Thursday, December 27

WRESTLING, East Hampton at Half Hollow Hills East tournament, also Friday, 9 a.m.

GIRLS BASKETBALL, Pierson-Bridgehampton at Hampton Bays tournament, 11 a.m.

BOYS BASKETBALL, Bridgehampton at Mattituck, 3 p.m.

Saturday, December 29

BOYS BASKETBALL, Pierson at Rocky Point, noon.

Tuesday, January 1

POLAR BEAR PLUNGES, Gurney’s Inn, Montauk, plungers to meet in spa lobby at 11 a.m.; East Hampton Volunteer Ocean Rescue Squad plunge, benefit East Hampton Food Pantry, Atlantic Avenue, Amagansett, 1 p.m., registration from 11:30 a.m., and Seafood Shop plunge, benefit Phoenix House, Beach Lane, Wainscott, road-end, 2:30.

Thursday, January 3

BOYS BASKETBALL, Bridgehampton at Smithtown Christian, and East Hampton at Shoreham-Wading River, 4:30 p.m.

GIRLS BASKETBALL, Shoreham-Wading River at East Hampton, 6:15 p.m.

Friday, January 4

BOYS SWIMMING, East Hampton at Huntington, 4:30 p.m.

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

GIRLS BASKETBALL, Shelter Island at Pierson, 4 p.m.

BOYS BASKETBALL, Pierson at Shelter Island, 5:45 p.m.

December 10, 1987

    Ground will be broken Monday in Hampton Bays for a 60,000-square-foot building that will house an ice hockey and figure skating rink, the first such on the East End.

    To be known as the Southampton Civic Center, the building, which, besides an Olympic-sized 90-by-200-foot rink, is to include training and Nautilus rooms, locker rooms, a pro shop, and public meeting rooms, is being put up by Gerry Hart, a former New York Islander, and Ed Broidy, partners in a land developing and building business on Southampton’s North Highway.

December 31, 1987

    Kenny Wood, East Hampton’s 6-foot-4-inch junior center, turned in two awesome performances this past week, scoring 39 points in the 69-60 defeat of Wyandanch here on Dec. 23, and 36 against Riverhead at Southampton College on Monday, but as the 59-57 loss to Riverhead attested, Wood can’t do it alone.

    Wood’s 39 points versus Wyandanch enabled him to become East Hampton’s all-time scoring leader. Going into the game he had needed 31 points to break his older brother Howard’s record of 1,232.

    Bridgehampton High School’s Killer Bees lost two of three nonleague games played this past week, but, win or lose, the Bees, now 3-3, provided plenty of excitement.

    In a doubleheader played at East Hampton High School on Dec. 23, Bridgehampton lost to Manhasset 55-51, almost pulling the game out with a flurry of steals and baskets in the final minutes. On Saturday, the team lost a first-round game to South Side in the Amityville Christmas tournament, 77-70, and on Monday the Bees won the consolation game, defeating the host team 72-54.

    John Niles, Bridgehampton’s coach, said he was happy to be even at this point in the team’s extremely tough nonleague schedule. Hempstead is Bridgehampton’s next nonleague opponent, at Freeport High School on Saturday at 1:30 p.m.

   East Hampton High School’s young wrestling team bore testimony to its schooling as it won three matches Saturday before losing to Centereach in the Doc Fallot Memorial Duals tournament at Hampton Bays.

    On the way to the final, the Bonackers, who had three freshmen in the lineup — Axel Alanis, at 170 pounds, Robert Padilla, at 126, and Malachy Mitchnick, at 138 — defeated West Babylon’s B team 59-18, Sayville’s B team 52-24, and Long Island Lutheran 66-15 before losing to a strong Centereach team that had come out of the A Pool (East Hampton was in the B Pool).

    Originally, Miller Place was to have been East Hampton’s opponent in the final — a team with which East Hampton’s coach, Steve Tseperkas, thinks the Bonackers match up well — but the fact that these teams are to meet in league competition soon led to Centereach’s substitution.

    “We got beat up at Riverhead on Thursday,” Tseperkas said after Saturday morning’s win over West Babylon B. “We lost eight of those matches by pin, so I like the way our kids have come back today.”

    Six of the 15 starters are sophomores, three are juniors, three — Dallas Foglia, Kevin Heine, and Alfredo Perez — are seniors, and the above-mentioned are freshmen. Nine of the 15, then, are underclassmen.

    But, as Saturday’s showings demonstrated, all of them know what they’re doing. Mindful of the 48 points given up by way of pins at Riverhead, Tseperkas kept telling his younger charges to stay off their backs if they got into trouble. Not only did they, by and large, but each of them had his moments.

    Lucas Escobar, a 120-pound junior, arguably East Hampton’s best wrestler, won by pin, and Padilla won 11-10 at 126 in the opening match, in which Luciano Escobar, Lucas’s brother, Foglia, by a technical fall, Gabe Vargas, Heine, Alfredo Perez, and Richie Browne, a first-year junior at 285, also were winners. In an exhibition afterward, Alanis used a cradle hold to pin a 170-pound Centereach opponent.

    The semifinal with Sayville began at 138 and went on up to 285 before doubling around. Sayville had the upper hand in the early going — Mitchnick was pinned quickly, at 138, Colton Kalbacher lost 9-5 at 145, Foglia lost 8-6 at 152 after having led 5-2, Gabe Vargas was pinned at 160, and Alanis lost 17-12 at 170 before Heine came through with a pin at 182 and Browne followed with a pin of his own.

    Thereafter, Jonathan Hansen, a sophomore, won by forfeit, Hai Duong, a sophomore, won by pin at 106, Abe Perez, a sophomore, lost 8-7, Lucas Escobar won by pin, Padilla won by pin, and Matt Smudzinski, a sophomore, won 4-0 at 132, running out the string.

    Alanis, who almost pinned his opponent with a headlock late in his match, and Browne, a rookie, as aforesaid, came in for praise from Tseperkas during the post-match huddle.

    “Lutheran’s going to forfeit at five weights — you’ve got a 30-point lead — so, if you do your job, you should win,” the coach added before everyone broke for lunch.

    “Our numbers are a little down,” Tseperkas said during the break. “Last year, we had 30, this year we’ve got 23. . . . The team’s pretty much all freshmen and sophomores. Still, we should match up well with Amityville, Miller Place, and Mount Sinai in our league. Westhampton probably will be the best in our league, Rocky Point should be second best, and there’s John Glenn too. We’ll have our hands full with those teams.”

    Louis Russo, Tseperkas’s assistant, said that “against the good teams we’ll probably forfeit at 106 [Duong] and 113 [Abe Perez].”

    “And at 138 [Mitchnick] too,” said Tseperkas.

    Kalbacher started the semifinal with Lu Hi off strong, pinning his man with 20 seconds left in the first period. Foglia, at 152, and Gabe Vargas, at 160, won by forfeit. Alanis used a headlock to pin his 170-pound opponent midway through the second period after falling behind 5-1 in the first. Heine won by pin midway through the first period at 182, and Luciano Escobar prevailed 8-5 at 195 before Alfredo Perez, at 220, and Browne, at 285, won by forfeit.

    Hansen leapt for joy after pinning his Lutheran counterpart with 24 seconds left in the second period at 99 pounds, after which Duong won by forfeit and Abe Perez won by pin midway through the third period at 113 after having trailed 6-4.

    Lucas Escobar, who likes to shoot single-leg takedowns and finish his opponents off with cradle pin holds, had trouble at 120, losing 7-2 to a crafty foe who limited his movement with a front headlock, and who, after having built up a 6-2 lead going into the third, held on for the win. Escobar tried to turn his man — who, on his stomach, was eyeing the clock — in the final minute, but could not.

   Things have been going swimmingly for the East Hampton High School boys and girls basketball teams thus far.

    The boys, 5-0 over all as of Tuesday, had a big win at Mount Sinai Friday, besting the Mustangs, who have a 6-foot-8-inch Division 1-bound center, 65-63.

    The same evening, the girls improved their overall record to 5-1 (and to 2-0 in league competition) with a 42-23 win here over their Mount Sinai counterparts. Kaelyn Ward needed 26 points in that game to become the first East Hampton female basketball player ever to tally 1,000 career points, but wound up 7 shy. She got a bouquet of long-stemmed roses anyway.

    The boys customarily do well each year, but it’s been a long time indeed since the girls, who are coached by Howard Wood and Louis O’Neal, have fared so well. The reason, of course, is Ward, though, as has often been said, she can’t do it alone. In Friday’s game, she got considerable help from her teammates, on the boards and scoring-wise. Jackie Messemer and Carley Seekamp — who, along with Courtney Dess and Ryan Ward, rebounded well — each finished with 8 points. Ward led the way with 19. In addition, Messemer had two blocks and Seekamp had one.

    “But the best thing,” Kaelyn’s father said afterward, “is that she made the high honor roll — she’s proud of that.”

    “I look for us to make the playoffs,” he added.

    Mount Sinai, while energetic — and despite the fact that it had been putting up 50 or so points per game recently — couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn door, especially in the early going. A 16-3 second quarter, during which Kaelyn Ward scored 6 points, Messemer 4, Dess 2, Ryan Ward 2, and Seekamp 2, did the visitors in.

    Ward was loudly applauded when Wood took her out with 20 seconds left to play, after which Fran Schelfhout, who had come off the bench, capped the scoring with a 2-pointer.

    The girls aren’t to play again until Jan. 3. Wood, who will visit his wife, Maria, and their children, Dennis, 18, and Luz, 11, in Barcelona, Spain, over the Christmas break, said he hopes to schedule scrimmages with Southampton, Ross, and Pierson during the idle period. “We still need to do a lot of work,” he said. “For starters, we need to protect the ball a little more. . . . It would be great to make the playoffs and great to have a home game. Meanwhile, we’ve got to put the pedal to the metal.”

    As for the boys, Bill McKee, who is assisted by Bob Vacca, reported over the weekend that “it was really good to get that win Friday at Mount Sinai. The kids were happy, and so was I.”

    The team, which had been slow off the mark in recent games, jumped out to a 27-12 first-quarter lead as Thomas King (2), Danny McKee (2), and Thom­as Nelson hit from 3-point range. “It was our best quarter of the season,” the elder McKee said.

    But the home team got back in it as the result of a 20-2 run spanning the second and third periods. “We were up 53-47 going into the fourth. . . . We hit three of our last four foul shots to hold on for the win. They had a chance to tie in the last minute, but Rolando [Garces] came up with a big defensive rebound.”

    King finished with 24 points, and Nelson and McKee with 12 each. Mount Sinai’s big man had a game-high 30, “but he was the only one in double figures for them. As I said, it was a big win for us. We went down by 1 or 2 several times in the third quarter, but wrested the lead back each time. The kids kept working.”

    In another recent game, King had 16 points, 13 rebounds, and 5 assists as East Hampton defeated Pierson, a nonleague opponent, 65-54.

    The boys were to have played Miller Place, another league opponent, here yesterday. They are to play in a holiday invitational tournament at Southampton, along with Bridgehampton and the Dalton School of New York City, this weekend, beginning tomorrow with Dalton at 6 p.m. Saturday’s consolation game is to be played at 9 a.m., with the final to follow at 11.

   The East Hampton High School boys swimming team and the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton

RECenter Hurricanes enjoyed productive outings in pools this past week.

    While the boys, coached by Craig Brierley, lost 102-79 at Sayville, “we put up some good times,” said the coach, who added that “we’re not in our racing phase yet — we’re concentrating on building up our endurance. The other coach said afterward that he was ‘a little nervous,’ that he didn’t expect us to be so strong.”

    Meanwhile, Tom Cohill, the Y’s aquatics director and the youth swim team’s head coach, assisted by Brierley, Danielle Quackenbush, Annette MacNiven, and Dan Mendelson, reported that the Hurricanes had had “some outstanding times” at the Flushing-Cross Island Y Holiday Invitational at Eisenhower Park in Nassau County this past weekend.

    Among those Cohill cited from among his 50 competitors were Skye Marigold, a 17-year-old who is to swim at Connecticut College next fall, Georgie Bogetti, Thomas Brierley, Trevor Mott, and the 9-and-10-year-old girls — Katalina Badilla, Kiara Bailey-Williams, Olivia Brabant, Julia Brierley, Caroline Brown, Darcy McFarland, Sophia Swanson, Gaby Osborn, and Evelyn Purcell.

   The 9-10 girls, he said, finished second over all among about 10 teams; Bogetti had won the 13-14 girls 200 and 500 freestyle races, in 1:57.140 and 5:11.10; Mott had broken 5 minutes in the scholastic boys 500, finishing in 4:59.00; Brierley had been “the first person we’ve had to break 1:50 in the 200 free,” with a time of 1:48.52, and Marigold had turned in personal bests in the open 100 free (52.67) and in the 50 free (24.32).

   It was the 100-strong Hurricanes’ sixth meet of the season. Next for them is the Winterfest regional meet at the University of Maryland in January.

Cohill added that Marigold, Bogetti, and Brierley are very close to posting national-qualifying times.

   Moreover, there are four 11-to-12-year-old Hurricanes among the metropolitan region’s top 10 in the mile. Maggie Purcell is ranked fifth in that distance, Caroline Oakland seventh, Maddie Jones eighth, and Liana Paradiso ninth. Bogetti is sixth-ranked in the mile among the region’s 13-14-year-old girls.

   Getting back to the boys varsity, the elder Brierley said that absent the 13 points Sayville had been awarded in diving (East Hampton has no divers), the margin of victory would have been 10 points.

    “Nobody matched our top guys — Thomas and Trevor won their individual events easily — but Sayville got a lot of seconds and thirds.”

    Thomas Brierley won the 100 backstroke and the 200 individual medley, and was a member of the 200 and 400 freestyle relay teams as well. Mott won the 200 and 500 freestyle races.

    “With 33 swimmers [only four of whom are seniors] we’ve got the biggest roster we’ve ever had, and we’ve got a lot of versatility,” said the coach. “We’re having everyone do a stroke as well as freestyle.”

    T.J. Paradiso, a freshman, was “the swimmer of the meet.”

    “He had a full plate and stepped up,” Brierley said, “in the 100 free, the 200 individual medley, and in two relays.”

    Before Friday’s practice, Paradiso, when questioned, said he had personal best times in all of his races at Sayville. “The team,” he said, “is great.”

    There are a number of lifeguards or soon-to-be-lifeguards on it. One, Cort Heneveld, a junior who quarterbacks East Hampton’s football team and who as a sophomore was accepted into the United States Naval Academy, said of his first competitive swimming season, “I like it a lot.” He confessed that at the beginning, he — by virtue of his 210-pound frame — tended to sink, but he’s learned to move fast, so much so that in a recent intrasquad meet he had been “faster than some of the guys.”

    Afterward, he said with a smile, “we ate 10 pounds of bacon and a whole bunch of eggs.”

   The East Hampton High School bowling team was said to be “on fire” in a recent published report, and Pat Hand, the team’s coach, acknowledged during a conversation this past week that that was so.

    Going into Tuesday’s match here with Eastport-South Manor, a team that has had some 1,000-point-plus games, East Hampton was 4-0.

    As of that day, Chris Duran, a “steady as a rock” senior, had averaged 191, with a high game of 226, and Jacob Grossman, a sophomore whose parents manage East Hampton Bowl — and who each recently bowled perfect games — had the team’s second-high average, a 189.88. Grossman’s high game as of Tuesday was a 222.

    “We’re off to a good start — we’ve got wins over Rocky Point, Southampton, Southold, and Westhampton Beach,” Hand said, “though we’ll have to have a very good day to beat Eastport. It should go down to the last frame of every game.”

    East Hampton’s high team game as of Tuesday was a 934.

    Last season, Eastport won the league, with Westhampton second, and East Hampton third.

    East Hampton’s team is coed. Duran is the anchor, the fifth to go. The setup man, at four, is Grossman. Jackson Clark, a junior, leads off, followed by Brianna Semb, a senior, and Gabby Green, a senior who is the team’s co-captain, with Clark.

    The Bonackers defeated Southampton 29-4 at the All Star Lanes in Riverhead. “It’s brand new,” said Hand, “with floor-to-ceiling screens and a dozen couches. It looks like a party place, with a lot of distractions. The kids had to focus.”

    To prepare for Eastport, the bowlers were to have stayed after practice Monday to work with the Bowl’s manager, Ian Grossman, on making the 7 and 10 pins. Those who make the 10 pins in practice earn a free game from him.

    “We’ve had an awesome season so far,” Clark said during Friday’s practice. “Hopefully, we can stick with it.”

   Five female athletes from East Hampton were in the news this past week.

   Maddie Minetree, a freshman at Rollins College in Florida, and her three 800-meter relay teammates broke the school record by 13 seconds at a regional meet in Fort Lauderdale over the weekend, qualifying for the National Collegiate Athletic Association meet that is to be held in Birmingham, Ala., in March. It’s the first time that a Rollins relay team has done so.

   Also, in Sunday’s Newsday, the following East Hampton High School juniors were cited as all-Long Island selections: Marina Preiss, second team girls swimming; Raya O’Neal, second team girls volleyball, and Gillian Neubert and Daniella Dunphy, second team girls tennis.

Thursday, December 20

BOYS SWIMMING, East Hampton at Sachem East, nonleague, 4:30 p.m.

GIRLS BASKETBALL, Pierson-Bridgehampton at Port Jefferson, 4:30 p.m.

Friday, December 21

BOYS BASKETBALL, holiday tournament, East Hampton vs. Dalton, 6 p.m., and Southampton vs. Bridgehampton, 8, Southampton High School.

Saturday, December 22

BOYS BASKETBALL, holiday tournament, consolation game, 9 a.m., championship game, 11, Southampton High School.

BOYS WINTER TRACK, East Hampton at crossover meet, Suffolk Community College-Brentwood, 2 p.m.

   While she is technically conversant, Marie Minnick, were she a child again, wouldn’t be sitting inside playing video games or such, she would be outdoors.

    “I was out playing in Central Park all the time when I was a kid,” the longtime platform tennis pro said during a recent conversation. “We used to roller-skate, we played stoop ball . . . hopscotched, we’d sled, ride horses. . . .”

    While platform tennis, or “paddle,” as it is known, is her favorite game — “probably because it’s what I’m best at” — she is an extremely versatile athlete, platform tennis, tennis, golf, paddleboarding, sailboarding, snorkeling, and skiing being among her interests.

    “I’m a visual person; I watch things and I see how they work. I taught myself windsurfing by watching and reading a book. I taught windsurfing here, at Boys Harbor and near Devon. Paddleboarding is a beautiful thing to do if you take your time . . . it’s so peaceful. . . . As for golf, I didn’t like it at first — I’d hide in the ladies’ room at summer camp to avoid it — but I took it up at 40 and now I love it.”

    Typically, though, Minnick doesn’t spend four hours on the course. “I play speed golf,” she said. “Eighteen holes in two hours. I don’t stand there and worry and take 10 practice swings. I take none. Walk up to the ball and hit it. When I worked as a speech therapist, I’d come out here on Fridays, start at 5, and be done by 7.”

    “I’m an 18-handicap — I don’t practice, but I like the exercise and it’s a beautiful walk. . . . Stanley Barbour, who played at Maidstone, told his daughter, Kitty Sutro, once, ‘You don’t have to be stupid to play golf, but it helps.’ ”

    “Keep your armpits in close, stick your ass out, hold the club as if it were a wounded bird — Dave Alvarez, the former pro at Maidstone, used to say that — turn your shoulder until you can’t turn anymore, and let ’er rip! Grip, stance, posture, and alignment — that’s what Dave Alvarez used to say. That’s 90 percent of it. The rest is in your head, which is why I guess Stanley Barbour said it’s the smart thing to be stupid.”

    Asked if there were a sport she didn’t do, Minnick paused. “Curling . . . and I don’t fish. Peter [her husband, and a fly-fishing instructor, who was listening in] does that. When we take pack trips into the back country, he’ll fly-fish and I’ll ride around on my horse. Though once, fording a stream on our way out to where we were to camp, I looked back to Peter to find his hat, his head, and the horse had disappeared under the water. They popped up farther downstream. I wrote about that, actually.”

    Further on the subject of sports she’d not done, the interviewee said, “I haven’t done snowboarding — I watched my daughter fall and hit her head 20 times, and decided not to try it. . . . I look like I’m a really good skier, but I’m a total chicken when it comes to heights and steepness. Maybe I need to see a hypnotist.”

    Both the Minnicks’ daughters are, unsurprisingly, athletic. “The older one is working on a doctorate at N.Y.U. on movement and motion in the theater, and the younger one is a yoga therapist in Asheville [N.C.].”

    As for platform tennis, she and her husband first set eyes on a court almost 50 years ago in the Adirondacks, at the summer camp of his great-grandparents, and quickly become paddle proselytes.

    “Peter’s mother, Ninette — she’s 90 now — built the first court here in East Hampton in 1969, and there would be lines of cars down the driveway every weekend. It’s a great thing for people to do in the winter. Pretty soon, Stuyvie Wainwright [the late former congressman] got tired of all the waiting to play at Peter’s parents’ place and built his own court, and that’s how it started out here. Peter and Jim Clark and Bogey Thompson and Sandy Ingraham — I taught him how to play — and Kevin Graham — I taught him too — and the Bromleys, Steve Sr. and Jr., used to play. . . .”

    “And Claude Beudert and John Goodman and Bob Morgan,” this writer added.

    “We had Rich Maier and Steve Baird, who were 9 or 10-time national champions, come out to give us clinics,” she continued, “and other top-ranked players. . . . When I was 30 and Mary Scheerer was 15, we teamed up and went on to win a lot of tournaments. Everybody lived in fear of her forehand. And I love volleying and dancing back to send up lobs. We’re the defending Long Island 50s champions. We won the tournament the last time it was played, in 2008, the year she turned 50. I’m 15 years older than Mary is, so you do the math. Apparently they haven’t been able to get enough teams in that age group since, though I know there are many people here and elsewhere who are playing well into their 80s.”

    Lately, Minnick has been among several pros who have been through two-hour clinics drumming up an interest in the sport at the East Hampton Indoor-Outdoor Tennis Club, which recently put up two lit, raised, chicken-wire-enclosed platform tennis courts on either side of a well-appointed warm-up hut.

    “It’ll be great if we can get some good tennis players to come out into the fresh air and play this game, which offers much more exercise than tennis doubles. How many balls do you hit when you’re playing doubles tennis — four or five? Try 80. The rallies in paddle are much longer — 10 minutes sometimes — and the ball doesn’t go into the next court. It’s especially good for older people — you’re in a small area, you don’t have to hit the ball far . . . and it’s social.”

    Hard-hitters generally were disempowered, Minnick said in answer to a question, inasmuch as those who are adept at playing the spongy ball off the side and back screens could keep lofting it back.

    “It’s true what they say about the last team to hit the ball loses the point. Because they’re the first to make an error.”

    And with that, she said to this non-golfer, “Now, come outside and try swinging a golf club.”

   This past fall was a breakout season for the East Hampton High School boys and girls cross-country teams.

    Kevin Barry, the boys coach, recently said that although he had the youngest team in the county, it was the best squad he’d had in five years, and, in time, might well prove to be the best he’s had in a decade.

    “We won county championships in 2001 and ’02, with Chris Reich [who now coaches the boys winter and spring teams] and Joe Sullivan and the Ahearn twins. . . . That was a long time ago, but these kids seem to want it.”

    “My team,” said the girls coach, Diane O’Donnell, “was probably the best I’ve had in eight years. I’ve had good individuals in that span, but not the seven consistent scorers that I had this year. It was a very exciting season, though, because of the hurricane and the cancellation of the state qualifier meet, it ended with a whimper.”

    Likewise, because of the superstorm, Barry’s top three freshmen — Erik Engstrom, Jackson Rafferty, and T.J. Paradiso — weren’t able to compete in the county’s freshman-sophomore meet. Had they and their fellow ninth graders done so, “I think we would have finished in the top three,” said the coach, who added that Engstrom, the county’s second-ranked freshman runner, had, because of his 18th-place finish in the recent Foot Locker regional meet at Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, been ranked 13th among all the freshmen in New York State.

    The Van Cortlandt race for freshmen “from Maryland to Maine” was one and a half miles long (high school cross-country courses are usually 3.1 miles). Engstrom ran it in 7 minutes and 53 seconds, good for 18th place among 147 entrants.

    The boys finished the league season with a 4-3 record. Their losses were by narrow margins. “One,” said Barry, “was by two points, one was by three, and one, to league-champion Harborfields, was by five. The Shoreham coach — he was the state’s coach of the year two years ago — gave us a big compliment when he said, after seeing our scores at the meet with Harborfields, ‘East Hampton’s back.’ ”

    Adam Cebulski, a junior, who was East Hampton’s number-one (followed by Engstrom, Thomas Brierley, a junior, Rafferty, Jack Link, a sophomore, Paradiso, and Paul King, a first-time sophomore) broke Reich’s mark at Indian Island, the Riverhead course that has served as the site for East Hampton’s “home” meets in recent years, by running the 5K course in 16:57.

    “Erik pretty much rewrote the record book for East Hampton freshmen, in the mile and a half, the 3-mile, and in the 5K — at Indian Island and Sunken Meadow,” said Barry. “Chris Reich had a few of those records too.”

    As for the winter, Barry said, “T.J. and Thomas are swimming, but others are doing winter track.”

    One reason the boys had been so good, said Barry, was that Cebulski’s younger sister, Dana, a sophomore who has been to the state cross-country meet in each of the past two years, pushed them in practice.

    “The girls and boys train together and they travel to meets together, so there’s a great camaraderie, probably more so than in any other sport,” said O’Donnell.

    “Oh yes, she’ll improve every year,” O’Donnell said in answer to a question. “Her best time at Indian Island this fall was a very solid 19:43, in the meet with Westhampton. She was second, but a very close second. Her best 3-mile time at Sunken Meadow, which is a very tough course, was 19:38.”

    Cebulski, who took over at number-one last year when Ashley West (now doing very well at Susquehanna University) became injured, was the team’s number-one this fall, followed by Jennie DiSunno, a senior, Jackie Messemer, a sophomore, Emma Newburger, a junior, Devon Brown, a ninth grader, Jamie Staubitser, a senior, Merissah Gilbert, a sophomore, and Brittany Rivkind, a junior.

    O’Donnell also has her eye on “a couple of other young runners [one being Liana Paradiso] Bill [Herzog] had on his middle school team this year. . . . Liana’s an eighth grader. We’ll find out in August whether she’ll be able to come up next fall.”

    She and Barry and Herzog are planning to oversee workouts for the boys and girls this summer, to keep them sharp.

    Barry added that he and O’Donnell hope to get a 2.7-mile course he’s laid out at Cedar Point County Park certified by the county’s head track official, Tony Toro, so that the teams will be able to hold two home meets there next fall — for the first time in at least 20 years.