In making a circuit of East Hampton High School’s fields Monday afternoon, this writer found Michelle Kennedy, the boys tennis coach, and the track coaches Shani Cuesta and Chris Reich in good moods, as was Will Collins, who assists Ed Bahns with the baseball team. But in Collins’s case, he was trying to keep hope alive, given the fact that the team remained winless as of Monday.

    One game was played at the high school that day, in boys lacrosse. Mike Vitulli and his assistant, Steve Redlus, had thought going in that the contest would be competitive, but it quickly became obvious that Westhampton, with its dominant face-off play and with its midfielders whipping shoulder-high shots into the nets from about 12 to 15 yards out, was the stronger team.

    The Hurricanes led 6-0 at the end of the first quarter and never looked back on the way to a 14-2 rout. Drew Harvey, one of three or four starters from Pierson High School, scored East Hampton’s goals.

     Playing at Westhampton Beach that day, Bonac’s softball team came away with a 10-8 win as Casey Waleko, the winning pitcher, who’s been bothered by what’s believed to be a pinched nerve in her back, struggled from the third inning on.

    Lou Reale, the coach, said Tuesday morning that he wasn’t sure how his ace would fare health-wise. Courtney Dess, the senior second baseman, is ready to step in if Waleko needs rest.

    At any rate, the win improved East Hampton to 2-1 league play — it led the league as of Monday — and evened its overall record at 2-2.

    “We didn’t play all that well in Florida,” Reale said when asked about the team’s recent spring training trip to Disney World in Orlando. “We’re still throwing to the wrong base and making mental mistakes. . . .”

    On the other hand, the hitting isn’t all that bad. At least it wasn’t on Monday.

    The Bonackers put up three runs in the top of the third inning. “Ali [Harned] tripled, Casey doubled, and Ellie [Cassel] hit a shot,” Reale said in recounting the action.

    “In the bottom of the fourth, Casey’s back began bothering her. She walked three in a row and hit the fourth. Then there were two doubles, a single, and . . . one, two, three, four, five runs. That put them up 5-3.”

    “In the top of the fifth, Paloma Bahi doubled, Ali reached on an error by their third baseman, and Ellie hit another shot — a three-run homer that put us up 6-5.”

    “Luckily, we scored four runs in the top of the seventh. Courtney tripled to lead off, Ali drove her in with a double, and Casey singled. . . . They intentionally walked Ellie, but Emma Norris, a ninth grader, came through with a pinch-hit double down the third baseline.”

    “They hit three doubles in a row in the bottom of the seventh to make it 10-8. Then there was a popup to Courtney at second and two groundouts to Ali, at short, and that was it.”

    The softball team was to have played Sayville, the defending Class A state champion, here yesterday, and is to play at Elwood-John Glenn today.

Saturday, March 30

BOYS LACROSSE, Riverhead at East Hampton, nonleague, 11 a.m.

Tuesday, April 2

BASEBALL, East Hampton at Bayport-Blue Point, 4:30 p.m.

BOYS LACROSSE, East Hampton at Mattituck-Greenport-Southold, 4:30 p.m.

Wednesday, April 3

SOFTBALL, Mount Sinai at East Hampton, 4:30 p.m.

BASEBALL, Shoreham-Wading River at East Hampton, 4:30 p.m.

BOYS TENNIS, East Hampton at Westhampton Beach, 4:30 p.m.

GIRLS LACROSSE, East Hampton at Rocky Point, 4:30 p.m.

Thursday, April 4

GIRLS TRACK,  East Hampton at Sayville, 4:30 p.m.

BOYS LACROSSE, Kings Park at East Hampton, 4:30 p.m.

BOYS TRACK, Sayville at East Hampton, 4:30 p.m.

   The East Hampton High School teams that played Monday, which is to say boys lacrosse, girls lacrosse, softball, and baseball, lost, though the season is young and the teams are young.

    The week’s sole good news lay in the boys track team’s 76-64 league-opener loss at Miller Place. Chris Reich, the head coach, said in an e-mail account that “it was the closest we’ve come to beating Miller Place in three years. We have a great chance of winning a lot of meets this season.”

    Miller Place won the distance races, though the Bonackers did well in the field events and in the shorter races. East Hampton, with Evan Larsen, John Grogan, and Nick Tulp, swept the 400; Keaton Crozier won the long and triple jumps; Will Ellis won the 110-meter high hurdles and was second in the triple; Thomas King won the high jump; Josh King won the shot-put; Liam Kessler was second in the 100; Hunter Kelsey was second in the 200, and the 4-by-100 relay team of Kessler, Kelsey, Brent Henry, and Wanya Reid won.

    Matt Maloney, the girls lacrosse coach, said following a 16-5 trouncing here at the hands of a strong Babylon team that his players needed to go harder in practices.

    “It’s time to step up,” he told the girls during a lengthy soul-searching postgame huddle in the bitter cold.

    “We’ve not lived up to our potential yet,” he said as the team was leaving the field.

    When asked if the lopsided score were owing to an inexperienced defense, he said, “It was the offense too. We only scored 5 goals.”

The girls, who are hoping to repeat as a playoff team, will have time to figure things out this week, Maloney added, before the season resumes in earnest.

    Lou Reale, the softball coach, in reporting his team’s 7-5 league-opener loss at Rocky Point, said he was “pleased with the way we hit the ball — Rocky Point’s pitcher is one of the better ones in our league. What hurt us were errors and base-running mistakes. Six of their runs were unearned.”

    Casey Waleko, still recovering from a back injury, wasn’t sharp. She struck out seven, but walked six.

    “We threw the ball around in the first inning and gave them two runs,” said Reale. “We came back in the top of the third to tie it. They scored five runs in the bottom of the sixth. We scored three in the top of the seventh — Courtney Dess hit a solo home run, and Casey, Ali [Harned], Ellie [Cassel], and Ilsa [Brzezinski] all hit singles, though Ilsa was thrown out trying to stretch hers into a double. Shannon McCaffrey also doubled, but she was caught off second when their third baseman caught a foul off the line and threw her out.”

    “Theoretically, we can straighten out things like throwing to the wrong base and base-running mistakes, but we don’t have any experience. Anyway, the Florida trip will help. At least the weather will be better! We’ll have five scrimmages down there and we’ll get to work on things.”

Likewise, the boys lacrosse team lost its league opener Monday at Bayport-Blue Point, by a score of 15-7.

    Mike Vitulli, the team’s coach, said his players too were young, though the team, because of the flu, was shorthanded that day.

    The first half was disastrous. The home team led 10-1 at the break, but East Hampton outscored the Phantoms 6-5 in the second frame, with Daley Pagano, who had replaced Mikey Jara, in the goal.

    Cort Heneveld scored 4 goals and had 2 assists, Drew Harvey had 2 and 2, Tyler Shaw had 1 goal, and Jack ­Schleicher had 1 assist.

    In other recent action, the boys lost 14-9 to North Babylon, though the good news lay in the fact that East Hampton’s scoring was widespread. Harvey had 2 goals and 4 assists; Heneveld had 2 assists; John Pizzo had 2 goals, and Regis O’Neil, R.J. Notel, Jamie Wolf, Seamus McLaughlin, and Schleicher each found the nets once. Jara had 10 saves.

    “Once we get the flu bug off our backs we’ll be all right,” said Vitulli. “O’Neil and Schleicher are freshmen and we’ve got a lot of sophomores. It’s a steep learning curve.”

    Shani Cuesta, the girls track coach, underwent a trial by fire too, “to say the least,” she said, in recounting the girls’ first home meet of the season this past week with powerhouse Miller Place.

    Cuesta is now the head coach given the retirement of Diane O’Donnell, though, besides the myriad details that require attention during the course of a meet, she’s also overseeing a young team that numbers around 50.

    “Because the weather was so brutal, we decided that once 75 points were reached, we’d end it,” Cuesta said in an e-mail account.

    “The scorers for us were Nina Piacentine, who won the 1,500-meter racewalk; Gabbie McKay, who was second in the triple jump; Dana Cebulski, who was second in the 400; Taliya Hayes, who was second in the discus and third in the shot-put; Katie Mendoza, who was third in the triple jump, and Amanda Calabrese, who was third in the 100-meter high hurdles.”

    Cuesta added that because the new pole vault and high jump mats had arrived the morning of the meet “we were unable to prepare for those events, and, as a result, gave up 17 points to Miller Place, hard hits for us. Hopefully we’ll be able to practice with them this week and be better prepared for our meet at Sayville next Thursday [April 4].”

   A good big team, the Green Devils, was matched against a good small one, the Kings, in the 11-and-up roller hockey championship game at the Sportime Arena in Amagansett Sunday.

    And, in the end, though it took 44 minutes of regulation and 2:40 of overtime to do it, the Devils, thanks to Matt Kreymborg’s fourth goal of the day, prevailed 7-6.

    Though they gave up six inches or so in height to the three Kreymborg brothers, the brothers Nicholson, Robby and Brett, who play on travel teams as well, gave the Devils — and their goalie, Khloe Goncalves, about whom more later — all they could handle.

    A goal by the Kings’ Will Steinbrecher treated them to a 6-4 lead with about eight minutes left to play in the second (and final) 22-minute period.

    That deficit prompted Matt Kreymborg to go on a tear, and, within 36 seconds, thanks in part to the fact that the Kings — as had been the case all morning — had trouble getting back on defense, the game was tied at 6-6.

    Kreymborg continued to threaten after he’d tied the score, though the Kings’ tall goalie, Brady McCormick of Manorville, blocked his shots.

    During a timeout with 2:13 to go, Bob Nicholson, Robby and Brett’s father, told his charges, “No excuses — let’s go out and win it. You gotta get back on defense.”

    But Matt Kreymborg kept up the pressure. McCormick made a nice save of a shot he took with 1:01 to go, and an even better one when, with 45.7 seconds left in regulation, Kreymborg was awarded a penalty one-on-one after Brett Nicholson, with McCormick spread-eagled, had smothered the puck in the Kings’ crease.

    McCormick was to repel yet another Kreymborg shot before Brett Nicholson stole the puck in the defensive zone in the final seconds, and, with Kings fans cheering him on, broke in on Goncalves, who, refusing to take the bait of a fake in close, proved up to the challenge.

    That brought on the aforementioned sudden-death 22-minute overtime period, and Matt Kreymborg’s game-winning one-on-one goal 2 minutes and 40 seconds into it.

    For the Kings Will Steinbrecher had 3 goals, Robby Nicholson had 1 goal and 2 assists, and Brett Nicholson had 2 goals and 1 assist. McCormick had 35 saves.

    For the Devils Matt Kreymborg had 4 goals and 1 assist, Tim Kreymborg had 3 goals, and James McGuire had 2 assists. Goncalves, an East Hampton High School ninth grader who was celebrating her 15th birthday that day, had 37 saves.

    During a conversation afterward, Goncalves said a friend, Jackson Rafferty, had suggested she might like roller hockey about five years ago, “and now,” she said, “I play more than him — three times a week at Rapid Fire in Center Moriches and once or twice a week here. I usually play in the men’s pickup games on Sunday mornings.”

    She’s played goalie for only a year, Goncalves said in answer to a question. “Larry Lillie gave me a lesson, and I’ve gotten some pointers from my dad [Candido Goncalves] and UpIsland. . . . Otherwise, I’m pretty much self-taught.”

    Asked if she played any sports at the high school, Goncalves, who travels far afield to tournaments with Rapid Fire’s Black Ice all-star team, said, “No, this is really it. I love it.”

    When the subject of college came up, Goncalves’s mother, Diane, said, “There is roller hockey in college, but they only give out scholarships for ice hockey.”

    Goncalves said she thought she could make the transition without too much difficulty. Because one could slide in ice hockey, the goalie position might even be easier to play than in roller hockey, Goncalves said in parting.

    In other recent roller hockey action at Sportime, the Blackhawks won the adult championship, defeating the Wild 12-4 in the championship game.

    Tyler Jarvis, who oversees the youth hockey leagues at Sportime, led the way for the winners with 5 goals and 5 assists. Other scorers for the Blackhawks were Mike Murphy, who had 6 goals, and James Keogh, who had 1 goal. Ray Curtin and Dan Cebulski played defense, and Joe Lombardo, a rookie, was in the Blackhawks’ goal.

    Jarvis said following Sunday’s final that another adult league season is to begin at Sportime Tuesday, and that “we’re thinking of perhaps having another youth hockey season in the summer.”

   Jacob Siwicki of Sagaponack, who in his high school career played for top football programs in suburban Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C., before taking a postgraduate year at the Northfield Mount Hermon preparatory school in Gill, Mass., learned recently that he has been accepted at Dartmouth University, where he is expected to make an immediate impact.

    Asked if his goal were still to play in the National Football League, the personable, 215-pound, 6-foot tailback said, “Absolutely — it’s been my goal ever since I was a kid.” Though, in case that isn’t to be, he’s going to major in business, he said.

    Siwicki left East Hampton following his freshman high school year for greener football pastures, stopping first at Upper St. Clair, Pa., just outside Pittsburgh, before moving on in his senior year to storied DeMatha in Washington, D.C.

    “You might get a crowd of 1,000 at homecoming in East Hampton, but at Upper St. Clair we played Friday nights before 5,000 on average, and there were 11,000 at DeMatha’s championship game with Our Lady of Good Counsel in D.C.”

    “DeMatha [ranked sixth in the nation when he went there] has over the past 10 years sent an average of 15 football players a year to Division 1 schools. U.S.C. was still really good when I went there — Alex Park, who quarterbacked the team I was on at Upper St. Clair, is at Dartmouth now. He’s a sophomore.”

    While at DeMatha, Siwicki was nominated as the D.C./Metro area’s player of the year, and was its player of the week twice; was the top-ranked running back in Maryland and led the Washington, D.C., Catholic Athletic League in rushing yards and rushing touchdowns, and was his team’s most valuable offensive player. Moreover, he was cited as the most valuable player of the DeMatha-Our Lady of Good Counsel clash, a game in which 30 of the players on the field had received Division 1-A offers, and was picked for the Chesapeake Bowl, a regional all-star game in which the best players in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Virginia, West Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., competed.

    During his junior year at Upper St. Clair, Siwicki, who led that team in all rushing categories and was named to the all-Western Pennsylvania Interscholastic League team, participated in the U.S. Army combine for the nation’s top 500 juniors, was a Football University top-10 running back and Top Gun Top 80, as well as a U.S. Army all-American Top Junior.

    Now 20, Siwicki will enter Dartmouth as a freshman with four years of eligibility. He agreed that the extra year he’d spent in further preparing himself for an Ivy League education and in further honing his football skills had been worth it. The stopovers at the above-mentioned schools had been broadening, socially, athletically, and academically, he added.

    Each year, he said, in reply to a question, he has gotten stronger and faster. “The shuttle [which measures agility and quickness] is my strong suit. I can do it in 3.94 seconds. Most high school running backs do it in 4.5.”

    “My 40-yard dash,” he said, in answer to another question, “is 4.45. . . . That’s getting fast, certainly for a 6-foot running back who weighs 215.”

    In each of his high school years he had played the tailback position, averaging, he thought, “about seven yards per carry at DeMatha, and, though they didn’t keep stats at Mount Hermon, about five or six per carry there.”

    The prep school had gone winless the year before Siwicki came, and went 3-5 the year he was there, “though three of those losses were winnable. We could just as easily have been 6-2.”

    Asked if he would describe himself as a power back, he said, “I’d say I’m a more of a balanced runner. I can be shifty too. I get off the mark fast — the first 10 yards is my strong suit.”

    Prep school football — Northfield Mount Hermon played against such schools as Andover, Exeter, and Taft, which also had postgrads on their rosters — was “definitely not easy.”

    Siwicki is also a pretty good receiver. “Most of my catches were coming out of the backfield.”

    He found out last spring that he was also pretty good at lacrosse, a sport he hadn’t played since his eighth-grade year here. He’ll play only football at Dartmouth, however.

    This writer sent him a copy of Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers: The Story of Success” on learning that he would spend a “pg” year at Northfield Mount Hermon. Practice, practice, practice is the book’s advice. Don’t rush it whatever the field, says Gladwell. On average, 10,000 hours of practice will do.

    “It was good that you let the game come to you, as it were,” he was told.

    “Definitely, I wouldn’t have done anything different,” Siwicki said in signing off. “Everything works out — I really believe that.”

Thursday, April 4

GIRLS TRACK, East Hampton at Sayville, 4:30 p.m.

BOYS LACROSSE, Kings Park at East Hampton, 4:30 p.m.

BOYS TRACK, Sayville at East Hampton, 4:30 p.m.

Friday, April 5

BASEBALL, East Hampton at Mount Sinai, 4:30 p.m.

GIRLS LACROSSE, Sayville at East Hampton, 4:30 p.m.

BOYS TENNIS, Southampton at East Hampton, 4:30 p.m.

Saturday, April 6

SOFTBALL, Bayport-Blue Point at East Hampton, nonleague, 11 a.m.

Monday, April 8

SOFTBALL, East Hampton at Westhampton Beach, 4:30 p.m.

BOYS LACROSSE, Westhampton Beach at East Hampton, 4:30 p.m.

Tuesday, April 9

GIRLS TRACK, Amityville at East Hampton, 4:30 p.m.

BASEBALL, East Hampton at Amityville, 4:30 p.m.

BOYS TRACK, East Hampton at Amityville, 4:30 p.m.

GIRLS LACROSSE, East Hampton at Huntington, 4:30 p.m.

Wednesday, April 10

SOFTBALL, Sayville at East Hampton, 4:30 p.m.

BASEBALL, Amityville at East Hampton, 4:30 p.m.

BOYS LACROSSE, East Hampton at Comsewogue, 4:30 p.m.

BOYS TENNIS, East Hampton at Ross, 4:30 p.m.

April 7, 1988

    Shawn Turner set a new East Hampton High School high jump record of 6 feet 3 inches, and surprisingly good performances were recorded by hitherto-untried competitors in East Hampton-Pierson’s league season-opener here Tuesday with Mercy High School of Riverhead. East Hampton won the meet 106-19.

April 14, 1988

    Another honor came Kenny Wood’s way on Sunday as Newsday named him to its 10-player all-Long Island boys basketball team.

    . . . “You can’t stop him,” said Center Moriches coach, Dom Savino. “He brings the ball up, he gets the ball inside — he’s the whole team.”

    While he lost rather badly in the final, to Tim Mayotte, Paul Annacone, the East Hampton-reared touring tennis professional who lives in Knoxville, Tenn., last week enjoyed two wins over top-10 players — Jimmy Connors and Brad Gilbert — in the Chicago Volvo tournament.

    . . . Annacone’s father, Dominic, who is superintendent of Sag Harbor schools, said his son’s groundstrokes, which were weak in the final, were strong in the semifinal match with Gilbert. Following his brother Steve’s advice, Annacone forsook chip-and-charge tactics against Connors, whom he had never beaten before, in favor of staying back, at times even on his serve. The strategy worked.

April 21, 1988

    A team made up of East Hampton Town men’s slow-pitch softball league all-stars won a United States Slow-Pitch Softball Association tournament in Centereach last weekend, enabling the entry, Pete’s Boys, to qualify for the state championships to be played in Smithtown in July, and in the national tourney, which is to take place in Parkersburg, W. Va., over Labor Day weekend. It was the first time an East Hampton team had played in a USSSA-sanctioned tournament.

    . . . Pete’s Boys, sponsored by the Bologna and Landi Gallery and named in memory of the late Peter Landi, won all four games it played in its D classification bracket.

    According to Dan Mazzeo, the team’s player-manager, D teams are considered to be moderately powerful, but to guard against “beefing up,” over-the-fence home runs, he said, are outs in D ball. There is no prohibition against triples, however, and Pete’s Boys banged out six of them in the tourney, two each by Mazzeo, who caught, Steve Wilson, who pitched, and Steve Thebner, who played third base.

    There is more enthusiasm on the Montauk Rugby Club than experience. Thus, the side lost twice recently, to Amityville 24-4 on April 9, and to the New York Rugby Club, 15-0, on Saturday.

    As usual, the team, which must be able to field two sides if it is to continue playing in Division II come the fall, is looking for more players.

    . . . Asked what Montauk’s strengths and weaknesses were, Mike Toohey replied, “Actually, we tend to have more weaknesses than strengths — the team is so young. But we’re strong in key areas — at number-eight, where Keith Bunce plays, at second row, where Charlie Whitmore plays, at scrum half, where I play, and anywhere Larry Lillie plays. We’ve got a super outside center from Patchogue, too. I don’t know his name, but he can really run.”

April 28, 1988

    As of Monday, Jim Nicoletti, East Hampton High School’s varsity baseball coach, said Michael Sarlo was batting .483, Scott Loper, .478, Kenny Wood, .433, and Trevor Grunewald, .417. In addition, Sarlo was leading the team in runs batted in with 17, “probably putting him among the top in the county in that category.”

    The local running season was welcomed in Montauk Sunday by 52 road racers who had, it turned out, overwintered well. While Kevin Barry, 25, of Shelter Island, ran away with the 3.4-mile Dock race in 17 minutes and 46 seconds, just eight seconds off Neil Donahue’s mark set in 1982, there were few, if any, slouches among the competitors, whose ages ranged from 8 to 68.

    Annette MacNiven of Springs won among the women in 23:34, and finished 16th over all.

    MacNiven, who works weekends for Pony Farm Realty in Amagansett, had bid a customer a hurried goodbye, and had made it to the starting line in front of Montauk’s Shagwong Tavern just a few minutes before George Watson’s “Ready, get set, go,” turning some heads as she quickly shed a dress that she had worn over orange running tights.

    Duane Bock, a 1987 graduate of East Hampton High School who plays number-two for Campbell University in Buies Creek, N.C., placed fourth in the recent Division 1 Big South Conference golf tournament.

    Attention all 9 and 10-year-olds who were cut in the recent East Hampton Little League tryouts. Help is at hand in the form of a Little League-sanctioned Minor League, which a Springs resident, Tedd Libath, has decided to launch.

    “There are at least 30 kids who don’t make Little League teams here year after year,” said Libath. “It’s not anyone’s fault — the Little League coaches are good people and they’d like to take everyone, but their rosters are limited.”

    Libath stressed that everyone who turns out will be able to play Minor League ball — there will be no tryouts.

   “One step at a time” is how Brigid Collins and Jim Stewart plan to create a bereavement center for children on the East End. They took a giant leap in that direction in October, when they secured not-for-profit status for Katy’s Courage Fund, named for their daughter, who died of hepatoblastoma, a rare form of liver cancer. The third Annual Katy’s Courage 5K race, which celebrates Katy and furthers her family’s progress toward their goal, will take place in Sag Harbor on April 13.

    Collins said on Tuesday that she hopes for good weather, and that people will register online in advance. Those who do will qualify to win an iPad, courtesy of GeekHampton, she said.

    Last year’s race, with over 1,200 people registered and more than $30,000 raised, enabled the couple to open an account for the center with the proceeds, in addition to providing college scholarships for East End students and funds toward pediatric cancer research at Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

    There is a “definite need in the community” for a bereavement center, Collins said, something she found out firsthand after Katy’s death in December 2010. Her son, Robert, was just 6 years old when he lost his sister, and he really struggled, she said. A friend, a director at the Children’s Bereavement Center of South Texas, suggested a visit, and it was a “transformative experience.”

    Collins, the assistant principal at the Montauk School, explained that the teachers she works with supported her trip to Texas, where highly trained specialists work with children at their different developmental levels. It makes a big difference, she said. Parents learn how to help their children at the age they are at, and understand how they will think differently as they grow older.

    The “atmosphere was remarkable,” she said. The couple hope to model their center on what they saw there. “I want other children to experience that.”

    Her son, now a second grader at Sag Harbor Elementary School, has asked to go back there, she said. “We would like to continue, too,” she said. “It’s sad that we would have to travel to Texas.”

   Most who attend the annual 5K would agree with Collins that “the feeling is what the race is about, to support her memory and the kind of kid Katy was.”

Attendees range from competitive runners to mothers with strollers and students, past and present, from Southampton to Montauk.

   Last year’s race winner was Richard Temerian of Bridgehampton, a 53-year-old who ran the race in 17:32.16 seconds. The first female was 42-year-old Sinead FitzGibbon.

   Stewart has been the only health teacher at East Hampton High School for 30 years, so just about every alumni of the school has passed through his class, Collins said, and many will walk or run the race. He has also coached the high school’s wrestling and boys soccer teams, and many of the athletes also support the cause.

   Katy’s friends are a big part of the event too, dressed in pink, Katy’s favorite color, and with headbands and bows, which Katy wore frequently after losing her hair “to feel pretty,” her mother said.

   “We see the love in the community during the event,” Collins said. “It is why Katy lived. . . . When everyone comes together . . . it embodies her spirit. . . . We will continue to celebrate that.”

   Registration for the 8:30 a.m. event is $25 online at islandrunning.net. Those who register early that morning will have a chance to win a tech shirt. On race day, from 7:15 to 8:15 a.m., registration is $30. Information about the cause and links to the events that support it can be found at katyscourage.org.

   Well, we finally had a spate of spring-like weather. On Saturday, a phoebe was calling around my house, joining the two-week siege of grackle, redwing blackbird, cardinal, Carolina wren, and tufted titmouse calling and singing. Phoebes show up when the insects begin popping out, and they started popping out over the weekend like mad.

    Among the first of these insects to appear is perhaps the prettiest, the mourning cloak butterfly, Nymphalis antiopa. This large lepidopteran, with its dark cast and white-margined wings and a lining of small black-ringed blue circles bordering the white, is the first butterfly by a long shot to make its appearance each year. Last year I saw my first in North Sea at the edge of an Atlantic white cedar bog on March 23. I was concerned that I hadn’t seen one this March despite many trips into wooded areas where they hang out motionless in a crevice or under the leaves until their spring emergence.

    This year Easter Sunday fell on the last day of March, and during a walk along the Long Pond Greenbelt following the long-abandoned railroad line between Bridgehampton and Sag Harbor, there appeared out of nowhere a mourning cloak flitting here and there, as if to say, “Hey, I made it after all.”

    Butterflies evolved about 40,000 years ago, a few hundred million years after the most common lepidopterans, the moths, appeared. The mourning cloak is probably much younger, but it has been on Earth long enough to spread its range across all of the Holarctic, from northern Asia through North America and throughout most of Europe. Interestingly, it is only accidental in the British Isles, but how it gets there year after year is an indication of why it has a range rivaled by few other butterflies, indeed, by few other species in the animal world.

    It’s one of the few species of butterflies that overwinters in cold climes and thus it is one of the longest-lived butterflies, sometimes lasting an entire year. Was it some kind of omen that the mourning cloak appeared on Easter Sunday when another kind of cloak, the Shroud of Turin, was on display in the Vatican in Rome?

    The name “mourning cloak” is a translation of the German name for this butterfly, “trauermantel,” or death cloak, after the traditionally dark attire worn by women in many parts of the world when attending funerals.

    And for the mourning cloak, it’s a kind of second coming, after spending November through February and most of March almost completely lifeless. How can a butterfly that should be a nectar feeder emerge when there are but a handful of flowers, and none in the woodlands where it spent the winter, manage to survive? The mourning cloak has a special feeding niche used by hardly any other butterflies — it feeds on the sap exuding from the bark of trees. What is eerily ironic about the mourning cloak in the woods south of Sag Harbor on Sunday was the presence of another sap feeder in the immediate vicinity, a yellow-breasted sapsucker.

    It was eerie because, as Vicki Bustamante was quick to point out, when we saw the mourning cloak on that March 23 Friday last year in North Sea, what was feeding in a tree twenty feet above it? A sapsucker. Is it possible that the sapsucker’s unmusical notes rouse the mourning cloak from its deep sleep? There may be a connection here that requires further investigation.

    Well, as in almost every other fairy tale, the male mourning cloak finds a female, mates with her, and the eggs are laid in a willow, alder, or some other convenient tree, but one that leafs out early to give the attractively colored black and red caterpillars a head start over the other lepidopteran larvae that might be in the area, say, the gypsy moth or spring canker.

    You can figure out the rest of the story on your own. The mourning cloak caterpillars mature by the end of summer, pupate, and hatch out into the “imagos,” adult mourning cloaks, which spend time searching for a good overwintering spot while getting by on sap, rotten fruit, and, on occasion, flower nectar. While the monarch and other butterflies are flying south with the snowbirds, the mourning cloak is perfectly content to spend the winter as I do these years, miserably cloaked in a dark blue bathrobe, resigned to riding out the numbing cold of these northern latitudes doing crossword puzzles and watching old movies.

   The rain predicted for Saturday — snow, as it turned out — didn’t arrive until the afternoon, which allowed East Hampton High School’s baseball team to scrimmage Mattituck here.

    The initial outing gave Ed Bahns and Will Collins — and their volunteer assistant, Kevin Brophy — a chance to give their 17-player roster a look in a game situation, and afterward there was agreement that while there was much to work on, if the young team continued to work hard and made steady improvement, that would be fine.

    Eleven players were lost to graduation last June. The sole senior on this spring’s squad is Peter Vaziri, the center fielder. Perhaps Maykell Guzman, who spent the past year in the Dominican Republic, is too, though, for the moment, the coaches are thinking of him as a junior.

    Guzman was one of four pitchers used in the scrimmage. “He looked good in the first inning, but had some control problems in the second,” Collins, who managed the team in the early going, said during a conversation Sunday. “He works fast, which isn’t a bad thing, but sometimes it’s too fast. He needs to take a breath.”

    Collins thinks Guzman’s fastball is in the 80s, but doesn’t know for sure given the fact that East Hampton has no radar gun.

    Others who pitched for the Bonackers Saturday morning were Peter Shilowich, Max Lerner (who also was not here last year), and R.J. Anderson, a lefty. Jack Link was expected to start Monday’s scrimmage at Pierson.

    Collins demurred when asked for the rotation. “We’ve got five or six candidates, though it’s likely Maykell will be number-one and Peter [who also had control problems Saturday] number-two. We’re definitely looking for a three. We should know more about that by the end of this coming week.”

    East Hampton’s in League VII, along with Amityville (which is to start the regular season here Monday), John Glenn, Shoreham-Wading River, Bayport-Blue Point, and Mount Sinai.

    The Bonackers are to play four games with each of their opponents, beginning with single games with each of them, after which they’ll play three-game series.

    Asked about hitting, Collins said that “we’ll have to know how to bunt and run the bases well in order to score. We’ll have to take advantage of every chance.”

    Guzman, for one, can hit, so well in fact that Bahns, during a conversation following the scrimmage, said that it was scary to toss him balls in close from behind a screen.

    “We’re not going to overpower anybody,” the head coach said, “but the main thing is that the kids listen and work, which they have been doing, and improve every day. . . . We don’t have the same talent we’ve had in the past. We’ve got a young team and a long way to go, but we’ll be patient.”

    Asked who the captains were, Bahns said, “We don’t have any yet, but Brendan Hughes [who played third base Saturday] will be one. He’s been stepping up.”

    The roster comprises Vaziri, 12 juniors, four sophomores, and one freshman, Kyle McKee.

    Aside from Hughes, Guzman, Shilo­wich, Anderson, and Link, the juniors are Tyler Restrepo, Danny Page, Ben Newberry, Cristian Mizhquiri, Bryan Gambino, Michael Abrams-Dyer, and Bryan Gamble. The sophomores are Jack Abrams-Dyer, Lerner, Adrian Mora, and Patrick Silich.

    Asked to assess the scrimmage, Collins said, “I’m glad it was our first day. If it were two weeks from now, I’d be disappointed. The great thing, though, is that all of these kids are very coachable. You tell them something, and they listen, and remember.”

    Southampton is to scrimmage here this afternoon at 4. Tomorrow, the Bonackers are to scrimmage at Mattituck.