The East Hampton High School girls basketball team won twice last week to improve its record to 3-4, thus giving it a fighting chance to make the playoffs; the boys swimming team split, losing at league-leading Hauppauge but swamping Deer Park here at the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter, and the wrestling team, while it continued winless, could point to some good individual results.

    Concerning girls track, Shani Cuesta, the coach, said her team is to compete in the league championships at Suffolk Community College-Brentwood Saturday night, with Ashley West, in the 300 and 600, and Dana Cebulski, in the 1,500 and 3,000, being her best bets to place.

    “We’ll go all out at the leagues, where each of them can compete in three events,” said Cuesta. The small schools and state qualifier meets are yet to come, as is, of course, the state meet. West made it to the state qualifier last year. Cebulski made the state meet in cross-country this past fall.

    Howard Wood and his assistant, Louis O’Neal, said before Monday’s practice session at the East Hampton Middle School that the girls basketball team had played well in its wins over Westhampton Beach and Mount Sinai. The Bonackers edged the Hurricanes 43-41 and defeated Mount Sinai 44-37. Kaelyn Ward, who finds herself invariably the subject of opponents’ box-and-one defenses, led the team in both games, and Sarah Johnson, East Hampton’s senior post player, came up big, as well, when it came to rebounding and boxing out.

    Johnson had been getting into early foul trouble, “but she played all 32 minutes against Mount Sinai and in most of the game with Westhampton,” said Wood, who added that the two wins “weren’t pretty, but I’d rather have an ugly win than a pretty loss. . . . We’ve got to win three of our last five to make the playoffs. We’re taking them one at a time.”

    As for wrestling, Steve Tseperkas’s team lost 46-34 to Harborfields here on Jan. 18. Sawyer Bushman won by pin at 126 pounds, Mike Peralta won by a major 13-2 decision at 145, Dallas Foglia, who was trailing 10-7 midway through the third period, used a headlock to pin his opponent at 152, Kevin Heine won by pin at 182, and Jacob Hands won by pin at 195.

    The Bonackers lost 51-18 at Eastport-South Manor on Friday. Tseperkas had five winners that day — Bushman, by a score of 3-0, at 126, Colton Kalbacher, by 3-2, at 132, Peralta, by pin, at 145, Morgan Rojas, by 3-1, at 160, and Hands, by 7-1, at 220.

    East Hampton, moreover, had five place-winners in an 11-team invitational meet at Mattituck Saturday. Lucas Escobar placed fourth at 106 pounds, pinning his Connetquot opponent and thus erasing a 12-5 third-period deficit, in the quarterfinals. Escobar lost 4-2 in the semis “to the Harborfields kid who’d decisioned him 8-1 in the dual meet here.”

    Bushman, who won two matches by pin before losing to an all-county Miller Place wrestler in the semifinals, placed sixth at 126.

    Brian Ordonez, a junior in his first year of varsity competition, was a surprising sixth-place finisher at 145, earning Tseperkas’s praise, and, at 195, Hands was the runner-up and Alfreddo Perez was sixth.

    Tseperkas added that “Colton Kalbacher and Heine were each one match away from placing.”

    The team was to have finished the league season here yesterday with Huntington. It is to wrestle in an invitational at Port Jefferson High School Saturday. The league tournament will be at Bellport High on Feb. 4.

    East Hampton’s swimmers easily defeated Deer Park at the Y on Jan. 18, exhibitioning (and thus forfeiting 12 points) in the penultimate event, the 200 freestyle relay.

    Thomas Brierley won the 50 freestyle in 24.02 seconds; Trevor Mott, Andrew Winthrop, and Jeremy Pepper swept the 200-yard freestyle, and Mott won the 100 free in 53.95. Brierley was the runner-up in the 500 in 5:03.95, and Dan Hartner was the runner-up in the 100 backstroke in 1:01.01.

National Qualifier

    Besides qualifying for the Y.M.C.A. national swim meet as a member of the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter Hurricanes’ 200 freestyle relay team, Maddie Minetree also qualified for the nationals in the 50-yard freestyle at the University of Maryland over the Jan. 13 to 15 weekend with a time of 25.38 seconds in the final, good for 14th place. She swam a personal-best 24.87 in a preliminary heat.

E.H.I.T. Leagues

    The following were winners and runners-up in East Hampton Indoor Tennis Club leagues this fall: Nanette Hansen and Kelly Canavan, Thursday morning women’s A singles; Lindsay Morris and Dawn Harvey, Tuesday morning women’s B-plus singles; Christine Kuhl and Wendy Flanagan, Thursday evening women’s B-plus singles; David Kozatch and Chuck Kraus, Monday evening men’s B singles; Justice Phillips and Joe Tyree, Tuesday evening men’s B singles; Bruce Horwith and Jack Graves, Thursday evening men’s A doubles; John Ali and Malcolm Braveman, Thursday evening men’s B doubles; Beth Schumann and Jane Gill, Monday morning women’s A doubles, and Sue O’Connell and Jean Forman, Monday morning women’s B doubles.

    Rich Swanson and Andrew Bedini tied for first place in the Monday evening men’s A singles.

Thursday, January 26

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

Friday, January 27

BOYS BASKETBALL, Bridgehampton at Pierson, Sag Harbor, and Greenport at Ross, 6:15 p.m.

GIRLS BASKETBALL, Elwood-John Glenn at East Hampton, 6:15 p.m.

Saturday, January 28

WRESTLING, East Hampton at Port Jefferson tournament, 9 a.m.

GIRLS BASKETBALL, Knox at Ross, nonleague, 4:30 p.m.

BOYS BASKETBALL Knox at Ross, nonleague, 6 p.m.

WINTER TRACK, East Hampton girls at league championships, Suffolk Community College-Brentwood, 7 p.m.

FUTSAL, women’s championship game, 9 p.m., and men’s championship game, 10, Sportime Arena, Abraham’s Path, Amagansett.

Monday, January 30

BOYS BASKETBALL, East Hampton at Elwood-John Glenn, 4 p.m.

Tuesday, January 31

BOWLING, East Hampton at Suffolk County team tournament, Coram Lanes, 1:45 p.m.

BOYS BASKETBALL, Bridgehampton at Smithtown Christian, 4:30 p.m., Pierson at Shelter Island, 5:45, and Ross at Southold, 6:15.

GIRLS BASKETBALL, Shelter Island at Pierson, and Southold at Ross, 6:15 p.m.

WINTER TRACK, East Hampton boys at league championships, Suffolk Community College-Brentwood, 5 p.m.

Wednesday, February 1

SWIMMING, Smithtown vs. East Hampton-Pierson-Bridgehampton, Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter, 4 p.m.

The East Hampton High School bowling team needed at least 12.5 points in its match here with Rocky Point Monday to earn a berth in the county tournament, which is to be contested at the Sayville Lanes on Feb. 4.

    “Our seniors, Andrew Payne and Ricky Nardo, have gone to the counties every year, and they wanted to go this year too,” the team’s coach, Pat Hand, said during a conversation Monday morning.

    Payne, who leads the team and is fourth in the league with a 188.33 average, rolled an uncharacteristic 162 in the middle game at Mount Sinai last Thursday and asked to be taken out, prompting a pep talk from Hand, who told him he was her senior captain and that it was time to reach down and focus. The result was a 215 for Payne in game three, a score that helped East Hampton to a 23.5-9.5 win.

    Hand said she had read the interview on these pages last week with Dr. Paul Weinhold, a sports psychologist, and agreed that in athletic competition, especially in bowling, quieting the ofttimes censorious mind was paramount. “I even have our kids heckle the others in practice so they get used to tuning things out,” she said. “I like them to bowl one frame at a time.”

    Most everyone had had his or her moments thus far this season, the coach said, in reply to a question.

    “Andrew began the season with a 192.33 average, so he’s down a bit, but he’s had a 600 and a 633 series, and Ricky [whose average as of Monday was 177.46, good for 11th place in the league] has had a 653 series. Chris Duran, who’s from Pierson, has bowled 212 and 206 games, and is averaging 173.84. Those are our top three, though Dan Ruggiero, who’s a first-year senior, is averaging 166 and has had 226 and 235 games — he’s been a surprise. Briana Semb was doing well until she hurt her knee. Jackson Clark has had 211 and 192 games. . . .”

    “We’ve bounced around a bit in the standings. We’ve been fourth, we’ve been second, even first, for one day. We’re in third at the moment and hope to stay there. Rocky Point, which is in fourth place, and Mount Sinai bowl Tuesday, but if we win at least 12 and a half points this afternoon, it doesn’t matter what happens with Rocky Point and Mount Sinai.”

    The three seniors, Payne, Nardo, and Ruggiero, start, as does Duran, a junior. Clark, a sophomore, and Gabby Green, a junior, alternate.

    “Actually,” said Hand, “we’re right where we should be. Eastport-South Manor’s bowlers are averaging 185, Westhampton’s 174, and ours are averaging 169.”

    As of Friday, the League V standings showed Eastport-South Manor in first place with 283 points, followed by Westhampton (269.5), East Hampton (212.5), Rocky Point (167.0), Mount Sinai (163.5), Southold (91.5), and Southampton (34.0). As of that day, Payne had won 18 match points and Duran 17.

   Bobby Vacca, who ought to know, said after the East Hampton High School boys basketball team’s extraordinary fourth-quarter resurgence here against Shoreham-Wading River on Jan. 10 that “the greatest comeback in high school basketball in Suffolk County that I’ve ever seen” had led to the remarkable 57-56 win.

    This writer, who has seen numberless boys basketball games in Suffolk over the past 30 years, wasn’t about to argue.

    For those who stayed, and most did, it was a game they’ll not soon forget. To begin with, it seemed as if East Hampton had no answer for Shoreham’s tough inside man, John Kovach, who repeatedly tossed in 2-pointers from close range, and who was virtually impeccable from the foul line.

    The Bonackers were down by 9 points when the fourth quarter began, and, with about five and a half minutes remaining, trailed by 15 — Kovach having outscored East Hampton 8-2 in the final period’s opening minutes.

    It was then that Bill McKee, East Hampton’s coach, called for a timeout, and, in the huddle, for full-court pressure.

    When play resumed, Thomas King, who was to be the game’s hero, was fouled as he went to the hoop and subsequently made both free throws. East Hampton’s press took over from there, forcing turnover after turnover as the Bonackers, fired up by their fans, became increasingly confident. Increasingly discomfited, the doubled-up visitors stepped on lines, were stripped of the ball, and tried desperately to pass over the top of Bonac’s swarming D as Kovach waited, lonely and unfed, at the baseline.

    During that frenzied finale, East Hampton outscored Shoreham 19-3 — the Wildcats’ only basket, a long 3, accounted for by Kevin Turano. East Hampton, meanwhile, went 9-for-11 from the foul line, with King going 6-for-8 and Juan Cuevas going 3-for-3 after having been fouled beyond the arc. Thomas Nelson made two huge baskets during the run, his first after intercepting an over-the-top pass at midcourt and converting the layup and the second after slipping free and gathering in a bounce pass from King on his way to the hoop.

    Nelson’s second score brought the home team to within 56-51. Moments later, King answered a Shoreham miss with a layup of his own for 56-53, and Donja Davis, who had come off the bench, stole the ball, prompting McKee to call an East Hampton timeout with 1:51 on the clock.

    East Hampton inbounded when play resumed, but Davis was called for a backcourt foul, which turned the ball over to the visitors as McKee shook his head. Shoreham did not take advantage, however; Cuevas came up with a steal — East Hampton’s 10th of the quarter — and hit a runner in the lane for 56-55. With the gym in an uproar and half a minute left, Shoreham came close to losing the ball again before its coach called for a timeout.

    The Wildcats did a pretty good job of playing keepaway as the final seconds ticked away. With 6.4 seconds left, after McKee had during his last timeout told his players what to do should a Shoreham player go to the line, Nelson fouled Kovach.

    The gym shook as Shoreham’s big man — who was to wind up with a game-high 33 points — prepared to let the ball go.

    It was off the mark, and King, who rebounded, took off, mindful that if it were a 1-point game he should go to the hoop. “I took seven dribbles,” the point guard and co-captain said later, “and took off into traffic. Everybody had a hand on the ball. . . .”

    But despite the hacking, the coast-to-coast layup banked into the net just as the buzzer sounded. East Hampton hadwon! The team and its fans were beside themselves. A foul had been called on the play, but, perhaps because a foul shot would have been moot, none was awarded.

    “I guess the refs wanted to go home,” an elated McKee said afterward.

    King, a junior who co-captains the team with Patrick McGuirk (recovering at the moment from an appendectomy) and Cameron Yusko, said that in those last five and a half minutes the team had shifted gears, and that it had been the best game he’d played.

    “The kids were great,” said McKee.

There was much to write home about when it came to East Hampton swimmers this past week.

    The varsity boys team just missed out on winning two meets. “Five more yards and Thomas [Brierley] would have won the 400-yard freestyle relay for us,” Jeff Thompson, the varsity coach, said after the Jan. 10 meet here with Harborfields.

    Going into the aforementioned finale, the Bonackers trailed 79-77, but despite Brierley’s blazing 51.51-second split in the anchor leg — the best split by far in the race — the visitors, who won by a little more than a second, pulled the meet out by a score of 87-83.

    Thompson’s deep team, which has logged more than 1,469 football fields to date in practices, swam away with a meet here with North Babylon last Thursday. The score was given as 97-70, though some entries “exhibitioned,” which is to say weren’t counted.

    Moreover, the 16 members of the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter’s Hurricanes youth swim team who competed in a big meet at the University of Maryland over the weekend also made waves, according to the Hurricanes’ coach, and the Y’s aquatics director, Tom Cohill.

    Of special note, he said on his return here Monday, were the facts that Skye Marigold, 16, had tied for first place in the open 50-yard freestyle in 24.36 seconds, “her best time ever,” and had thus qualified for the nationals; that Georgie Bogetti, 12, had placed second in the 11-12-year-old 500 freestyle, in 5:19.30, and that the 200-yard freestyle relay team of Carly Drew, Maddie Minetree, Mari­gold, and Mikayla Mott had also qualified for the nationals, placing eighth in the final in 1:40.79. The same girls, Cohill said, had almost qualified for the 200 medley relay as well. “They needed a 1:58.89 and finished with a 1:58.98!”

    “We had a lot of top-eight athletes,” Cohill continued, adding that Thomas Brierley, who swims with the boys varsity as well, had broken, “for the first time ever,” five minutes in the 500 free. Brierley’s 4:59.33 put him within striking distance of the Y.M.C.A. nationals’ qualifying time of 4:47, the coach said. “Thomas and Georgie stood out in the distance events . . . it was an inspired weekend with the kids and their families. Everybody pitched in.”

    During the next six weeks or so “there will be a number of meets we’ll go to,” said Cohill, when asked what was next for the Hurricanes. “We’ll be focusing on training in this period so that we’ll peak for the Y state championships, which are the third weekend in March, the 16th to the 18th, in Buffalo, and for the Y nationals, which are going to be the first week of April in Greensboro, North Carolina. . . . We’re hoping that we’ll qualify for at least one more relay for the nationals, and there are several individuals who are on the cusp.”

    Getting back to the varsity, Thompson, in reviewing the Harborfields results, said, “We were looking to get one-two in the final relay, but got two-three instead. Thomas [who had started well behind] almost got his guy.”

    East Hampton was swept in the penultimate event, the 100-yard breaststroke, “but we knew we’d take a hit in that — the whole meet went as I had expected. . . . Harborfields beat us significantly last year. But even if we’d won, I would have forfeited the meet because I saw that our B team jumped the gun in the final relay. It’s to be expected — they’re young. The ref didn’t see it, but I did.”

    The coach said Brierley’s 57.57 in the 100 backstroke, which he won, had been “a lifetime best.”

    Among the “honorable mentions” that day were Jeremy Pepper’s 2:12.68 in the 200 free, “a lifetime best”; Adam Heller and Rob Anderson’s sub 2:30s in the 200 individual medley; Heller’s 1:06.48 and Sergio Betancur’s 1:14.06 in the 100 butterfly; Brierley’s winning time of 52.21 in the 100 free; Trevor Mott’s winning time of 5:11.06 in the 500 free, “his best this year”; Pepper’s 6:13.25 in the 500; the 1:37.75 the winning 200 freestyle relay team (Dan Hartner, Brierley, Peter Skerys, and Mott) swam; Rob Anderson’s 1:09.47 in the 100 backstroke, good for fourth place, and Ryan Lewis’s 1:19.47 in the 100 breaststroke. “Ryan never swam the breaststroke until the Lindenhurst meet,” said Thompson.

    Among East Hampton’s winners in the meet with North Babylon were the 200 medley relay team of Hartner, Thomas Paradiso, Heller, and Paul Dorego; Mott in the 200 and 500 free; Brierley in the 100 free; Hartner in the 100 back; the 200 free relay team of Hartner, Brierley, Skerys, and Mott, and the 400 free relay team of Mott, Heller, Skerys, and Brierley.

    “The brain, then, is a terrible thing. . . ?” this writer said after Dr. Paul Weinhold, a sports psychologist, sat down during a recent visit to The Star.

    “A terrible and a wonderful thing,” he said. “The mind plays an incredible role as to how you’re going to perform. There’s no level of athlete who’s exempt, whether you’re a professional or a weekend warrior.”

    “As the skill level increases,” he continued, the ante is upped, as it were. “For instance, if you look at an elite player — and I work with a lot of them, in all different sports — what separates those who succeed from those who struggle is the mind game, the mental component.”

    “Jack Nicklaus was giving a seminar and he said he never missed a putt within three feet. Somebody in the audience said, ‘But Mr. Nicklaus, I once saw you miss a putt of probably two-and-a-half feet.’ ”

    “ ‘No, sir,’ ” Nicklaus said. ‘I don’t remember that.’ He had chosen to forget the mistake, because he wished to remain positive. It’s a strategy that’s best for athletes to follow. You don’t want to be reminded of mistakes because the brain then becomes too captivated by the failures, and in so doing activates a lot of the sympathetic nervous system. That kind of obsessing produces a physical result. Your heart beats faster, your blood pressure rises . . . the brain has initiated what we feel as anxiety.”

    When one is “in the zone,” performing at an extraordinarily high level, Weinhold said, “the mind is quiet, no negative energy is being created. Countless examples exist of victorious athletes acknowledging in interviews the overwhelming importance of an additional shift that allows a calm, determined, positive focus. Successful athletes need to master and sustain this shift. This ‘zone,’ or ‘flow’ is best described as completely focused motivation.”

    In the early days of his career, Weinhold, who had played tennis at the University of Illinois “before academics got in the way,” worked largely with tennis players, including elite junior players at the Port Washington Tennis Academy, “though not in the Harry Hopman years.” Later, he came to work, he said, with professionals in golf, football, basketball, baseball, swimming, gymnastics, sailing, riding . . . even billiards.

    “Billiards is very, very psychological. You’re thinking way ahead to position your shots. There are a lot of opportunities for tension to come into play. You must be completely in the moment. It’s comparable to golf because of all the time you have to think. If the brain thinks too much it goes into rapid beta activity. An alpha rhythm, a slow rhythm where your heart beats very, very consistently, is preferred. . . . When you’re not activating the sympathetic nervous system, your heart settles into a very, very comfortable rhythm, which allows you to feel less tension and helps you focus on what you’re trying to accomplish. . . . The brain is the narrator, we’re always judging ourselves, but we can, through training, release our conscious minds so that we can, if we’re golfers, say, play the ball as it lies by summoning our energy to execute the best shot we can manage.”

    Lately, he has been working with the half-dozen boys and one girl who constitute the first class of the Ross School’s Tennis Academy. “We try to get together as a group every Friday. They’re very talented kids, a great group. I’m there to help them reduce the anxiety of playing what is inherently a very difficult game, to modify how the pressure of tournament play is felt. They’re between the ages of 11 and 15, so I’m getting them at the right time to introduce them to the mental side of the game.  If they advance, you want their minds not to be working against them. Their bodies will be more comfortable if their minds aren’t working against them. You look at that sprinter, Usain Bolt. He’s so confident, he looks so comfortable. He breaks out of the blocks and he starts looking around. I would think that he’s done sports psychology work. He can let everything go. . . . Focus and confidence go hand in hand. If you’re confident, you will see the ball coming to you more clearly. Suddenly it becomes larger even though it’s coming at a rapid speed.”

    “The best,” he went on, “are confident — in any sport. They’re not adding an enormous amount of pressure on themselves because they’ve already incorporated into themselves the knowledge that they will not always be perfect. It makes no difference whether you’re an athlete or a surgeon or a musician. I’ve worked with some top musicians — they like the idea that I come from a sports psychology background. They recognize that what they do is related. They’re entertainers too, they’re both performing very intricate maneuvers, though in different areas. They realize the mind can play havoc with their performances. They want to be focused, confident, to quiet the mind.”

    The effects of a sports psychologist’s work might be somewhat hard to quantify, the interviewee said, inasmuch as “they’re measured not only in terms of winning and losing, but, for me, in how a player adapts to the game, how he maintains his resiliency and adaptability on the court. If I see a player, for instance, who has previously been angry but is no longer manifesting anger on the court, I consider what I’ve done to have been a great success.”

    “I like to see an athlete who enjoys the competition, who doesn’t back away, who wants to learn from the competitive circumstances,” he continued. “I’m fascinated by how the mind impacts performance, whether it’s Tim Tebow, John Elway, or the America’s Cup sailor Dennis Conner. John Elway had the dry heaves every Sunday because of his anticipation of the game, but once he was on the stage he would just play the game as he did as a kid.”

    When it came to coaching, he said, “John Wooden was one of the best psychologists who ever came along. He was very instructional, very positive, not insulting. He didn’t create negative energy and he got the most out of his players. . . . Bobby Knight had wonderful athletes who despite his behavior performed well. His players said they feared him but loved him. He would have been a much better coach had he not been that way, if his emotions hadn’t­ got the better of him. Of the two, I definitely prefer John Wooden.”

    He said the Ross Academy boys’ results in regional tournaments were attesting to the efficacy of his work there. “It’s not about winning or losing, but about how they compose themselves emotionally. The goal is to help them understand who they are and to give them an opportunity to engage in the educational process, to use sport as a vehicle to avail them of higher educational opportunities, to help them feel composed and emotionally intelligent. Emotional intelligence, by the way, bears more strongly on success in life than intellectual intelligence. E.Q. is more important than I.Q. If you have both, you’ve got it.

    “We got killed on the boards,” Bill McKee, who coaches East Hampton High School’s boys basketball team, said during Biddy hoop practice at the John M. Marshall Elementary School Saturday morning.

    McKee was referring to the previous night’s lopsided 70-49 loss at Amityville.

    Howard Wood, who coaches East Hampton’s girls team, said the same thing Monday morning after a two-hour practice session during which he emphasized the importance of “boxing out.”

    While the boys had pretty much been blown out, the girls were in Friday’s game here with their Amityville counterparts all the way, until a Hail Mary heaved by the visitors’ point guard at the buzzer swished through the nets for a 44-43 win.

    “Amityville was a much bigger team — the girls played their hearts out,” McKee, who saw the game, said during Saturday’s conversation. “They were behind for a lot of the game, but kept it close. I think they hit their last six foul shots to go up 43-41. . . . I felt so bad for them.”

    For his part, Wood said, “With 30 seconds left, Amityville’s girls were begging for a timeout. After it, we inbounded with seven seconds left, and they didn’t contest it. Kaelyn [Ward, the team’s star junior point guard] came off a screen to get the ball, but it was an errant pass. They intercepted and came down looking to get the ball into Price down low, but they couldn’t. The girl just heaved it from around the C. As I tracked it, I could tell it would go in. . . . It was like they’d won the championship.”

    “It was an unfortunate incident, but the most positive thing I took away from that game is that we didn’t lose our focus, even when we were down. We fought and fought and fought to the end. ”

    A few fewer turnovers and some more made foul shots and his charges could well have come out on top, said Bonac’s coach. “But our biggest problem is that under the basket we’re not down and dirty enough. We don’t box out, we don’t push back. We don’t get the over-the-back calls because we’re in too close to the basket, we’re not working hard enough.”

    “It’s not about height — Dennis Rodman is smaller than I am — it’s about desire. Rebounding is wanting to do it. The guy who put the best defensive move on me was one of my teammates [at the University of Tennessee], Ralph Parton. He was 5-6, 5-7. I was crashing the boards from the outside, and — I still remember this — he locked me up. I was a foot taller than he was, and yet in boxing me out he stopped me cold. It kinda hurt.”

    That was the way he wanted his charges to play, said the coach, who sees that kind of play when he watches men’s and women’s college games on television. “You got to score, but really the game is about the boards, the boards, the boards. Calipari said that it boils down to ‘doing what’s right when it’s hard to do what’s right.’ ”

    Wood added that “our perimeter players have been doing all right, it’s our inside girls who have to improve. Kaelyn, as I’ve said before, can’t do it all. She can’t be expected to shoot, rebound, and bring the ball up. She needs help. . . . I don’t have the book with me, but I think she got 17 points in that Amityville game.”

    “We’re 1-4 at the moment,” he said in parting, “and we’ve got to finish at 6-6 to make the playoffs. We’ve had a couple of bad games, but we’ll see.”Of course you’ve got to score points, East Hampton’s coach, Howard Wood, has said, but rebounding is key.

   While having been wrestled to the mat by its tough league opponents thus far this season, East Hampton High’s wrestling team can nevertheless point to some outstanding individual performances by Lucas Escobar, Sawyer Bushman, Mike Peralta, James Budd, and Jacob Hands, among others.

cAt an invitational dual meet contested by four schools at Comsewogue High Saturday, Escobar went 4-0 at 106 pounds, Budd went 3-1 at 170, and Bushman, at 126, Peralta, at 145, and Hand, at 220, each went 2-2. Moreover, Morgan Rojas, at 160, Kevin Heine, at 182, and Andrew Dixon, at 285, each had one win. As for Dixon, “it was the first win of his life!” said Steve Tseperkas, East Hampton’s coach.

    As a result of his sweep, Escobar was named the team’s most valuable wrestler for the day. He began with a 10-5 decision of Comsewogue’s Ryan Pisano, after which he shut out Brentwood’s Wilmer Cruz 14-0 and pinned counterparts from Northport and Island Trees.

    Earlier in the week, on Jan. 11, Escobar lost 6-4 here to his Kings Park opponent, Andrew Roden, a takedown near the end of the match proving to be the difference. There was no shame in losing to Roden, however — he is ranked second in the county.

    Kings Park, a strong team, won the match 72-3. Bonac’s sole winner was Budd, who decisioned Sean Bennett 5-1 at 170.

    The visitors’ 220-pounder, Steven Lee, who had won at that weight in the recent Half Hollow Hills East tournament, held on for a 6-5 win over Hands despite having been hobbled by an ankle injury sustained early on. A third-period escape spelled the difference.

    At 126, Bushman lost 7-1 to Tom Venier, who placed second in the league meet last year. It was 2-1 in Venier’s favor after the first period, and 5-1 after the second. Venier was awarded 2 more points for a reversal in the third. Last year’s third-place league finisher, Dominic Montemurro, pinned Colton Kalbacher midway through their match at 132. Peralta was kept out of the lineup that day because of a wrist injury.

    “Kings Park is stacked, so is Islip

. . .” Tseperkas said before Monday morning’s practice. “Kings Park, Islip, and Eastport-South Manor, which are all in our league, are among the county’s top 10. Eastport, the team we’re wrestling Friday [tomorrow], is fourth among the county’s tournament teams and the county’s 10th-ranked dual meet team. Islip beat Kings Park 37-30 the other day.”

    Getting back to Saturday’s tournament, Tseperkas said that while East Hampton had lost 48-21 to Northport, “we won six of the 12 matches we wrestled. We forfeited at three weights. Island Trees beat us 60-24, but we won five of the 12 matches we wrestled with Island Trees, and again forfeited three. . . . We were overmatched by Brentwood. It’s the sixth-ranked team in the county, and though Comsewogue, which is in our league, beat us 57-27, we were happy that we were able to put up 27 points against them. Over all, I was happy with the way we wrestled.”

    Harborfields was to have wrestled here yesterday. Tseperkas predicted some good match-ups. The team will be at Eastport-South Manor tomorrow, and on Saturday it will vie in a tournament at Mattituck High School. The county’s top-ranked dual meet and tournament team, Connetquot, will be there, said Tseperkas, in addition to Rocky Point, North Babylon, Miller Place, Southampton, Riverhead, Hampton Bays, Calhoun, East Hampton, “and a team from the city.”

    “We’ve got two weeks of matches left, and then the leagues, at Bellport,” said the coach, who demurred when asked how he thought his top grapplers would fare.

Tim Garneau, the East Hampton Little League organization’s president, has announced that boys and girls 7 through 12 can register this month online through eteamz.com/ehll or at free hourlong clinics that are being held for registered East Hampton Little League players at the Sportime arena in Amagansett on Sunday and Jan. 29.

    The registration fee is $80 for the first child and $50 each for siblings. The deadline is Jan. 31. A $10 late fee will be charged after that, said Garneau, who added that “children will be wait-listed for rosters if they register late. . . . A copy of birth certificate and utility bill as proof of residency are required.”

    On the days of the Sportime clinics, first and second-grade boys and girls will receive instruction from 2 to 3, followed by third and fourth graders from 3 to 4, and by fifth and sixth graders from 4 to 5.

    There will be a cleat-and-glove swap at the Jan. 29 clinics.