheim, and Astilean all won in straight sets. 

The doubles teams, despite the absence of Alex Weseley, who, with Jaedon Glasstein, is at the top of the duo heap, also did well in the Westhampton match. Glasstein and Jamie Fairchild, at one, won 6-3, 6-3, Brad Drubych and Matthew McGovern, at two, won 4-6, 6-0, 6-2, and Miles Clark and Jackson LaRose won 6-2, 6-2 at three.

“It’s been a great advantage having the whole team back,” said McConville. “Everyone’s improved; everyone’s a year older and a year wiser. In doubles, we’ve been trying to be aggressive, to get two to the net rather than have one stay at the baseline and the other stand statue-like at the net. They were getting it last year, but their overheads weren’t as good as they are this year, nor were their putaways as good. They’re more in sync this year, their positioning is better — they’re getting it.”

Interestingly, Weseley was missing from East Hampton’s first three matches, all, as aforesaid, wins. He was to have been back in the lineup yesterday. 

It had been “serendipitous,” McConville said, that Astilean had beaten Glasstein, who shared fourth singles last season with Drubych, in a recent ladder match. With his big serve and strong groundstrokes, Glasstein has further strengthened East Hampton’s doubles lineup. Just about all of his doubles players were “interchangeable,” McConville added.

Back to singles, “Jonny is as good as you’ll see in the transition game, and that’s been good for Ravi, Luke, and Max to see, all of them being good groundstrokers. Bringing these kids up to the net who don’t want to come up to the net has been hugely helpful.”

MacGurn had been winning many points with topspun forehands hit to his opponent’s backhand side, and Louchheim this year had added topspin to his forehand, the coach said. “He’s no longer just blasting it flat and deep. I’ve been preaching variety to Luke too. Every day we practice the transition game.”

“They all have cool heads,” McConville agreed. “They have just the right mentality to be good, to stick with the game plan, and to execute — they’re relentless.”

February 17, 1994

Leroy DeBoard, one of the finest athletes in East Hampton High School history, was inducted on Feb. 4 into the football hall of fame of Benedict College in Columbia, S.C.

DeBoard graduated from East Hampton in 1951. He later worked in the East Hampton and Riverhead school systems and was an East Hampton Town Board member.

He recently said he owed his college education to Fran Kiernan, a former longtime East Hampton High athletic director. “If it weren’t for him,” said DeBoard, “I might have wound up a bitter young man. I’ve often wondered about that.”

A four-sport athlete (football, basketball, baseball, and track) and class and Student Council president, DeBoard seemed about to miss out on a college scholarship. Kiernan popped into the now-defunct Marmador, where DeBoard washed dishes, one evening and “asked me how bad I wanted to go to school,” DeBoard said.

“He told me the good news was that I had a place to go, and that the bad news was that I had to go the next day.”

“I had a mom who always came through,” DeBoard continued. “She bought me a ticket on the Silver Meteor, and the train got into Columbia at 2:30 in the morning. I saw a guy who seemed to be waiting around and when, after the third pass, I approached him, he looked surprised. ‘You’re Leroy DeBoard?’ He was looking for a guy who was 6-2, 190. I was 5-10, 170.”

“They decided to let me stay,” said DeBoard, who played four years as a defensive back. “I had a full scholarship all the way through, except for $200 a year for books.”

Record-keeping wasn’t as thorough when DeBoard played for the Bonackers. “One year, I think I was second in the county in touchdowns and third in scoring,” he said. “When Eddie Ecker, Harry O’Rourke, and I ran we’d make 20, 30, 40 yards at a clip. Eddie was faster than I was. I was quick, but Ed was fast.”

Ecker, a Montauker, later won a scholarship to Syracuse University and became an East Hampton Town supervisor.

Running on the grass of Herrick Park in baseball cleats, DeBoard ran 220 yards in a field day race in a time that held up as the East Hampton High record for almost 25 years.

—

The second meeting of cyclists who have ideas for good bicycle routes on the South Fork will be held at 7:30 p.m. Monday at the Group for the South Fork’s offices on Main Street, Bridgehampton. Scott Lewendon, a professional bike route planner, will be on hand to offer advice and to answer technical questions.

The group’s Mike Bottini will have an update on the proposal to build a bike path along the Long Island Rail Road from Bridgehampton to East Hampton, and there will be a review of a draft bike route map prepared by Bill Webb of Bridgehampton. 

Ryan Fowkes, the East Hampton senior who earlier this month won the 1,000 meters at the county small schools championship and then finished second at that distance a week later in the Section XI state qualifier, will compete on Saturday at the Long Island Elite Meet at St. Anthony’s High School in South Huntington, along with his teammate Matt Maya, who will run the 300 meters.

Fowkes will be “in the 1,600-meter run,” his coach, Ben Turnbull, said by email, “and try and get the school record of 4:26.80 set by Erik Engstrom back in 2016.”

Engstrom, who was a county champion in cross-country while at East Hampton, now runs for the University of Massachusetts. His sister, Ava Engstrom, a distance runner on Coach Yani Cuesta’s girls winter track team, will also compete at St. Anthony’s, in the 1,500 meters, joined by her teammate and fellow sophomore, Penelope Greene of Pierson High School in Sag Harbor.  

And for Fowkes the season won’t end there, as his 2:36.15 second-place finish in the state qualifier, which was held on Feb. 11 at Suffolk Community College-Brentwood, means he’ll run the 1,000 at the state championship meet on March 2 at the Ocean Breeze indoor track complex on Staten Island. 

“He is considered all-county as well,” Turnbull said. “His time was his second best time of the season.” His best being the school-record 2:34.75 1,000 he ran in the small schools meet on Feb. 3. 

Fowkes “is ranked 24th in the state for this event, but not everyone that is on this list is running it at states,” Turnbull said. “He is most likely in the top 10 for the runners that will run this event at the state meet.” 

Richie Daunt, a boxer out of Montauk, will return to the ring tonight at the New York Athletic Club on Central Park South. Weigh-in begins at 5, and the bouts start at 6. Daunt’s is fight number 17 at 152 pounds in the elite open class, he reported. 

“I won’t know who I am fighting until Thursday, then they will make a bracket,” he wrote by email. “This is the Golden Gloves,” his third time competing at that level, “but they switched the name to the Ring Masters Road to the Garden. There is tough competition this year!” 

Daunt trains at the MuvStrong fitness studio in East Hampton.

When she was last here almost four years ago, Jen Gatz, a science teacher at Patchogue-Medford High School — Dr. Gatz now — told an audience of I-Tri participants and their parents that she hoped her doctoral dissertation would provide evidence that after-school exercise and mentoring programs for teenage girls such as I-Tri’s would result in measurable improvement in science scores.

“My hypothesis was supported,” Dr. Gatz said, with a smile, the other day during a conversation in Aquebogue, where she lives. To wit that “chronic aerobic exercise that these girls are participating in, plus all of the peer mentoring and adult mentoring they receive, increase self-efficacy in science and cognitive processes that improve academic achievement.” 

“Self-efficacy,” she said, was “different from self-esteem. Self-efficacy is confidence in ability for a specific task. You can have increased self-efficacy for fitness; you can have increased self-efficacy for the ability to do science. . . . There have been lots of such studies with older people and with very young children looking at how aerobic exercise affects cognitive processes, but not so many with children in their adolescent years, particularly regarding their ability to do science.”

Dr. Gatz undertook two studies focused on Theresa Roden’s internationally recognized I-Tri program, both of which were peer-reviewed and published within the past two years. 

The first, she said, “was more of a qualitative study looking at confidence, self-efficacy, and motivation, and did I-Tri help to increase all of those things, and did I-Tri’s triathlon training translate into better academic performance. . . . Our study showed that it did. We found that an after-school program like I-Tri is very beneficial, especially for girls at risk for being overweight, for being out of shape, and for not fitting in well socially.”

Moreover, I-Tri’s camaraderie, mentoring, and physical and mental training helped promote “collective efficacy,” Dr. Gatz continued. “All of a sudden, swimming 300 yards, biking seven miles, and running a mile and a half,” as I-Tri participants do each year in a youth triathlon at Noyac’s Long Beach, “become a lot less scary. You see your peers do it and you say to yourself, ‘If she does it, I can.’ . . . We found these confidence-building strategies carried over to their schooling. They studied more and started to do better. The first study has wonderful quotes, though we changed the names to those of my nieces and good friends.”

“Mary,” an eighth grader, told Dr. Gatz that I-Tri had given her the “confidence to be able to know that I can do better. It makes me want to go out and get it, and, like, show myself that I can do it. . . . Before, I would get B’s and C’s, but now I’m A’s all across the board.”

Mary added, “I remember running across the finish line crying hysterically. I never had thought I would be able to do it, but I had done it. . . . If an obstacle is in my way, I’m gonna do whatever I can to overcome it. That was one of the lessons we learned. Doing something you didn’t think you could do is the most amazing feeling in the world.”

“Kate,” a seventh grader, told Dr. Gatz that I-Tri had given her “confidence to do everything and anything basically. . . . When a subject gets kind of hard, at first you’re like, oh man, I don’t know what to do, but I-Tri taught me that when you are so close, like with the race we do, you just have to push on and keep going.”

“Amy,” an eighth grader, told her, “Like everyone I met I had something in common with. And if I didn’t know how to do something, I wasn’t the only one. It felt really good knowing that we would learn together, and that I didn’t need to feel bad about not knowing how to do something.”

“The second study,” said Dr. Gatz, “focused on cognition. I was specifically looking at executive function and the cognitive processes that fall under that umbrella term, such as working memory, the ability to recall information and to keep it in mind . . . the ability to plan and to organize is an executive function, as is the ability to inhibit reactions — to step back and look at all the evidence and think critically about a problem and trying to solve it rather than automatically jump to a conclusion.”

What she found, she said, “was that the physical activity involved in triathlon training acted as a moderator that helped the girls increase their achievement in science, and also improved their problem-solving ability . . . no matter what the problem was.”

There had been a control group in that second study of 30 similarly at-risk girls who were not in I-Tri, Dr. Gatz said, girls faced with a similar curriculum at the same time as were the girls with whom I-Tri was working. “There were 30 girls in each, and when we initially matched their science ability there was no difference, but when I did post-testing to see if the I-Tri group’s cognitive functions had increased, I found they had in comparison to the control group. It was wonderful . . . it was exciting. The studies were peer-reviewed and published. If people want to look at them, they can email me and I’ll share copies with them.” She’s at jengatz@optonline.net.

While she had shown that physical activity had a measurable effect when it came to improved performance in science tests, a more amplified examination of hers was under review now, said Dr. Gatz, a study that looks not only at before and after results, but also at the relationship between physical fitness increments and consequent increments in scientific achievement. 

“The stronger they are aerobically should make a difference,” she said, adding that “this is where most of the research is now, measuring the effects on executive function of chronic aerobic activity over a period of five months, say. This paper has been in review for six months. Hopefully, I’ll hear something, though it could take a couple of months up to two years.”

As for Theresa Roden, who won an award of excellence from the International Triathlon Union this past summer, Dr. Gatz said she’d run into her “at Costco, in Riverhead. I could tell it was her car because it had that pink bike rack on the back. . . . I keep up with her often. She’s started a whole new unit for the I-Tri girls, you know, on the science of triathlon, which partly resulted from the findings we have. Exposing them to science outside of the regular classroom ought to spark their interest and help motivate them in the regular school day.”

I-Tri, which is in its 10th year, now numbers 200 middle school girls in 10 schools on eastern Long Island, the latest additions being in Riverhead, Bridgehampton, and Mastic-Shirley.

The drive north on Abraham’s Path in Amagansett is dark and nearly absent of cars this time of winter, even on a weekend night, until you near the intersection of Town Lane and see the lights from the multi-use Sportime Arena glowing in the distance off to the right, along with the swaying headlights of cars pulling into the parking lot, and the silhouettes of soccer players and their families hustling toward the front doors.

Once inside, the smell of empanadas and home-cooked spare ribs wafts from the snack bar and bleachers area, and the sound of animated Spanish being spoken by players yelling to one another for the ball echoes in the hangar-like building. The 85-by-200-foot multipurpose floor (which can also be converted into a hockey rink) is ringed by waist-high wood boards topped by plexiglass panels and set up for indoor soccer with a net at either end. Latin music is usually playing over the sound system.

Ninety-nine percent of the players in the fall and winter nine-week tournament leagues — or torneos — are Latino, said Ramon Nuala, who has served as the league’s director since its inception seven years ago. But 100 percent of the people in the building seem to love what they find here on weekends. It’s a community gathering spot and cultural touchstone as much as a sporting event.

The 7-on-7 games in the men and women’s open divisions and over-37 leagues are part of the draw. But so is the chance for so many families to gather in one place, renew acquaintances, and channel a bit of their heritage even if they themselves were born in the U.S. There are 42 teams in all, and many of them choose Spanish-inflected names like Liga S.B. (S.B. for the Ecuadorean village of San Bartolo) or the men’s team Su Madre, which is Spanish for “Your Mother” but not to be confused with the trash-talking English expression “Yo Mama.”

“No, no, no,” Kimberly Bautista, a Sportime employee who was working the scoreboard Friday night, said, laughing. “It’s a respectful way of saying ‘Your Mothers.’ We have a Los Papis team too.”

The 45-minute games roll out every hour on the hour from 6 to 11 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, and 1 to 10 p.m. on Sundays. Nuala says it’s not uncommon for one family to have the wife playing in one game, her husband playing in another, and their children playing on a team or sitting in the stands, watching the games. 

(During the week, Sportime hosts wintertime Soccer Stars NY age-group clinics and play for kids run by Martin Gutierrez, a UEFA and FIFA-licensed coach who played three years for the New York Red Bulls and has coached pro teams as far away as China. Twelve boys Gutierrez has coached now play for the East Hampton High School boys team. Friday night, he was at Sportime refereeing some of the games.)

Nuala says he and the Sportime staff try to keep the atmosphere of the torneos respectful. But that’s different from saying the level of play isn’t occasionally intense — it is — or that the competition for players isn’t heated. 

Among the men’s teams, in particular, it isn’t uncommon for team managers to recruit players, and throw in incentives like offering to pay for a player’s league registration and uniform fees, which can easily run more than $200 per torneo. Some players commute from as far away as Bay Shore, Patchogue, even New York City.

At the end of every nine-week cycle, there’s a championship round that attracts a near-capacity crowd. Afterward, a ceremony is held and trophies are awarded.

“You should be here then — the atmosphere for the playoffs is really great,” said Tyler Jarvis, who manages the Sportime Arena. “We have people chanting for the players and teams, yelling at the refs. It gets pretty loud and intense.”

To keep the ball inbounds more since the rink boards are out of play, a less inflated soccer ball that’s four inches smaller in diameter than a regulation 28-inch outdoor ball is used. Though the indoor ball has less bounce, the level of play is good. Most of the Sportime players seem to have little trouble shooting, passing, or even heading the ball. They just adjust their games, if not their expectations.

Andres Meija, a 38-year-old truck driver from East Hampton who plays striker for the Le Calle team, said his soccer favorites are two of the world’s greats, Lionel Messi and Ronaldo. Meija was named most valuable player in the recent men’s over-37 playoffs.

“I’m here because I’ve loved soccer my whole life,” he said.

Though the Liga S.B. men’s and women’s teams dominated play for many years, the mix of torneo winners has recently changed. In six weeks, Nuala said, new champions will again be crowned before the games move back outside, and winter once again gives way to spring.

It is fitting that Annemarie Cangiolosi Brown is now East Hampton High’s softball coach inasmuch as the dugouts, built by her father and her brothers, Phil and Paul, were dedicated to her grandmother, the late Molly Cangiolosi, who started the push for Title IX here years ago.

On learning that she had been named as the new coach — the job had been hers from the get-go, Joe Vas, East Hampton’s A.D., said, though when first tapped she demurred because she had an infant to take care of — she called her father, Phil Sr., and asked him to come to the field.

“I didn’t tell him why — I think he thought somebody had sprayed graffiti in the dugouts. He  was kind of mad when he got there. I asked him when the last time was that he was there. He said not for a long time. ‘I think you’ll be coming up a lot now,’ I said.”

“ ‘Why?’ he said. So I told him. We had a little moment; we were both tearing up . . . I was carrying on the tradition.”

Her grandmother, she said, had coached “all the sports, for $100, and was always pushing for more.” Upon her death, in the new coach’s senior year, the interviewee became the first recipient of the Molly Cangiolosi outstanding senior athlete award, which was funded by her family and friends. It is given each year to an East Hampton senior aiming to become a physical education teacher.

Brown, who still holds pitching records at the State University at Cortland, a 1.33 career earned run average among them, was a protégée of Lou Reale, one of the state’s winningest high school softball coaches, who lives now, with his wife, Ginny, in the Orlando, Fla., area.

“Reale started here when I was a freshman. I thought he was a great coach. He taught us how to be dedicated and hard-working, and taught us life lessons. The people we are today,” she said of a group including Melanie Anderson and Mylan Le Eckardt, teammates of hers on Coach Reale’s inaugural team, which went 22-2, “is because of things he did for us. . . . I had a photo taken of all the coaches at a recent Sunday workout and sent it to him. He’s proud of all of us.”

Yes, she said, in answer to a question, “Reale Ball will be back! I want to rebuild the program back to where it was, beginning with Little League and travel leagues.”

Reale was a stickler for form, for doing things the right way when it came to hitting, bunting, fielding, throwing, pitching, catching, base-running. . . . His teams played heads-up ball, “Every Pitch, Every Inning.”

For example, Brown said, “the wrist snap for an overhand throw is a little thing, but so important. If you don’t snap the ball correctly you’re risking an error, which might lose the game. . . . We’ve been breaking down the grips, the throws, and we’ve done the same with hitting. We’ve been doing a lot of hitting. . . . We break down the swing with every kid. We work with all of them from the ground up.”

Brown, Anderson, who will assist her in coaching the team, and Eckardt, who will volunteer her help, not to mention the junior varsity coach, Nicole Fierro, all played in the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s World Series — Brown, as aforesaid, for SUNY Cortland, Anderson and Eckardt for Bloomsburg University, and Fierro for C.W. Post. All are in East Hampton High’s Hall of Fame as well.

Brown, who is in her 16th year of teaching here, said she still goes back to Cortland, to “help with winter clinics. My daughter, Lilah, who’s in fourth grade, goes too. I was the pitching coach last February. I taught Lilah how to pitch last spring. She pitches with full motion, as I do. . . . We’ve got a lot of good young pitchers here. Once I knew I was going to be the coach I helped out last spring with the Little League all-star traveling teams.”

Brown and her fellow coaches, who also include John King of Springs, Chris Merkert, Beth Crowley, and Erin Abran, who is another former Bonac teammate of Brown’s who played in college, will constitute a formidable array.

East Hampton’s field, Reale’s creation largely, is one of the best in the county, if not the best. Recently, the baseball field got a turf infield, though Brown said she preferred a skinned infield “because there’s a lot of bunting, a lot of leaning and sliding. We didn’t want grass or turf on the infield. They’ve resodded the outfield, though, and put in new irrigation. My freshman year, there were just two metal benches and a little backstop. When the boys got their dugouts, my dad, who’s a mason, said he would build dugouts for the girls. Jill Kampf’s dad, Billy, did the carpentry.”

Asked if she, as Reale used to do, would drag the infield, Brown said, with a smile, “Mel has her own landscaping company. She might do it.” Reale called Anderson the best hitter he’d ever seen, male or female.

Coach Reale, she said, “had a terrific run. We’re aiming to get back there. It will take some time, but definitely we’ll be there.”

When Brown’s Sunday afternoon workouts at the high school’s gym began a few weeks ago, 40 seventh through 12th graders turned out. 

“My goal,” she said in parting, “is to build a program from Little League all the way to the top with the same drills. I’d like to collaborate with the middle schools, with Montauk, Springs, and East Hampton. It won’t just be, you know, the varsity softball team. It will be East Hampton softball. We’re all a team, all going for the same goal.” 

“Lou knows we can pass on the knowledge. He told us,” she said, looking down and reading from her cellphone, “the kids couldn’t be in better hands. He told us, ‘You guys will do a great job. I couldn’t be more proud.’ ”

Friday, February 15

GIRLS BASKETBALL, county Class C-D game, Centereach High School, 4:30 p.m.

Wednesday, February 20

GIRLS BASKETBALL, county B-C-D game, Centereach High School, 4:30 p.m.

February 3, 1994

The explosion was inevitable. Pierson High School’s Tyler Ratcliffe, the third-leading scorer in Suffolk last season, had emerged from a shooting slump in a big way over the past three weeks. But his hot shooting then was, it turned out, only a prelude to what was to come Tuesday against Shelter Island.

Playing his next-to-last game on the Whalers’ home court, Ratcliffe turned in one of the most memorable games in Pierson history, notching 46 points in little more than three quarters to lead his team to a 107-62 slaughter of Shelter Island.

The point total was the second highest in the county this year; the last Whaler to break the 40-point barrier was Dawson Giles, who canned 40 against Hampton Bays in 1974.

Credit the left-hander, who canned 18 of his 22 field goal attempts, all six free throws, and all four 3-point attempts. Credit also his unselfish teammates, who repeatedly set their high-scoring teammate up with breathtaking passes as Pierson ripped off fast break after fast break.

The most amazing thing about Ratcliffe’s outburst was how effortlessly it came. He didn’t force a single shot — in fact, Ratcliffe dished off a team-high eight assists and also logged a game-high seven steals. The fact was, every thing he threw up went in — the youngster might have easily set several more marks had he not been pulled from the game on two occasions.

February 10, 1994

Motorists on the Long Island Expressway one day last month might have thought it strange to see a Schaefer school bus rumbling toward La Guardia Airport with a dozen — mostly oversized, 30-to-50-something — happy campers as passengers, headed for a ski trip to Jackson Hole, Wyo.

. . . Abilities ranged from beginner to advanced, East Hampton Village Police Sergeant Mike Tracey said on the group’s return. “We range from being in fair shape to . . . abysmal, I think that’s the word,” said Sergeant Tracey. “Some of us are carrying a lot of extra baggage.”

“Some of us,” Scott Elley, a village police dispatcher, said. 

“He has an eating disorder,” Sergeant Tracey jabbed back, adding that “we all sat on the same side of the plane, which created a strain on the suspension. . . . When we were on the runway, Ken Brown leaned forward and asked one of the passengers how many minutes it had been since they had de-iced the wings. He likes to keep people loose.”

Jackson Hole was more to their liking, with its laid-back western flavor, than Vail, where the group went last year. “The glamorous crowd goes there,” said Sergeant Tracey.

“Women in mink coats, fancy shops,” said Elley. “It was more like here . . . more trendy.”

“And we are not exactly the trendy set,” said Sergeant Tracey.

. . . “It’s so vast out there,” Elley said. “I didn’t realize there was so much open space still left in America. One day, we took a snowmobile trip 100 miles north to Yellowstone. We saw a bald eagle, elk, buffalo, coyotes. . . . It was incredible, the scenery and wildlife. Yellowstone’s mobbed in the summer, so it was a good time to go.”