Thursday, December 14

BOYS SWIMMING, Deer Park vs. East Hampton, Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter, 5 p.m.

GIRLS BASKETBALL, Islip at East Hampton, 6:15 p.m.

BOYS BASKETBALL, East Hampton at Islip, and Pierson at Comsewogue, 6:45 p.m.

Friday, December 15

WRESTLING, East Islip at East Hampton, 6:15 p.m.

BOYS BASKETBALL, Bridgehampton at Port Jefferson, mandatory nonleague, 4:30 p.m.; Pierson at Stony Brook, 7, and Ross School at Shelter Island, 7:15.

Monday, December 18

BOYS BASKETBALL, Ross School at Stony Brook, mandatory nonleague, 4:30 p.m.

Tuesday, December 19

BOYS SWIMMING, East Hampton at Hauppauge, 5 p.m.

GIRLS BASKETBALL, East Hampton at Harborfields, 6:45 p.m.

BOYS BASKETBALL, Bridgehampton at Center Moriches, mandatory nonleague, and Harborfields at East Hampton, 6:15 p.m.

Wednesday, December 20

BOYS BASKETBALL, Stony Brook at Bridgehampton, mandatory nonleague, 6 p.m., and Port Jefferson at Pierson, Sag Harbor, mandatory nonleague, 6:15 p.m.

GIRLS BASKETBALL, Pierson at Southold-Greenport, 6:15 p.m.

East Hampton High School’s boys basketball team commenced its season with an impressive win in the Kendall Madison Tip-Off tournament here this past weekend, trouncing McGann-Mercy 80-48 on Friday before besting Pierson (Sag Harbor) 60-47 in Saturday’s championship game.

Jack Reese, Bonac’s senior point guard, led the way with 18 points, 7 assists, and at least as many steals in the final. He was adjudged the tournament’s most valuable player. 

Reese, Malachi Miller, who guarded Pierson’s chief scoring threat, Will Martin, in what East Hampton’s coach, Dan White, called “a sagging man-for-man defense” designed to keep Martin from getting into the paint, and Jeremy Vizcaino, a sophomore guard who scored 16 points in the win over Mercy, were named to the all-tournament team, along with Pierson’s Martin and Henry Brooks, who, like his brother, Tom, is a serious 3-point threat.

With Martin exploding for 36 points, and with Henry Brooks draining five 3-pointers, Pierson defeated Mattituck 56-49 in Friday’s other semifinal. Mattituck placed third in the tourney by defeating Mercy in Saturday’s consolation game.

East Hampton’s junior varsity, coached by Joe McKee, also won a trophy, defeating Mattituck’s jayvee in the final as Pierson beat Mercy for third place.

There was a Slammin’ Santa youth tournament here this past weekend as well, with East Hampton’s third-and-fourth-grade team, Sag Harbor’s fifth-and-sixth-grade team, and Westhampton Beach’s seventh-and-eighth-grade team winning the brackets.

It was no surprise that the White-coached Bonackers handled the Whalers with relative ease in the Kendall Madison tournament’s championship game, for White, who had been at Sag Harbor for a number of years before coming here last season, had coached most of Pierson’s varsity players since they were third graders.

(He’ll be doing the same with East Hampton’s youngsters as of Saturday, overseeing a revived Saturday morning Biddy Basketball program at the John M. Marshall Elementary School.)

East Hampton led 15-5 after the first quarter, and was up 28-15 at the half. Thanks largely to Miller’s attentiveness, Martin was limited to 12 points for the game.

When the Whalers cut the lead to 9 early in the third, on a 3-pointer by Cooper Schiavoni, Reese, after a 3-point try by Miller went in and out, replied with two successive steals and layups for 32-19. 

A 3-pointer by Martin, who found himself whenever he tried to penetrate double and sometimes triple-teamed, pulled Pierson to within 7, at 36-29 with about three and a half minutes to go in the third, but that was as close as the Whalers were to come. A buzzer-beater by Vizcaino treated the Bonackers to a 45-36 lead at the end of the third period, a lead they were to extend to 21 before White and Hank Katz began to send in the subs.

Reese, Noah Lappin, Ruben Aquino, and Chris Stoecker (a 6-foot-8-inch center), the team’s senior captains, accepted the trophy from Carl Johnson, the former coach of Bridgehampton’s Killer Bees.

The tournament’s program said the late Kendall Madison, after whom the tourney is named, “was a beloved son  of the East Hampton community. He played football, basketball, and ran track in the spring. He was a member of the 1989 Class B state-championship boys basketball team. He was an all-league, all-county, and M.V.P. football player who went on to play football at the University of Connecticut on a full scholarship.”

“The Kendall Madison Foundation and the Kendall Madison scholarship fund were established in his memory to assist others to achieve their dreams. . . . Kendall was inducted into the East Hampton High School Hall of Fame in 2012.” 

After Saturday’s game, White said Reese was “probably the best point guard I’ve ever coached. . . . If anything, he’s a little too unselfish.”

Katz, when questioned, said his team had “played hard,” and that he’d been impressed by his players’ rebounding, “but our ball movement needs to be better.”

Martin couldn’t do it all, he said, “and he realizes that — he’s a leader, he does his best to orchestrate things, to keep his teammates involved.”

While a good, hard-working team, the Whalers can expect to have a lot of competition in Class C this winter. “Stony Brook’s always strong, Port Jefferson ought to be good, and Greenport is really good,” Katz said.

For his part, White said he’d have a better idea as to how the Bonackers may fare this season once Monday’s nonleaguer at Southampton is under their belts.

When last Nick West was at a final — at the 2014 state boys soccer championships in Middletown — he was on crutches, having suffered a broken foot in a semifinal the day before.

That he was at full strength in Saturday’s National Collegiate Athletic Association Division III championship game in Greensboro, N.C., made Messiah’s 2-1 win over Chicago’s North Park University all the more thrilling, his mother, Christine Tulp, said on her return here, especially given the fact that Messiah had lost its conference’s championship game to Lycoming.

A two-time all-state player when he was at East Hampton High School, West played on the left wing in the national tournament. 

He figured prominently in both games played at Greensboro, assisting on one of the Falcons’ three goals in Friday’s come-from-behind 3-2 double-overtime semifinal win over Brandeis, and assisting on one in the final, a header by Justin Brautigam into the right corner that converted West’s cross from the left side in the 10th minute. That goal tied the score at 1-1, North Park having stunned Messiah with a goal of its own, on a shot taken from the top of the box, with barely five minutes gone.

It was the 11th national title for the Harrisburg-area school, which has largely been invincible since the turn of the century.

Coming from behind in the semifinal and final rounds was a first for the Falcons, who are not used to playing catch-up. 

An account on the school’s website said the Brandeis game “may rank among the best in Messiah lore,” the Falcons having to come back on two occasions before putting the hard-fought victory away in the second overtime period. 

West’s high-bouncing header into the middle that his high-scoring teammate, Kirby Robbins, converted with a rocketed sidekick tied the score at 2-2 with 10 minutes left in regulation. 

The first O.T. was scoreless. “As the clock ticked under six minutes in the second,” the website account said, “Brautigam launched a shot from 24 yards out that went under Brandeis’s crossbar for a stunning game-winner. . . . It was only the 10th time in 103 N.C.A.A. tournament games that Messiah had allowed two goals to an opponent.”

A threat whenever he’s got the ball, West, who finished the season with 14 goals (second on the team in that category) and 7 assists, was named the offensive player of the tournament.

The junior business and sports marketing major has been a starter since arriving at Messiah. He played in all 26 of Messiah’s games this fall. The national champions finished at 24-2 over all. 

West is from an athletic family. His older brother, Brandon, played at Messiah (winning national titles as its goalie in 2012 and ’13) and coached there before becoming the women’s soccer coach at Eastern University, which is outside Philadelphia, and his older sister, Ashley, a graduate of Susquehanna University, where she was an all-American, is running professionally now with the University of Connecticut’s track club. Brandon and Ashley were there in Greensboro to see him play, as were his mother, father, and stepfather.

It wasn’t easy, even playing for Messiah, to win a national championship, he said in answer to a question.

The East Hampton High School boys swimming and girls basketball teams began their seasons this past week, with decidedly different results.

The boys, coached by Craig Brierley, swamped Smithtown — a team that had finished a couple of spots higher than the Bonackers in last year’s county meet — in a nonleaguer Friday at the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter, and the next day, the girls basketball team, coached by Kelly McKee, was overwhelmed by their Whaler counterparts at Pierson High School in Sag Harbor.

“That’s a good team,” McKee said following the 75-23 shellacking. As for East Hampton, whose numbers are good, and whose attitude, according to McKee, remains great, “we’ve got a long way to go. “

When Kevin Barron, Pierson’s coach, was asked afterward how he thought his team would do vis-a-vis Class C peers, he said, “We’ll be in the mix, but there’s Mercy and Southold and Stony Brook and Port Jefferson — Mercy and Southold especially. . . . We’ll find out.”

Katie Kneeland led the Whalers with 21 points, Celia Barranco had 13, and Chastin Giles, the energetic point guard transfer, whose swift one-arm passes often found Barranco or Jalyn Hopson underneath, and who had no trouble in driving to the hoop, had 9.

Pierson, whose aggressive defense befuddled the Bonackers, jumped out to a 19-0 lead and never looked back. A made free throw by Maddie Schenck accounted for East Hampton’s sole point of the first quarter.

Olivia Brauer made East Hampton’s first basket of the season in the first minute of the second period and, later on, banked in two more before she went down in a scrum under the basket East Hampton was defending with an apparent ankle injury just before the half ended.

She was on crutches when the teams returned from their locker rooms for the second half.

With 16 on the squad that afternoon, McKee frequently subbed in fresh groups of five, but not to much avail. Pierson cashed in on repeated steals, drew fouls, and otherwise created havoc.

Emma Silvera hit a 3-pointer for East Hampton to begin the fourth. Otherwise, there wasn’t much to write home about.

The swimmers, by contrast, made a splash, beginning with the 200-yard medley relay team’s come-from-behind win in the meet’s opening event. Smithtown held the lead going into the anchor leg, but Ethan McCormac overcame it in exciting fashion.

Ethan’s brother, Owen, then won the 200 freestyle handily (with Ryan Bahel second), after which East Hampton placed second (Ryan Duryea), third (Joey Badilla), and fourth (Aidan Forst) in the 200 individual medley, and swept the 50 with Ethan McCormac, Fernando Menjura, and Thor Botero.

Coming out of the diving intermission, East Hampton led 43-19, and while the final score was given as 91-71, the Bonackers forwent some points at the end, exhibitioning in the 100 breaststroke and the 400 free relay, the meet’s last event.

Besides the aforementioned, other East Hampton winners that evening were Ethan McCormac, in the 500; the 200 freestyle relay team of Colin Harrison, Duryea, Owen McCormac, and Menjura; Duryea in the 100 breast, and the 400 free relay team of Ethan McCormac, Joey Badilla, Owen McCormac, and Forst. 

Monday’s mandatory nonleague meet, with Northport, “one of the top four teams in the county,” would probably be a different matter entirely, the coach said.

Thursday, December 7

BOYS SWIMMING, Stony Brook vs. East Hampton, Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter, 5 p.m.

GIRLS BASKETBALL, East Hampton at East Islip, 5 p.m.; Pierson at Center Moriches, 7.

Friday, December 8

BOYS BASKETBALL, Pierson at Babylon, and Bridgehampton at Mattituck, mandatory nonleague, 4:30 p.m.

Saturday, December 9

WRESTLING, Frank (Sprig) Gardner tournament, East Hampton High School, 9 a.m.-6 p.m.

Monday, December 11

GIRLS BASKETBALL, Port Jefferson at Pierson, Sag Harbor, 6:15 p.m.

BOYS BASKETBALL, Pierson at McGann-Mercy, Riverhead, mandatory nonleague, 6 p.m., Ross School at Center Moriches, mandatory nonleague, 6:15, and East Hampton at Southampton, nonleague, 6:30.

Wednesday, December 13

WRESTLING, East Hampton at Comsewogue, 6 p.m.

BOYS BASKETBALL, McGann-Mercy at Bridgehampton, mandatory nonleague, 6 p.m.; Mattituck at Pierson, Sag Harbor, 6:15, and Babylon at Ross School, East Hampton, mandatory nonleague, 6:15.

The weather was good on Thanksgiving Day, warmer apparently than was expected, so the turnout at the East Hampton Town Recreation Department and John Keeshan Realty’s three and six-mile Turkey Trots in Montauk was bountiful.

So bountiful, in fact, that the 10 a.m. start time had to be pushed back 15 or 20 minutes so that the long lines of day-of-race attendees could be registered.

“All the money after we pay our expenses will go to the Montauk Food Pantry,” said Keeshan, who founded this race (as a six-miler) 41 years ago. “On this day of giving thanks it seems right that the food pantry should be our beneficiary.”

Bob Beattie, the race director, said before everyone lined up at the Circle that he thought the tally of participants might reach 1,000, which would have been a first. It was a first anyway, inasmuch as there were 688 finishers in the three-miler and 84 in the six, for a total of 772. “There were 650 last year, and that was the record until today,” said Beattie. “We’ve been setting turnout records for the past few years now.”

Billy O’Donnell, who has participated in Keeshan’s Thanksgiving Day runs since the beginning, suggested that “they put up a tent on the Circle to handle the registrations from now on. It’s a bottleneck in there,” he said, pointing to the lines about to descend the stairs in the small Chamber of Commerce building across the street from the start-finish line.

The Berglin twins, Nicholas and Christian, of Hampton Bays, who are collegiate runners now, were runners-up — Nicholas in the three, less than a second behind Dylan Fine, a Georgetown runner, whose time was given as 15 minutes and 38.4 seconds, and Christian in the six, several minutes behind Tim Rossi, 25, a Central Park Track Club member, Emory College alumnus, and part-time Sag Harborite who, while he was not listed among the six-mile finishers (Carlo DiFlorio was credited with the win, in 32:59.1), said, when asked afterward, that he had been the winner, which, if so, would have been a four-peat for him, dating to 2014.

Rossi, who has run a half-marathon in 1:15.59, bettered last year’s time by about a minute. But what he was happiest about, he said, was that his father, Steve, who had undergone quadruple bypass surgery about six months ago, was among those who walked the three-miler that day.

Alyssa Bahel, a Denison University field hockey player and runner, was the first female finisher (seventh over all) in the six, in 40:02.4, nine seconds ahead of Barbara Gubbins, 57, thus reversing their placements in 2015’s six-miler.

Rossi said he had been a soccer player to begin with, but switched to competitive running “at this race about six or seven years ago.” 

This writer was not able to catch up with Fine, though Rossi said he was an Amagansett summer resident spending the holiday with his family there.

A number of East Hampton High School’s 2015 and 2017 county-champion cross-country runners were on hand, though Erik Engstrom, the former county champion who is now among the University of Massachusetts’s top runners, sat it out.

Eric Perez, a 2015 graduate, was the third-place finisher in the three-miler, behind Fine and Nicholas Berglin, in 16:38.6. Omar Leon and Ethan McCormac, members of this year’s county-championship team, were sixth and seventh, each in 17:59.2, and Ryan Fowkes, who led the Bonackers this fall, was listed as third in the six-miler, in 36:22.8.

Keira Hughes was the three-miler’s female winner (and 10th over all), in 18:21.7. Bella Tarbet, a ninth grader who, with Ava Engstrom (Erik’s younger sister and a ninth grader as well) led East Hampton’s girls cross-country team this fall, was the runner-up, in 19:33.1. She was 19th over all.

When the question of Fine’s time came up, and whether it was a record, Kevin Barry, East Hampton’s longtime coach, said he doubted it. Artie Fisher’s name always comes up in such discussions, as does Wojtek Wysocki’s. He, himself, Barry said, had run a 15:40 on the way to his second counterclockwise loop around Fort Pond in the not-so-distant past.

Dan White, who is in his second year coaching the East Hampton High School boys basketball team, said following Saturday’s multiteam scrimmage at Mattituck, a scrimmage that also included Riverhead and Greenport, that he was “optimistic” when it came to the coming season.

East Hampton’s girls team scrimmaged too this past week, at Pierson High School in Sag Harbor on Nov. 22, and afterward Kelly McKee, Bonac’s coach, said that he was pleased with his numbers this year — he had 18 players available to him that day — in contrast to the eight he had on his varsity squad last winter. The plan apparently is to harry the opposition with waves upon waves of subs, who, it is hoped, will convert at least some of the turnovers.

The feather in the boys’ cap, as it were, was a 3-point overtime “win” over Riverhead after that school had jumped out to a 10-point lead. Led by their senior point guard, Jack Reese, the boys moved the ball well in that scrimmage, and shot well — Malachi Miller’s 3-pointer, following a steal by Reese, putting the Bonackers over the top, 44-41.

White’s optimism was not unbridled, however. “We’ve got to do better in transition, both offensively and defensively, but we’re unselfish, and I like that. We had a very young team last year, and it’s still a young team, with half a dozen sophomores and juniors, but we’re more experienced. The kids have been playing in the off-season.”

To bolster the program in general, White is reviving Biddy basketball sessions at the John M. Marshall Elementary School Saturday mornings this winter, beginning Dec. 9.

Third and fourth graders are to play from 8:30 to 10 a.m., fifth and sixth graders from 10 to 11:30, and seventh and eighth graders from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m., said White, whose varsity players will help him.

The season begins in earnest with the Kendall Madison Tip-Off tournament here this weekend. Mattituck and Pierson are to play at 5 p.m. tomorrow, with East Hampton and McGann-Mercy to follow, at 6:15.

The varsity consolation and championship games are to be played Saturday, at 4:30 and 6 p.m.

“We’re hoping for an East Hampton-Pierson final,” said White, who was the Whalers’ coach before coming here.

The tournament, which includes junior varsity games, is to benefit the Kendall Madison Foundation, which each year presents four-year college scholarships to East Hampton High School seniors. This year’s winners were Andrew Wilson and Alex Rutkowski. The scholarships require that their recipients “give back,” by mentoring younger East Hampton student-athletes.

The girls squad, which has seven seniors on it — Maddie Schenck, Jayleen Schiappacasse, Danielle Lackner, Sophia Ledda, Melanie Barros, Tallulah Marino, and Olivia Brauer — is to play a nonleague game at Pierson Saturday at 3 p.m. It will follow up with its league opener against Kings Park here on Tuesday at 6:45 p.m.

The boys were to have scrimmaged yesterday at Wyandanch — a team that it upset in league play at the end of last season — and are to scrimmage at Huntington Monday. The Bonackers are to play a nonleague game at Southampton on Dec. 11, at 6:30 p.m.

Moreover, Bridgehampton’s Killer Bees are to play a mandatory nonleaguer with Babylon at the Bee Hive Wednesday, at 6 p.m., the same day that the Pierson Whalers are to play a mandatory nonleaguer at Center Moriches, at 5.

Joe Vas, East Hampton’s athletic director, said during a recent conversation concerning winter sports that East Hampton will field a varsity wrestling team rather than pursue talks for the moment about combining with South­ampton, whose wrestling program is also struggling.

Anthony Piscitello, a Ross School teacher, will be back coaching the team, whose numbers dwindled to eight or so last winter. There are 16 on the squad at the moment, Vas said. East Hampton is — as was the case last year — combined in the sport with Pierson, Ross, and Bridgehampton. 

Jim Stewart, East Hampton’s former longtime varsity coach, thinks that the program will right itself here in the near future, given the encouraging number of participants in the lower grades.

Boys swimming promises to be competitive, said Vas. Craig Brierley has 35 on his squad, which is based at the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter. The winter track teams, by contrast, were thin, the A.D. said, with 12 to 15 on the boys team, coached by Ben Turnbull, and with half a dozen on the girls team, coached by Yani Cuesta.

East Hampton may revive its bowling team next winter, Vas said, at the East Hampton Indoor-Outdoor Tennis Club’s large Clubhouse annex — whose offerings are to include bowling. Billed as a family fun center, the Clubhouse is expected to be up and running come the spring.

The athletic director said in parting that he has begun providing up-to-date East Hampton High School sports news, photos, and videos on a Twitter account that can be summoned up on the school’s website, easthamptonschools. org.

Frank Ackley, the East’s top-ranked 65-year-old United States Tennis Association singles player in 2015, said during a recent conversation at his house in Springs that he hadn’t played singles at the national level in a while, “ever since I broke my leg in a freaky accident on the grass courts at The Bridge.”

“It happened so quick,” he said. “I was going for a volley and my partner [Mike Dickens, of Melbourne, Fla.] was too. We ran into each other and I went down and was pushing myself back up when he fell on me. That sidelined me for eight months. When it happened we were getting ready to play in the [2016] national grass courts in Monmouth, N.J.”

In recent months, Ackley and Dickens have played in two national championships and, though unseeded, have done well. Last month, at the New Orleans Lawn Tennis Club, said to be the oldest tennis club in the United States, they reached the quarterfinal round of the national clay courts, losing to the eventual winners, Andrew Rae, the world’s number-one in both singles and doubles in that age group, of Australia, and Daniel Grossman, of Tiburon, Calif.

In the first round, Ackley and Dickens toppled the fifth-seeded team 6-2, 6-2 and emerged as victors 7-6, 2-6, 6-3 in the second round before losing 6-2, 6-1 to Rae and Grossman in the quarters. “They were so solid — they play together all the time. They did everything right and took care of us. They beat Tom Smith and Paul Wolf, the top team in the U.S., the team that won the grass courts in New Jersey, 6-1 in the third set of the final.” 

“I didn’t play in the singles because I’m not in really good shape, which you need to be to play singles in these national events,” Ackley continued. “There are some guys that’s all they do, they travel all over playing tournaments. . . . If you’re not in shape, you begin sucking air after the first couple of games and your game drops — you start going for winners, hitting riskier shots, and that’s not my style.”

Earlier in the fall, he and Dickens had won a first-round match at the national grass courts before losing to the second seeds 6-4, 6-4 — “a guy from Australia and a guy from New England. They lost in the finals to Smith and Wolf.”

He would try to get himself into “fighting shape” this winter, said Ackley, who spends the winter in Melbourne, where he and Judy Soman have a condo, playing tennis and golf.

Asked how he compared the two sports, the former University of Tennessee’s women’s tennis coach said, “They’re totally different. One is physically demanding, a fistfight; golf is precision and mechanics. It’s always the same. You improvise in tennis a lot on the run, the ball takes funny bounces and you have to adjust — you gotta do what you gotta do. . . . I love golf too. I used to play at the Sag Harbor Golf Club. They called the greens in those days ‘the browns.’ They oiled them so they wouldn’t fall apart.”

He had come to golf first, when he was a student at Mercy High School in Riverhead, whose home course was the Baiting Hollow Country Club. “One day on the golf course I wound up watching the tennis team hitting balls and running around. Larry Chizever, Mercy’s volunteer tennis coach, showed me the game, and the next year I was on both teams. They let you do that then. I was number-one on the tennis team and was two or three on the golf team.”

“Golf is all mechanics and mental, and you don’t lose any weight. . . . You have to be tough mentally in tennis too.”

“Yes, the courts at Baiting Hollow were hard courts,” he said in answer to a question. “The only high school in the country that I know of that has Har-Tru courts is Ross.”

“I’d like to get ready again,” he said, summoning up the U.S.T.A. website on his laptop computer and looking at the long age-group tournament list. “We’ll end up the calendar year with only two tournaments. . . . They take your four best tournaments when they’re figuring out your rankings. Some guys play in 20. Andrew Rae does. Oh my God can he play — effortless. When you play him you’re the one moving around. There are tournaments all over, in Baton Rouge, South Carolina, Jackson, Miss., Atlanta, Texas, Indiana. . . . There’s one this summer in New Haven. That’s closer to home. There’s one coming up in Longboat Key, on the other coast. But my brother’s duck shoot at Spring Farm is that day and I can’t miss that. The day after the duck shoot we’re driving down.”

To get ready for the national clay courts he had been helped greatly at the East Hampton Tennis Club, he said, in the days leading up to it “by the pro there, Gary Clermont, and by Phil Koufmann and Greg Connor. We did serve and volley drills every day in the afternoon. It was a crash course. They’d adjust to try to help me out — it wasn’t a practice match. We wouldn’t have beaten the fifth seeds otherwise. . . . I haven’t hit a ball since that tournament in New Orleans.”

“Frankly,” Ackley confided, with a smile, “I really like beating seeded guys.”

November 19, 1992

The 1992 high school football season ended in East Hampton Saturday, but not before the gallant Bonackers gave undefeated Mount Sinai all it could handle.

If the heartbreaking 21-20 loss did little to console the losers, the fact that some veteran onlookers commented that the game was one of the finest ever played here certainly should.

East Hampton thus ends its season with a 4-4 mark, although in defeat the locals gave arguably their most impressive performance of the season, outplaying the tough-as-nails Mustangs for much of the game before being worn down in the late stages of the second half.

. . . Trevor Darrell and Paul Poutouves, East Hampton linebackers, were sensational in defeat, each recording numerous tackles and contributing some crushing blocks on the other side of the ball. Peter Maxey, playing with a badly bruised shoulder, hung tough for the entire game. Marcus Borowsky, the quarterback, was debited with throwing three interceptions, but only one of those passes was poorly thrown. In a nutshell, it was his versatility that played a major role in the near-upset.

And though Todd Carberry’s numbers were not up to par, his toughness on both sides of the ball was evident throughout. To say he was a marked man would be an understatement — each Mustang defensive player had Carberry’s number, 26, written on his helmet, a reminder to keep an eye on the elusive but powerful senior. 

Paul Blodorn, the young Mercy High School senior from Sag Harbor, continues to amaze on the cross-country trails. Blodorn celebrated his 17th birthday in Wappingers Falls Saturday by finishing a strong 10th in the New York State Federation meet, an open one with competitors from high schools of all sizes and stripes.

“Kevin [Barry] and I would have been happy with a top-30 finish, but Paul ran a super race,” said Cliff Clark, who has been advising the Mercy phenom. “The course was just as tough as Sunken Meadow, and it was rainy and slippery. Paul moved up from 18th to 10th in the last mile, and missed third or fourth by just seconds. The winner was only 20 seconds faster than Paul.”

In the process, Blodorn left Dave Garner, who had defeated him by 15 seconds in the state Class C meet, in the dust, as it were. Garner, of Walton, which is near Oneonta, finished 14th. . . . Blodorn’s time over the 3.1-mile overland course was 16 minutes and 37 seconds.

Thursday, November 30

GIRLS BASKETBALL, Westhampton Beach at Pierson, Sag Harbor, nonleague, 4 p.m.

Friday, December 1

BOYS SWIMMING, Smithtown vs. East Hampton, mandatory nonleague meet, Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter, 5 p.m.

BOYS BASKETBALL, Kendall Madison Foundation Tip-Off tournament, Mattituck vs. Pierson, 5 p.m., and East Hampton vs. McGann-Mercy, 6:15, East Hampton High School.

Saturday, December 2

GIRLS BASKETBALL, East Hampton at Pierson, Sag Harbor, nonleague, 3 p.m.

BOYS BASKETBALL, Kendall Madison Foundation Tip-Off tournament, junior varsity championship game, 3 p.m.; varsity consolation game, 4:30, and varsity championship game, 6, East Hampton High School.

Sunday, December 3

MEN’S SOCCER, over-30 league, Hampton United at Inter United, Baymen Soccer Complex, Sayville, 2:15 p.m.

Monday, December 4

BOYS SWIMMING, Northport vs. East Hampton, mandatory nonleague meet, Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter, 5 p.m.

BOYS BASKETBALL, East Hampton at Huntington, scrimmage, 5 p.m.

OLD MONTAUK ATHLETIC CLUB, holiday dinner, South Fork Country Club, Amagansett, 6 p.m.

MEN’S SOCCER, 7-on-7 league, championship game, Herrick Park, East Hampton, 7 p.m.

Tuesday, December 5

GIRLS BASKETBALL, league opener, Kings Park at East Hampton, 6:45 p.m.

Wednesday, December 6

BOYS BASKETBALL, Babylon at Bridgehampton, mandatory nonleaguer, 6 p.m.

GIRLS BASKETBALL, Mattituck at Pierson, Sag Harbor, 6:15 p.m.