Thursday, March 15

SOFTBALL, East Hampton at Center Moriches, scrimmage, 4 p.m.

Friday, March 16

GIRLS TRACK, Southampton at East Hampton, scrimmage, 3:30 p.m.

SOFTBALL, Newfield vs. Pierson, Mashashimuet Park, Sag Harbor, scrimmage, 4:30 p.m.

BASEBALL, East Hampton at Southampton, scrimmage, 4 p.m.

Saturday, March 17

BOYS LACROSSE, East Hampton at multi-team scrimmage, Eastport-South Manor High School, 8 a.m.

BASEBALL, East Hampton at Mattituck, scrimmage, and Pierson at Southampton, scrimmage, 10 a.m.

Sunday, March 18

SOFTBALL, clinic by Lou Reale and Erin Abran for third through eighth-grade girls, Little League coaches, and parents, East Hampton High School, 10:30 a.m.

Monday, March 19

SOFTBALL, Southampton at East Hampton, scrimmage, 3:30 p.m.

BASEBALL, East Hampton vs. Pierson, Mashashimuet Park, Sag Harbor, scrimmage, 4 p.m.

BOYS TENNIS, East Hampton at West Islip, nonleague, 4 p.m.

Tuesday, March 20

GIRLS LACROSSE, East Hampton at Westhampton, nonleague, 4:15 p.m.

BOYS LACROSSE, East Hampton vs. Riverhead, Pulaski Park, nonleague, 4:30 p.m.

SOFTBALL, Southold-Greenport vs. Pierson, Mashashimuet Park, Sag Harbor, 4:30 p.m.

Wednesday, March 21

BASEBALL, Pierson at East Hampton, scrimmage, 4 p.m.

BOYS TENNIS, Eastport-South Manor at East Hampton, 4:30 p.m.

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

   Pete Spagnoli, a Sag Harbor physical therapist and adventure racer who often traverses in his wide-flung travels some forbidding terrain and has faced some of nature’s more daunting conditions, returned, as he had vowed, to Alaska’s Mount McKinley last June for a second attempt.

    His first, in 2009, had ended well short of the 20,320-foot summit, “the highest point near the Arctic Circle,” according to a National Park Service guide, which lists acclimatization, acute mountain sickness, high-altitude pulmonary and cerebral edema, frostbite, carbon monoxide poisoning, physiological and physical impairment, lassitude, diarrhea, and dehydration as some of the things climbers ought to bear in mind should they be planning an ascent there.

    The guide says further that Mount McKinley, also known as Denali (the High One), “is buffeted by storms from the Gulf of Alaska and from the Bering Sea. In few mountain locales of the world does the weather change so precipitously and dramatically. A balmy day of glacier travel can rapidly deteriorate into a day of survival-snow-cave digging. The intense cold is, of course, another unique feature . . . comparable only to the Antarctic ranges. The Himalaya is tropical by comparison.”

    Spagnoli went with two fellow Sag Harborites, Mary Scheerer and Shari Hymes, as well as with his brother, Rob, of Stony Brook, and Scott Pleban, a Virginian, and Brian Reiss, an eastern Pennsylvanian — the latter two frequent teammates of Spagnoli’s in adventure races, though McKinley had been Pleban and Reiss’s first mountaineering expedition.

    In January 2008, he climbed the 19,340-foot Cotopaxi and the 17,159-foot Cayambe volcanoes in Ecuador, whose ice-bridged crevasses had provided “a good training ground” for Mount McKinley’s glaciers, though because volcanoes are cone-shaped, they were, he said, easier to scale.

    “June 1st to the 20th is supposed to be the optimal time to climb Mount McKinley,” the thick-chested former Sachem wrestler and football player said during a conversation in his Bay Point house, which looks out onto Noyac Bay. “If you go earlier, there are fewer storms, but it’s colder. It you wait until July, the temperature will be warmer, but the crevasses open up, and avalanches are a possibility.”

    The group, with two knowledgeable guides, each of whom led a rope team, chose the West Buttress route — one of 30 such routes up the mountain — “but,” Spagnoli said, in answer to a question, “the West Buttress, while it’s the most commonly used, was no walk in the park. . . . Seven people had died on the mountain when we were there. Some fell, some got separated from their groups in storms, one froze to death. . . .”

    When a member of a roped-in party fell, he said, in reply to another question, “we’re trained to go into a rest position and to dig in with our ice axes to set a brace up. You’ve got to be watchful. If you’re not, and someone falls, you might get pulled off too. . . . You can also trip over the rope that links you all together. I did — it’s easy to do — but I stopped myself.”

    “Patience” was the watchword of Phil Ershler, a well-known guide who had taught him a lot, said Spagnoli. It took the group 17 days to make the round trip. “Coming down,” he said, “is sometimes harder than going up, because of fatigue.”

    “You’re going up and down, up and down — up to drop off supplies and down to rest. . . . The air gets lighter as you go up. We carried 70 pounds on our backs and 80 pounds on a sled.”

    The Park Service guide advises parties to “limit ascents to 1,000 feet per day at elevations above 8,000 feet. . . . The extra rest days at 14,200 feet have proved to be critical before ascending higher. Allow three to five days food and fuel at the high camp at 17,200 feet.”

    “Compared to the last trip, this was perfect,” Spagnoli said in reply to a question. “It was cold and it snowed, but we were able to progress steadily. We didn’t get stuck in our tents this time.”

    (In 2009, his party packed it in after spending eight days and nights in tents at 14,200 feet. When he reached that height this time he “prayed that the weather would hold up. . . . Sixty-mile-per-hour winds at the top of a mountain will blow you off it.”)

    “As I said, as you go up it gets harder,” Spagnoli continued. “If there’s a problem, an injury or something, it could affect you. Actually, we were questioning whether my brother was going to make it. He’s a very good athlete, but he wasn’t as fit as we were.”

    “We discussed this behind closed doors,” Spagnoli said with a smile, “but he picked up on it. ‘You don’t think I can do it, do you?’ he said. Actually, he did unbelievably.”

    “There’s a ridge at 17,000 feet,” he said, looking with his visitor at a photo of the mountain. “A mile down that way and a mile down that. You don’t want to fall. Rob said, ‘Does it flatten out?’ I told him it didn’t flatten out until the top.”

    The summit of Mount McKinley was about the size of his living room rug, he said in reply to a question. “You’re freezing and exhausted, but euphoric. You’ve got to be there to experience that feeling. It’s an unbelievable feeling. You’re on top of the world, in the clouds. There’s a marker and a prayer flag. Scott was going to take a photo of me, but my camera was frozen.”

    Asked what was next, he said, “I’m taking a year off from mountaineering, but I’m going to climb some ‘14ers’ in the Rockies in May with our daughter, Kelly, who is doing her physical therapy clinical work in Boulder. I’ve done several of them before. My next mountaineering expedition will be Mount Elbrus in Russia next June. I’ll go with whoever wants to go.”

    Meanwhile, there were, he said, “two big adventure [orienteering, mountain-biking, kayaking, trail running, and rappelling] races coming up — in Maine in June and the world championships in France in September near Nice. . . . I’ve been adventure racing since 1998. I got into mountaineering after that. . . . They say climbing Mount McKinley [because of its northern latitude and lower barometric pressure] is as hard as [the 29,029-foot] Everest. I’d love to climb in the Himalayas someday, if I could get the financing.”

    The boys swimming season just past, the first winning one in the East Hampton High School program’s three years under Jeff Thompson, began with a bang — an opening day turnout that doubled that of the previous year — and ended with one — three career-best and four season-best performances in the county meet — the intense, quiet-spoken coach said this week.

    All 24 of his charges, most of them underclassmen from East Hampton, Pierson, and Bridgehampton, had improved this winter, Thompson said. While the team was largely led to its 3-2 league record by two versatile sophomores, Thomas Brierley and Trevor Mott, a number of others came to mind when the coach was asked to list some pleasant surprises.

    Among them were Rob Rewinski, a Bridgehampton freshman, who arrived as a novice and wound up with a top-10 county finish as a member of the 400-yard freestyle relay team and a top-20 finish in the 100 freestyle; Kyle Sturmann, a Pierson sophomore, who was one of those who swam the 100 butterfly, “the most complex and difficult stroke”; Robert Anderson III, an East Hampton freshman and county meet competitor who “came on strong,” as did two other freshmen, Tyler Menold and Shane McCann, alternates at the county meet; Jeremy Pepper, who “broke 2:10 in the 200,” and Andrew Winthrop, an East Hampton junior who “shattered 5:40 in the 500, which was for him the pink elephant in the room.”

    Moreover, said Thompson, Chris Kalbacher, an East Hampton freshman, Thomas Paradiso, an East Hampton eighth grader, Ryan Lewis, of East Hampton, one of five seniors on the team, and Baxter Parcher, a Pierson sophomore, had “held their own” in the 100 breaststroke, an event from which Mott had been pulled at the beginning of the season so that he could do other things.

    Speaking of Mott, Thompson, who previously co-coached championship teams in Livonia, N.Y., smiled and said, “He’s the bulldog of the team. He’s so competitive. He’s been our distance guy, but he won’t concede a thing in any race he’s in. If I told Trevor it needed to be done, it was done. He’s matured a lot this year. In terms of performance, he and Thomas are our leaders.”

    Brierley, who missed qualifying for the state meet in the 100 backstroke — a stroke he hadn’t focused on — by one second, was another extremely versatile competitor, often following up the 500 with the 200 relay, the 100 back, the 100 breast, and the 400 relay.

    Brierley’s 56.74 in the county’s 100-yard backstroke, good for fifth place, and his 51.38 in the 100 free, good for eighth, were “lifetime bests,” said Thompson, as was the 54.73 that Rewinski, who was 19th, swam in the 100 back.

    Season bests at the county meet were turned in by the ninth-place 400 relay team of Rewinski, Anderson, Mott, and Brierley; the 10th-place 200 freestyle relay team of Dan Hartner, Paul Dorego, Brierley, and Mott, and the 16th-place 200 medley relay team of Hartner, Kalbacher, Adam Heller, and Peter Skerys.

    The Bonackers finished 15th among the 23 schools that were scored, and, absent the diving (East Hampton does not compete in diving) would have been 14th.

    “Most of them swam well, though some were a bit jumpy,” Thompson said of his nine county qualifiers. Afterward, he suggested to Section XI, the governing body of public high school sports in Suffolk, that it adopt the two-day format from which the top 12 move on to contest final-day championship and consolation heats that is used by Section V and VI schools and at the Olympics. Two-day meets’ lower qualifying standards would enable more young swimmers to get their feet wet, as it were, and would, because of the reduced pressure, “promote faster swimming.”

    Though Thompson will lose five seniors — Hartner, Dorego, Skerys, Pepper, and Lewis — “for the first time I won’t have to worry next year about filling holes. At the end of the season, I could have put four or five guys in most events. They were all chomping at the bit.”

    While Skerys, Winthrop, and Brierley had been the captains, “everyone on the team is a leader,” he said. “It’s our job as coaches to teach them how to push their boundaries and help them build their characters.”

    He had worried at first about how everyone from the three schools [Boys swimming seems to be the strongest combined sport there is here] would get along. The interaction, said Thompson, was “cool to watch. . . . The kids are doing the recruiting. It’s what every coach hopes to have.”

    He wanted to say something too, the coach said, about his assistant, Craig Brierley, Thomas’s father. “We actually were co-coaches . . . I couldn’t imagine one person coaching this team. There were two heads on the same dragon on the same pool deck. And on those days when I couldn’t get to practice right on time, he had the workouts ready. At the end, we were finishing each other’s sentences.”

    Thirty had showed up on the first day, though six withdrew soon after. “I’ve been coaching 15 years and I’ve never cut — I don’t believe in cutting,” said Thompson. “If you’re working, there’s a place for you. I like to celebrate the victories of the slowest guys [and, indeed, in swimming the last-place finishers in the 500 are applauded by all]. That’s how you build. Our sport is not fun. But it gets in you, and it’s always there. As much as they bemoan it, the day after the season is over they miss it.”

    Having helped coach a perennial top-10 state team, was his goal here the same? “Goals are incremental. Every year it’s different. You want to set a goal that’s just out of reach. Next year, our goal will be to win a league championship and to send as many swimmers to the states as we can. Is a league championship possible? I don’t know. We’ll see who comes back. It’s certainly a long-term goal.”

    And now that the best season thus far is over? “The kids are ready for the lifeguard test. They now have a talent they can put to good use. They’re responsible for their work and their performance, qualities that make for great lifeguards.”

    And what would he do?

    “Me. . . ? I’m having a baby,” the coach said with a smile. His wife, Jessie, is “due any day now.”

   Basketball is arguably the most exciting game inasmuch as the presumptive victors can become the vanquished in the blink of an eye.

    Such was the case Saturday at Oswego State’s Max Ziel gymnasium as a line-drive N.B.A.-length 3-pointer by Eastern Connecticut’s Brian Salzillo with 2.5 seconds left in the second overtime period stuck a dagger into Hayden Ward and his Laker teammates’ hearts.

    As a result of the stunning 70-69 loss, Oswego State, which, with the 6-foot-6-inch Bonac graduate making major contributions, had gone through the regular season undefeated, was ousted from the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s Division III tournament.

    The night before, Ward and the Lakers had come out on top of another thriller, turning back Endicott 72-71 in OT. It was the second year in a row that Oswego State had lost in the second round of the N.C.A.A. tournament.

    “It was a battle the whole game,” the junior from Montauk said during a conversation Monday afternoon. “Very much like Friday’s game. We were able to force two overtimes. We were down by 5 points in the last minute of the first one. . . . We never gave up; we weren’t going down without a fight.”

    In Friday’s first-round contest (both of the weekend’s games were played on the higher-seeded Oswego’s court), Ward, who normally hits 80 percent of his free throws, suffered at the line, going 3-for-10, including two misses at the end of regulation that could have clinched it for Oswego.

    Ward’s fellow forward, Chad Burridge, saved the day, however, scoring all 6 of the Lakers’ points in O.T. Endicott managed to can a half-court shot at the buzzer, but this time, with Oswego having been up 72-68, the 3-pointer was moot.

    Further testimony to Oswego’s never-say-die grit can be found in the fact that the Lakers came from behind in both games — from 13 points down in the second half of the game with Endicott, and from 10 down in the second half of the game with Eastern Connecticut, as well as from 5 down in that game’s first overtime period.

    Ward, who finished Friday’s game with 18 points and 14 rebounds, made 6 of 7 free throw attempts the next night, including two that tied the score at 54-54 with 32 seconds left and forced overtime.

    Eastern Connecticut, according to an account on Oswego’s Web site, “went on a 6-1 run in the first four minutes of the overtime, but a 3-pointer by Sean Michele, a senior from East Rochester, with 15 seconds left, gave the Lakers new hope.”

    “After the Warriors missed two free throw attempts on the other end, the Lakers brought the ball up the floor, down 60-58. Michele drove the lane and found an open Chris Gilkes right under the basket with three-tenths of a second left, sending the game into a second overtime.”

    “Ward hit a 3 early in the second OT and Burridge added a free throw, but a quick 5-0 run put the Warriors up 65-64 with 1:50 to play.”

    “Ward put the Lakers back in front with a bucket in the paint, and a Warrior miss allowed Oswego State to run some time off the clock.”

    “Ryan Sheridan drew a foul with one second left on the shot clock, and hit both free throws for a 68-65 Laker lead.”

    “With 12.1 seconds left, Eastern Connecticut put back an offensive rebound for 68-67 and fouled Michele. Michele made one of the free throws for 69-67. The Warriors came down and, with 2.5 seconds left, Brian Salzillo hit a deep 3-pointer from the top of the key. Much like the night before, Burridge threw a long pass to Ward at the top of the key for one final shot, but the Warriors defended it well, the shot fell short, ending the game and the Lakers’ season.”

    While he hadn’t seen Salzillo’s game-changer, which had been “pretty well defended,” Ward said fans had told him later it had followed a line-drive trajectory. “Unfortunately, it went in. . . . While it was a tough loss, there was no better way to lose.”

    A business administration major with a minor in coaching, Ward, who was recently named to the all-SUNYAC first team, said he would take a couple of weeks off before resuming weight training and individual skill work.

    And next year? “We’re graduating five or six seniors, but we have a strong junior class. I’m confident we’ll have a very good year, that we can repeat as the SUNYAC champion and, hopefully, get a chance to go deeper into the national tournament.”

    Yes, he agreed, basketball was an exciting game, “though sometimes it doesn’t go the way you want.”

Friday, March 9

GIRLS BASKETBALL, Smithtown Christian eighth-grade team at East Hampton Middle School, 4:30 p.m.

Saturday, March 10

BOYS BASKETBALL, New York State regional finals, Class C bracket, Pierson-East Rockaway winner vs. Pine Plains-Tuckahoe winner, 2:45 p.m.; Class D bracket, Bridgehampton vs. Section I/IX winner, 4:30 p.m.

Sunday, March 11

LIFEGUARDING, training, evaluating and testing for 2012 summer junior lifeguard program, ages 9 through 14, Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter, 1:30-2:30 p.m., through June 17; skills and conditioning for lifeguard trainees, ages 15 and up, Y.M.C.A., 2:30-4:30 p.m., through April 18.

Monday, March 12

GIRLS BASKETBALL, Montauk eighth-grade team at East Hampton Middle School, 3:30 p.m.

WRESTLING, Southampton at East Hampton Middle School, 4:30 p.m.

Tuesday, March 13

SOFTBALL, Hampton Bays at East Hampton, scrimmage, 4 p.m.

Wednesday, March 14

GIRLS LACROSSE, William Floyd at East Hampton, scrimmage, 4:30 p.m.

LIFEGUARDING, skills and conditioning for lifeguard trainees, ages 15 and up, Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter, 7-9:15 p.m

    Montauk’s fishing community was saddened by the death of Bobby Huser on Monday. Most will picture him at the wheel of his classic Nova Scotia-style lobster boat, Teddy Boy. The Muskrat, as he was known, was a popular presence on the Montauk docks for decades. He will be sorely missed.

    Monday’s cold snap was preceded by a good day of cod fishing on Sunday aboard the Viking Star. Capt. Carl Forsberg reported six to eight cod on the line around the boat at all times in the morning, with solid fishing at the trip’s end after a midday lull. Mavros Bennis was the high hook with 23 keeper cod. Montauk’s veteran angler Freddy Shay ended up with 16. He’s got the touch.

    Peter Spacek went after cod on Friday aboard the Star and reported tough fishing with more fish caught from the stern section than in the bow section where he was. However, Spacek did come in second in the pool, and caught a few ling to boot. Those aboard the Star witnessed whales feeding with plenty of birds including gannets. Herring were most likely what the whales were eating.

    Plenty of herring were reported in the New York Bight to the west of us, with striped bass feeding on big schools of them. Mackerel are around as well. Unfortunately there are plenty of dogfish to steal clam baits before the terminal gear even reaches the bottom.

    At least one UpIsland charter boat has been advertising catch-and-release striper trips in the Bight. The State Department of Environmental Conservation allows catch-and-release fishing for bass. The regular season will start on April 15.

    On Monday, March 21, busloads of recreational and commercial fishermen will descend on Upper Senate Park in Washington, D.C., to protest what is being called the unjust administration of the nation’s fishing laws. So far, one bus will depart from Montauk for the rally at 5 a.m. on that day. More information about the rally can be found at keep ­fishermenfishing.com.

    Diane O’Donnell, who coaches East Hampton High School’s girls cross-country team, said during recent physical evaluations of Springs’s I-Tri girls at the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter that she thought they were “ready to take the next step . . . you can see a difference in these girls, they have more of a spark.”

    Theresa Roden, who founded the I-Tri (Transformation Through Triathlon) program at the Springs School about three years ago as a means to empower the minds and bodies of early-adolescent girls who did not see themselves as athletes, and who were in danger of “making some bad choices,” agreed.

    “We now have 30 girls from Springs, including 14 alumnae who act as mentors for the younger ones, and we’ve added 15 girls from the Montauk School,” she said during a recent conversation. “We’ve doubled our numbers in one year, and have quadrupled them since I-Tri began.”

    On I-Tri’s new Web site, itrigirls.org, Roden, a former teacher who now publishes Captain’s Guide yachting and boating destination magazines with her husband, Rob, said that, until discovering triathloning herself some seven years ago, she had largely also been on the sidelines as it were, very much like the girls she has been mentoring with the help of Sharon McCobb, Annette MacNiven, and Amanda Husslein, among others. They mix swimming, cycling, and running workouts with weekly self-esteem-building workshops.

    Roden’s charges, who each year train for and participate in a popular Youth Triathlon that McCobb oversees at Maidstone Park in the summer, now see themselves as athletes, as triathletes, in fact. (Three of I-Tri’s alums, Abby Roden, the founder’s daughter, Alexa Berti, and Alana Ellis intend to do the Montauk Sprint triathlon as a team this summer.)

    “For most who start off with us in the sixth grade, running is their least favorite thing,” Roden said when the cross-country coach’s comments were mentioned. “Though now we’ve got some strong runners who are about to enter the high school.”

    Presumably, O’Donnell, who, like Roden, did not participate in sports when she was in high school, and who did not start running until the age of 27, will be among those to reap the benefits of I-Tri’s transformative efforts.

    I-Tri’s success has been furthered by financial contributions from such organizations as the East Hampton Healthcare Foundation, the Women’s Sports Foundation, Simple Works, the Long Island Fund for Women and Girls, the Old Montauk Athletic Club, and the East Hampton Rotary Club. “Adolescent girls go through a tough time when they are unsure of who they are, or of how they fit in,” Roden said. “I-Tri gives them a common ground, something they can be a part of that is bigger than themselves. It’s about empowerment.”

    Things are to get going in earnest for the 45 I-Tri girls of Springs and Montauk this week. The Montaukers are to get medical evaluations at Southampton Hospital today, there is to be a retreat for I-Triers and their mothers — who have pushed for this — at the East Hampton Day Care Center Saturday, and a spin class at B-East in Amagansett next Thursday. “It’s the third year Romaine Gordon has done this for us,” said Roden.

    For the rest of the school year, the girls will be given classes in various athletic disciplines every Thursday afternoon, they’ll swim at the Y’s pool on Saturday afternoons, coached by MacNiven and Husslein, and Gurney’s Inn volunteers are to give the Montauk girls fitness classes on Tuesday afternoons. In addition, self-esteem-building workshops will be held at each of the schools one day a week during a lunch-recess period.     “Our big fund-raising event is to be a Celebrity Turbo Tri on June 16 on the Maidstone Park [300-yard bay swim, 7-mile bike, and 1.5-mile run] course,” said Roden. “A couple of professional triathletes have agreed to do it and we’re working on getting celebrities. We also want to get 100 percent participation from the staffs at the Springs and Montauk Schools — either as participants or as contributors to the participants’ $100 entry fees. It looks as if it should happen.”

    The Youth Triathlon is to be held at Maidstone Park on July 22.

    Roden added that the I-Tri girls who are to enter East Hampton High School in the fall have been working — along with McCobb’s daughter, Lena Vergnes, a junior racewalker — with the high school’s principal Adam Fine to have I-Tri included among the school’s clubs next year.

    Abby Roden said during the recent fitness testing at the Y that they wouldn’t stop there. “We want to make it worldwide,” she said, with a broad smile.

   Hayden Ward, who played on back-to-back East Hampton High School state Final Four basketball teams in 2008 and ’09, has kicked it up a notch at Oswego State, which with his considerable help went 21-0 in conference play before sweeping through tournament games this past week with New Paltz, Brockport, and Cortland to become the State University of New York Athletic Conference champion.

    The last time the Lakers, who take an overall record of 25-3 into the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s Division III tournament, wound up at the top of the SUNYAC heap was in 1965, almost 50 years ago.

    A junior who is 6 feet 6 inches tall and weighs 220 pounds — 20 pounds heavier than he was in high school, “most of it muscle” — Ward has been a force underneath for Oswego State the past two seasons. He was named by the conference’s coaches to the all-SUNYAC first team Monday, two days after his 24-point, 13-rebound performance — his eighth double-double of the season — led Oswego State to a 66-57 win over Cortland in the SUNYAC final. He was named to the all-tournament team, and a teammate of his, Chad Burridge, was named the tournament’s M.V.P.

    As a result of its conference championship, Oswego State is one of 62 teams in the nationwide N.C.A.A. tourney, and is to play host this weekend to first and second-round games. The Lakers are to play Endicott (20-8) tomorrow, and, should they win, the Eastern Connecticut State-Medaille winner at home Saturday. Eastern Connecticut takes a 22-5 record into the tournament, Medaille, a Buffalo school, comes in with a 25-2 mark. 

    Sectional games are to be played at sites yet to be determined on March 9 and 10. The Final Four games are to be played in Salem, Va., at the Salem Civic Center, over the March 16 to 17 weekend.

    The affable Montauker said during a telephone conversation Monday that he had been pleasantly surprised to see his family in the stands at the final — “It’s a long trip, eight to nine hours” — and pleased, as well, to receive a congratulatory phone call afterward from his former coach, Ed Petrie, who had watched a Webcast of the game.

    It was the third time in a row that Oswego State had beaten Cortland, but going through the league undefeated, said Ward, who has averaged 16 points and 9 rebounds per game, “was by no means a walk in the park — we could have lost a couple of those games.”

    Asked to what extent he had improved since his high school days, Ward said, presumably with a slight smile, “I’m a little bit stronger and a little bit smarter.” He had worked hard on his vertical leap off-season, he added.

    Petrie, who told this writer that Ward had “played a terrific game,” remarked in the post-game conversation on his protege’s “hard work down low” and on the way he’d gone after rebounds.

    Ward’s coach, Jason Leone, had this to say in an e-mail message: “Hayden has had a phenomenal junior season during which his game has reached new heights because of his hard work. In addition, he’s become a more committed defensive player and is more physical around the basket, which has allowed him to shoot more free throws per game and thus improve his scoring numbers. He is an integral part of our team and I’m proud of him.”

    When asked about the coming N.C.A.A. tournament, Ward said, “We’ve got a very strong team — we’ve been playing together for three years now. We’re confident. If we play as hard and compete as well as we did in our conference tournament, I think we can play with anybody in the country.”

   The Bees may be back, but the Whalers are too, and so it was that in the county C-D boys basketball game at Farmingdale State on Feb. 22, Sag Harbor’s players took the measure of their Bridgehampton counterparts by a score of 57-41.

    The outcome, however, was moot insofar as the state tournament was concerned. Both teams had already made it by virtue of county championship wins — the Class D Bees over Greenport and the Class C Whalers over Stony Brook. Yet Pierson will have to scale one more hurdle — on Tuesday at Farmingdale State, where it is to meet East Rockaway — before the Whalers can join Bridgehampton in Southeast Regional competition at the State University at New Paltz on March 10, the Bees having been granted a pass because there are no Class D schools in Nassau County.

    The Whalers were to go on to lose 68-36 Friday to a full-court-pressing Center Moriches team in the county B-C-D game, a contest that Pierson’s coach, Dan White, said he hoped would help prepare his charges for the state tourney.

    Last week’s clash between the Killer Bees and Whalers was the third of the season for the South Fork schools, who played in League VIII, the Whalers having won both regular-season games by comfortable margins.

    Before it began, Joe Zucker, who assists Carl Johnson in coaching Bridgehampton, said, with a smile, “I don’t know, we just seem to struggle against them. Greenport clobbered them in one of their games and Ross waxed them in one of theirs, but we can’t seem to beat them. . . . Pierson outhustled us in the first two games. It will come down to who executes the best and who wants it the most.”

    It was Pierson that turned out to have more desire that day, as evidenced by its energetic man-for-man defense that only Caanan Campbell, the Bees’ 6-foot-5-inch star, who finished with 21 points, could withstand, and by its swift ball movement at the other end of the court, which frequently found the open man.

    The teams played toe-to-toe throughout the first one and a half quarters, though, at that point, the Whalers began to pull away a bit thanks to two foul shots by Patrick Sloane, a 3-pointer from the top of the key by Jackson Marienfeld after Sloane had picked Jason Hopson’s pocket, and a basket by Sloane, who was fed by Forrest Loesch — the sophomore hero of the Whalers’ 36-35 Class C semifinal win over Port Jefferson and the 34-32 win over Stony Brook in the Class C championship game.

    The hero role this time, however, fell to Joey Butts, a hard-working 5-7 junior guard who was to finish with a team-high 17 points. A coast-to-coast layup of his after he’d stolen the ball from Hopson got the third quarter going and increased Pierson’s lead to 13. A 3-pointer of his in the final two minutes of the third period extended the Whalers’ lead to 45-27, and back-to-back fast-break layups by him, driving the margin up to 17, earned Butts and his fellow starters seats on the bench, and applause, as their coach brought on the subs.

    Butts, as aforesaid, finished with 17 points. Sloane had 12, and Sam Miller, the senior inside man, had 10 to go with 10 rebounds.

    Asked during a conversation in between county classification contests last Thursday how his team, the Pierson High School Whalers, got to be so good, Dan White, who’s in his second season coaching boys basketball in Sag Harbor, said, “The big thing is that the kids are playing year round.”

    Last year’s senior-heavy team, whose players didn’t play the year round, went 5-9 in league competition, but this winter White reaped a bonanza as Jon Tortorella’s 12-2 junior varsity moved up.

    Before this campaign began, White, who played in New York State’s Final Four Class C tournament in 2005 with Hoosic Valley High School’s team, and who later was a guard at Springfield College in Springfield, Mass., made a gentleman’s bet with his former-New York Knick assistant, Eric Anderson, as to how the 2011-12 Whalers would do.

    “Anderson said he thought we’d go 10-4, and I said 11-3. He won.”

    While there are no D-1 prospects on the team, Pierson’s players are energetic, tough, well drilled, and they’ve benefited, their coach said, from “playing against guys who are more athletic than they are in the off-season.”

    Pierson finished one game behind Stony Brook in League VIII and then went on to topple the Bears 34-32 in the final second of the county Class C championship game thanks to the sophomore Forrest Loesch’s 3-pointer from 22 feet out on the left wing.

    That victory — the first county boys basketball championship the school had won in 18 years — followed an equally exciting semifinal with Port Jefferson played in Pierson’s gym on Feb. 17. Loesch came up big in that one too, scoring all 4 of the Whalers’ points in O.T. on the way to a 36-35 final.

    “These guys play together on travel teams in the spring, summer, and fall — I set it up,” said White, whom Anderson has described as “a perfect coach — he’s a basketball junkie, and he’s got that number-one thing every A.D. looks for — that motor, that energy.”

    Joe Zucker, Carl Johnson’s assistant at Bridgehampton, had nice things to say about White as well before the county’s C-D game was played by Bridgehampton and Pierson at Farmingdale State College on Feb. 22. “He’s done a great job with his team,” Zucker said. “They run a tough man-for-man defense, they’re good with the ball, they run the clock, and they can all shoot.”

    It was true, White said last Thursday, “they were always good shooters. But there’s more to the game than that. We’ve been working with them on such things as ball pressure, running the floor, finishing. . . . Now they’re starting to become physically and mentally tough. There are no stars; they play as a pretty solid unit, with mutual respect.”

    “Ninety percent of the time,” he said, in reply to a question, “we play man-for-man defense. We played man against Port Jeff and man against Bridgehampton, but if a team has a couple of good shooters who can give us trouble, like Stony Brook had, we’ll play a match-up zone.”

    He was looking forward, he said, to the following day’s county B-C-D game with Class B champion Center Moriches “because they play a style we’re not used to. They constantly press — pressure, pressure, pressure. It will be an excellent warm-up for the state tournament.”

    Pierson is to play East Rockaway in a state regional semifinal at Farmingdale on Tuesday at 5 p.m. The winner of that game is to play the Section I/IX winner at the State University at New Paltz on March 10. Bridgehampton is also to play at New Paltz that day, versus the Section I/IX Class D winner.

    White said he saw East Rockaway, a team that bested the Killer Bees 73-60 in the Beehive in December, defeat Friends Academy on television recently. “Their inside men are a little bigger, but I think our guards are a little better.”

    Speaking of guards, Pierson’s coach said his sophomore point guard, Ian Barrett, “makes us go . . . Jackson Marienfeld [a junior] is good too.”

    Eric Anderson, he said, “has brought Sam Miller, our inside man, a long way — he’s been close to averaging 10 points and 10 rebounds a game for us in the second half of the season. . . . And Joey Butts, while at 5-7 he’s not physically imposing, is a shooter. He’s great coming off screens, he has a quick release, and can beat guys off the dribble. We look for him to shoot 10 to 15 times a game.”

    “Our defense,” White added, “has been giving up 43 points on average, which is pretty good, and we try to take 55 shots a game. If we score 50 to 60 points and play good defense we ought to be able to win most of the time.”

    League VIII was topsy-turvy this winter. The Whalers, for instance, handily defeated Bridgehampton twice in league play, but lost both times to Greenport, which, in turn, was routed 73-50 by the Bees in the recent county Class D championship game. Pierson split with Ross, losing 65-30 to the Cosmos on Feb. 7, and the Whalers split, as well, with league-champion Stony Brook, losing 60-35 to the Bears at home on Jan. 17 but rebounding to defeat the Brooksters 49-45 on Feb. 13.

    “The second time we played Stony Brook, when we beat them at their place, I began to think we might have a good playoff run,” said White, “that if we played our game we could go pretty far.”

    While he’s taking it one game at a time, Pierson’s young coach is aware that Pierson hasn’t won a state boys basketball championship since 1978. However the Whalers do in the state tourney this year, White is secure in the knowledge that “we’re turning things around.”

    It was “complete dumb luck” that he had ever come down here, he said, in answer to another question. “I had graduated from college and I was about to become an assistant coach on the college team when Jeff Nichols [Pierson’s principal] called. He’d seen my résumé online. It was July of ’09. I hopped on a ferry and gave a lesson in European handball to a group at the middle school. But I think he liked it that I had a basketball background. I was offered a job that day, and here I am.”

    “It’s easy,” he continued, “when you work with kids who want to learn. I work with the middle school kids too. Joey Butts never stops working, so why should I?”