Thursday, January 19

BOWLING, East Hampton at Mount Sinai, 4 p.m.

GIRLS BASKETBALL, East Hampton at Mount Sinai, 4:30 p.m., and Southold at Pierson, 6:15.

WINTER TRACK, East Hampton at Zeitler relays, Suffolk Community College-Brentwood, 5 p.m.

Friday, January 20

WRESTLING, East Hampton at Eastport-South Manor, 4 p.m.

BOYS BASKETBALL, Mount Sinai at East Hampton, 6:15 p.m., Smithtown Christian at Ross, 6:15, Pierson at Southold, 6:15, and Bridgehampton at Stony Brook, 7:30.

GIRLS BASKETBALL, Ross at Smithtown Christian, 4:30 p.m.

Saturday, January 21

WRESTLING, East Hampton at Mattituck invitational, 9 a.m.

WINTER TRACK, East Hampton girls at Art Mitchell meet, Suffolk Community College-Brentwood, 9 a.m.

Sunday, January 22

WINTER TRACK, East Hampton boys at coaches meet, Suffolk Community College-Brentwood, 10 a.m.

LITTLE LEAGUE, free clinics for registered Little League players, first and second graders, 2-3 p.m., third and fourth graders, 3-4, and fifth and sixth graders, 4-5, Sportime Arena, Abraham’s Path, Amagansett.

Monday, January 23

BOWLING, Rocky Point vs. East Hampton, East Hampton Bowl, 3:30 p.m.

GIRLS BASKETBALL, Ross at Southold, 6:15 p.m.

Tuesday, January 24

BOYS BASKETBALL, Southold at Ross, 6:15 p.m.

Wednesday, January 25

WRESTLING, Huntington at East Hampton, 4:30 p.m.

There were precious few bright spots during this fall’s football season, though the East Hampton High School Dance Company’s version of the can-can at the homecoming game certainly was one of them.

    Overseen by three coaches, Lea Bryant, Anita Finder, and Tracee Van Brunt, the high school company numbers about 30 and the middle school company, where Van Brunt and Andrea Hernandez are the instructors, more than 40.

    The dance gamut was pretty much covered by the three coaches, Van Brunt said during a conversation this week. “I’ve done a little bit of everything, Lea has a strong ballroom background, and Anita was a ballet dancer.”

    Van Brunt said she had danced competitively when growing up in Sayville, and presided over a dance company when she was a student at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. She wished, she said, that Sayville High had offered such a program when she was there. “Not that many high schools have dance clubs,” she said. “At East Hampton the kids don’t have to pay for studio dance lessons, which is a good thing.”

    The club was founded in 2002 by Haleigh Beyer, who asked for and received the then athletic director Chris Tracey’s okay. Forty-seven turned out that first year, testimony to the fact that the need was there.

    Mary Marrangoni, who was the club’s first coach, said at the time that “a lot of girls who otherwise wouldn’t be involved in a team had been looking for this.”

    But aside from the winter, during which the final touches are put to an ambitious end-of-March hour-and-a-half long recital, the company’s coaches are amenable to their charges playing on the school’s various teams as well.

    A recent attendee at one of the club’s practices, during which arduous Pilates exercises were mixed in with variegated dance forms, can attest that these girls are indeed athletes, an assessment with which Van Brunt, who teaches dance at the Dancehampton Studio on Lumber Lane here, and who is soon to oversee a dance company in New York City, heartily agreed.

    Among those who were at the aforementioned practice, Kelly Boles said she played field hockey, Dana Chittavong said she played soccer, volleyball, and ran track, Addie Herrlin said she rode horses, Jessica Alvarracin said she played soccer, and Aoife Forde said she was a runner. Kate Havlicek, Leidy Narvaez, and Laini Wright described themselves as full-time dancers.

    “This year, for the first time ever, we’re going to take the ones who’ve been with us the longest to a regional competition in May,” Van Brunt continued, adding that although the club is not now formally part of the school’s athletic program, “the athletic director [Joe Vas] is working to get us under its wing.”

    Before a recent merengue and barn dance performance during the school’s health fair, Wright, a senior in her third year with the club, who plans to do volunteer work in India next year, said she liked the coaches’ latitude when it came to the various dance genres — last April’s recital included ballet, jazz, swing, lyrical, pop, modern, African, Latin American, and hip-hop pieces — and their “passion.”

    Under Bryant, Finder, and Van Brunt’s tutelage, “I’m improving — absolutely,” Wright said, adding that “the older girls help the younger ones.”

    Havlicek, who has studied for a decade and who, with Rebecca King, choreographed two pieces performed in last spring’s recital, said that in addition to the thrice-a-week workouts at the high school, she took private classes two afternoons a week at Dancehampton and was eyeing performing arts schools. “We have girls who’ve never danced before and some who look as if they’ve danced their whole lives . . . everyone’s improved so much.”

    “We’ve been taking trips too,” said Van Brunt. “We went to see the Alvin Ailey troupe in the city last year and we went to the Broadway Dance Center studio where the kids took some classes with professionals. This winter, we’re going to bring the middle school group to the Broadway Dance Center.”

    The coming recital — “we’re having it at the end of March because we don’t want it to cut into spring sports” — would, she said, “give the spectators a taste of everything, but, on the other hand, we don’t want them running out the door!”

    The bet here is that they’ll stay and that they’ll be glad they did.

“You know what pleasure was to Epicurus?” I called out to Mary in the middle of the Steelers-Broncos playoff game.        “What?” she said amid the din.

    “Peace of mind!” I shouted.

    Well, we had little peace of mind — and therefore, little pleasure — during that game, I tell you. There was God’s anointed, Tim Tebow, in Denver’s backfield, and on our side, a hobbled but valiant Ben from a city that had once been blackened at 8 a.m. by the smoke from its hellish blast furnaces.

    “Beat God! Beat God!” we began to chant.

    But, in the end, of course, God beat us . . . ordaining as He did so some pretty nifty long passes that ripped our secondary to shreds and confounded our towel-waving legions.

    Why, we wondered, weren’t we so favored? We’d lived, if not exemplary, at least decent lives. Or, as my stepmother used to say (in the first confession she’d made in 40 years), we hadn’t done anything anyone else hadn’t done. We were believers, too. We had faith. And yet — was it because we were secular humanists? — the Almighty apparently had singled us out for abasement.

    ’Tain’t fair, McGee.

    Not that my son-in-law, who grew up in Denver and went with his brother to their games, and who remains an ardent Broncos fan to this day, is any more religious than we are. If anything, I would say he’s an Existentialist, given his perduring tragic history of dashed mile-high hopes, always rolling the stone up the hill only to have it roll down again.

    I’m told, however, that he was seen to genuflect in the fashion of Tim Tebow when calls went the Steelers’ way at crucial points in the agon, that he hailed the touchdown pass at the start of the overtime period as “a f—-ing miracle!” and that, should the Broncos make the Super Bowl, he’s considering full immersion in a spa filled with Fat Tire Amber Ale.

    “ . . . I hereby baptize thee, Gavin, in the name of John Elway, Tim Tebow, and Demaryius Thomas, Amen.”

    Even though Mary and I have been cast out, hurled, as it were, into the abyss by a jealous God and his agent, Tim Tebow, I wish my son-in-law well. We are, after all, all in this together — at least that is what we are led to believe by Epicurus and his disciple, Lucretius.

    Except, of course, when it’s the Steelers versus the Broncos.

The East Hampton High School boys basketball team, which has in the past two years often suffered disappointing defeats in the waning minutes of games, prevailed 60-58 in overtime at Bayport-Blue Point last Thursday, a night in which Bayport-Blue Point’s girls defeated their Bonac counterparts here 47-35.

    East Hampton’s girls had their moments, but they came in the first quarter, and, as time wore on, the fact that Kaelyn Ward, the team’s star point guard, got into early foul trouble, was to hurt.

    Indrea Stephens sparked an 8-0 run in the first frame when she converted a steal to tie the score at 4-4. Moments later, Ward fed her fellow guard, who made another fast-break layup, after which, following a Bayport turnover, Sarah Johnson, playing around the basket, passed out to Ward, whose jump shot swished through the nets for 8-4. After Bayport turned the ball over again, the result of a shot-clock violation, Steph­ens, assisted by Jackie Messemer, upped East Hampton’s lead to 10-4.

    That delightful streak gave Bonac fans reason to think it would be a ballgame, but the visitors, who enjoyed increasing success with a defense that clamped on when Bonackers picked up their dribble, pulled to 10-9 by the end of the first quarter and outscored the home team 12-3 in the second quarter for a 21-13 lead at the halftime break.

    Ward had to sit when she was called for her third foul with about two minutes left to play in the second quarter, by which time the score was tied at 13-13. Bayport immediately took advantage, setting off on an 8-0 run of its own, sparked by Paige Faherty, who was to finish with a game-high 20 points and 13 rebounds.

    As for the boys game, Bill McKee, the team’s coach, said, “It was a good win for us, especially since it was in their gym. . . . We did a nice job on the boards even though Bayport was taller, and our shot selection was really good. We had 20 assists as a team, which is the most we’ve had in a while.”

    Bayport, said McKee, “tied the score at 53-53 with about eight seconds left in regulation. We got a shot off after that, but it didn’t go in. Cameron [Yusko] hit a 3 on our first possession in overtime, and then Thomas [Nelson] hit a 3 of his own and made one of two foul shots for the 60-58 final.”

    “It was one of our better games — we hope to build on that. Thomas King had 14 rebounds, 5 assists, and 5 steals. Thomas Nelson had 10 rebounds. Bayport pressed us the whole game, but we handled it. Four of our starters [King, with 18 points, Danny McKee, with 11, and Juan Cuevas and Nelson, each with 10] finished in double figures, andCameron had 9. . . . Bayport was a big team . . . they had kids who were 6-5, 6-4, 6-3 . . . but we had 12 offensive rebounds to their 5. That was a big difference right there.”

    Going into Tuesday’s game here with Shoreham-Wading River, East Hampton’s boys were 2-1 in league play.

Other Sports

    In other high school athletic action, Lucas Escobar, at 106 pounds, and Mike Peralta, at 145, were winners in Friday’s wrestling meet at highly ranked Islip. In other matches, Sawyer Bushman lost 4-2 to Brad Wade at 126 pounds; Colton Kalbacher lost 7-2 to John Theo at 132; Kevin Heine lost 7-3 to Craig Hinrichs at 182, and Jacob Hands lost 4-3 to Ryan Hughes at 220. East Hampton, which lost 65-6, forfeited at 99 and 160 pounds.

    In a 55-16 loss to Bellport on Jan. 4, Escobar, at 106, Bushman, at 126, James Budd, at 170, and Heine, at 182, were winners.

    Chris Reich, who coaches East Hampton’s boys track team, reported Monday that Deilyn Guzman won the 55-meter dash in a crossover meet at Suffolk Community College-Brentwood last Thursday in 6.94 seconds.

    “He is our greatest chance for scoring points in the league meet this season,” said Reich, who added that Adam Cebulski ran a personal-best 2:59 in the 1,000-meter race and that Alex Osbourne had run a personal-best 1:40 in the 600-meter race at the freshman-sophomore championships Sunday.

    Otherwise, he said, there wasn’t much else worth mentioning. “Christmas vacation has proved to consume the best of the athletes.”

    Tomorrow, Tom Cohill, the aquatics director of the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter, is to take 16 members of the Y’s youth swim team, the Hurricanes, to a meet at the University of Maryland that is expected to attract Y teams from Massachusetts to South Carolina.

    Because it is an Olympic year, with Olympic trial hopefuls among the older teenagers, the Winterfest invitational, as it is known, will be, said Cohill, and one of his assistants, Craig Brierley, “a fast meet.”

    So, while the Hurricanes will be one of the smaller groups there, Cohill isn’t expecting a high team placement, “but I’m expecting that our individual performers will be as good as anybody’s, across the board. I wouldn’t be taking them down there if I didn’t think so. They all have fast qualifying times.”

    Ten of the 16 — Alex Astilean, Georgie Bogetti, Thomas Brierley, Teague Costello, Carly Drew, Skye Marigold, Maddie Minetree, Mikayla Mott, Amanda Calabrese, and Lilah Minetree — have been training intensely since November, swimming at the Y before (from 5:30 to 6:30 a.m. two days a week) and after school, as well as training three hours a week under the watchful eye of Alex Astilean Sr. at his Speedfit studio on Newtown Lane.

    Astilean believes his system of short, intense bursts of training, on treadmills (running on the balls of the feet) and with Thera-Bands and medicine balls, prove more effective as far as physical well-being goes than longer workouts in gyms and running on paved roads. A speed/time chart with a ladder of color-coded equivalences for which he’s seeking a patent enables trainees to attain higher levels of fitness incrementally.

    A trainee used to jogging along at a 10-minute-per-mile pace, for example, would readily see, using Astilean’s chart, that he or she would be able to run at a more demanding 7:30 pace by cutting the treadmill time from four to two minutes.

    Cohill and a number of his charges with whom this writer spoke after a meeting with the parents Monday evening at the Y agreed that mixing Astilean’s explosive hourlong training sessions in with the early morning and afternoon swim workouts had proved to be effective.

    “They love it,” Cohill said of his charges’ reaction to the Speedfit workouts. “We work on building a strong endurance base and on improving technique here, and the explosive bursts they go through at Speedfit make them not only stronger, but quicker and more agile. . . . I think it’s great to have so many 12-to-18-year-olds from East Hampton doing this kind of work. I’m really proud of them.”

    The Hurricane lineup comprises Maddie Minetree and Mott, who are 17 years old; Marigold, who’s 16; Thomas Brierley and Costello, each 15; Calabrese, 14; Astilean and Drew, each 13; Bogetti, Christian Brierley, Cecilia de Havenon, and Marikate Ryan, each 12; Noelle Capone, 11; Chasen Dubs and Ryan Duryea, 10, and Julia Brierley, 9.

Thursday, January 12

BOYS SWIMMING, North Babylon vs. East Hampton-Pierson-Bridgehampton, Y.M.C.A East Hampton RECenter, 4:30 p.m.

BOWLING, East Hampton at Westhampton Beach, 3:30 p.m.

Friday, January 13

TENNIS, East Hampton Indoor-Outdoor Club party, Palm restaurant, 6 p.m.

GIRLS BASKETBALL, Amityville at East Hampton, 6:15 p.m., and Ross at Stony Brook, 7.

BOYS BASKETBALL, Bridgehampton at Shelter Island, 5:45 p.m., Stony Brook at Ross, 6:15, and Pierson at Greenport, 6:45.

Saturday, January 14

WINTER TRACK, East Hampton boys at crossover meet, Suffolk Community College-Brentwood, 9 a.m.

WRESTLING, East Hampton at Comsewogue dual tournament, 9 a.m.

Tuesday, January 17

BOWLING, Southampton vs. East Hampton, East Hampton Bowl, 3:30 p.m.

BOYS BASKETBALL, Ross at Bridgehampton, 6 p.m., Westhampton Beach at East Hampton, 6:15, and Stony Brook at Pierson, 6:15.

GIRLS BASKETBALL, Pierson at Stony Brook, 4:30 p.m., East Hampton at Westhampton Beach, 5:45, and Port Jefferson at Ross, 6:15.

Wednesday, January 18

WRESTLING, Harborfields at East Hampton, 4:30 p.m.

BOYS SWIMMING, Deer Park vs. East Hampton, Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter, 4:30 p.m.

Thursday, January 5

BOYS SWIMMING, East Hampton at Lindenhurst, nonleague, 4 p.m.

BOWLING, East Hampton at Southold, 4 p.m.

BOYS BASKETBALL, East Hampton at Bayport-Blue Point, and Pierson at Smithtown Christian, 4:30 p.m.

WINTER TRACK, East Hampton at crossover meet, Suffolk Community College-Brentwood, 5 p.m.

GIRLS BASKETBALL, Bayport-Blue Point at East Hampton, 6:15 p.m.

Friday, January 6

GIRLS BASKETBALL, Ross at Shelter Island, 4 p.m., and Smithtown Christian at Pierson, 6:15.

WRESTLING, East Hampton at Islip, 6:30 p.m.

BOYS BASKETBALL, Ross at Shelter Island, 5:45 p.m., and Bridgehampton at Greenport, 6:45.

Sunday, January 8

WINTER TRACK,  East Hampton boys at freshman-sophomore meet, 9 a.m., and East Hampton girls at Jim Howard meet, Suffolk Community College-Brentwood, 2:30 p.m.

Monday, January 9

BOYS BASKETBALL, Ross at Pierson, 6:15 p.m.

Tuesday, January 10

BOWLING, Eastport-South Manor vs. East Hampton, East Hampton Bowl, 3:30 p.m.

BOYS SWIMMING, Harborfields vs. East Hampton, Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter, 4:30 p.m.

BOYS BASKETBALL, Southold at Bridgehampton, 6 p.m., and Shoreham-Wading River at East Hampton, 6:15.

GIRLS BASKETBALL, Pierson at Ross, 6:15 p.m.

Wednesday, January 11

BOWLING, East Hampton at tournament, Sayville Bowl, 2 p.m.

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

   Another year has passed. The Christmas bird counts are in the bag. It’s time to sit back and enjoy the cold weather.

   One of the last-of-the-year counts was on the last day of the year. It was the Orient Count, which includes most of the North Fork, Plum Island, Shelter Island, and a small part of the northern South Fork — Morton Wildlife Refuge in Noyac to Three Mile Harbor in East Hampton. There were about 10 of us covering the South Fork portion. It was a warm day with on-and-off sunshine, intermittent showers, and barely a wisp of a wind. Unlike on the Orient count day last year, there was not a speck of snow and none of the waters were frozen. In other words, if not a harbinger of the coming siege of global warming and rising sea levels, it was a perfect day for seeing birds and listening to their calls.

    I was blessed with being able to accompany two keen-eyed, keen-eared birders — John Gluth, who works in advertising in the city, and Vicki Bustamante, who lives in Montauk. Both of them had already participated in at least two other Long Island Christmas bird counts. Vicki took her birdsong player hoping that we would get some of the rarer ones to respond to the digital calls of their species. And one did.

    It was a ruby-crowned kinglet that John thought he had seen in the brush along the shore of Cedar Point County Park. Vicki played the ruby-crown song and call and the bird responded, coming out in the open so John could verify it. My ears are bad on high notes; I couldn’t hear the kinglet’s response, or the songs and call uttered by the soprano and alto utterers, but I could hear the songs from Vicki’s device if the device was held close to my ears.

    My eyes aren’t so hot either. Suffice to say, my role was mostly limited to four-wheeling the two around and writing down on a clipboard the birds seen and heard. We started around 7 a.m. at Cedar Point, finished at Barcelona at 4 p.m. In that time, we drove some 32 miles of roads and a couple of miles of beaches, including the Cedar Point spit.

    Was it a sign of global warming, or was it just an unusually spring-like day at the end of December? Two of the most common land birds observed were robins and bluebirds, of which we counted about 75 and 20. Shouldn’t most of them have been in the Deep South by now? Except for the yellow-rumped warbler, or myrtle warbler, which feeds on cedar berries and other winter fruit, the New World warblers, which are primarily insectivorous, should be in the tropics or subtropics at this time.

    How is it then, that Terry Sullivan and Al Daniels came up with an unmistakable black-and-white warbler in their territory, the Village of North Haven? If the sighting is accepted by the Audubon authorities, and it definitely should be, then it will go down in the annals of the 50-plus Orient counts as a “count bird,” one that has never appeared in any of the past counts.

    Another bird that should have flown (or glided?) south by now showed up at Orient Point. Mary Laura Lamont, the count coordinator, and her husband, Eric, were coming back from surveying Plum Island, where they observed, among other biota, a house wren and an aster in bloom, when they looked up and saw a turkey vulture sailing by. Steve Biasetti observed another rare bird, a sedge wren (one of two marsh wren species) at Orient Point.

    On our side of the Peconic Estuary we saw lots of different sparrows, including tree, field, song, and white-throated sparrows, juncos, and a large number of goldfinches flitting about. Off Northwest Road, the Peach Farm, which is depicted on an 1838 U.S. Coast Survey map as the only farm in that thickly forested Northwest area, is now a very low-density subdivision, with pastures and an old-time look. True to form, it turned up flocks of birds including eastern bluebirds, robins, and many more.

    The waters were so calm that one could almost see the rafts of ducks sitting just off the shore of the North Fork from our South Fork vantage points. But there weren’t that many ducks to be seen. There were almost as many horned grebes as other waterfowl species. A few common loons gave their eerie calls, and the long-tailed ducks, or old-squaw, were very noisy. At other times it was so quiet that that the monotonic tremolos produced by the rapidly beating wings of the goldeneye ducks, or “whistlers,” scooting low over the water could be heard from more than a mile away.

    With his powerful scope, John picked out a single razorback, one of the auks, far out on Gardiner’s Bay. A red-necked grebe showed up in North Fork waters along with a couple of harlequin ducks. Vicki Bustamante e-mailed me that another auk, a dovekie, was seen resting on the rocks 25 feet off Montauk Point on Monday.

    One of the last birds to show up over Larkin’s Pond just before John had to leave, as he was going on a fourth count the following morning in Nassau County, was the fish crow. It flew over the pond from southwest to northeast repeating over and over that distinctive nasal caw which sounds like a crow with a head cold. This southern species has made an impressive beachhead around Sag Harbor and other parts of the East End. John says about 300 were tallied in the Captree count that covers part of Fire Island and the mainland area to the north.

    Mary Laura has not yet received all of the results but she said from the looks of things that the final count will number well over 115 species. That’s a good number for Long Island; however, California and Central American Christmas counts generally run over 200 species. After 50 years of climate change, we may be pushing such a large quantity here.

By Jack Graves

    A balmy day drew a record crowd to the New Year’s Day plunge at East Hampton’s Main Beach, as many as 800, John Ryan Jr., one of the event’s overseers, said.

    Colin Mather, the founder of New Year’s Day plunges here, in 1999, said that in Wainscott, following his annual 1.6-mile run from his Seafood Shop to the Beach Lane road end there at 2 p.m., he found “several hundred people on the beach . . . 75 went in.”

    While the air temperature was said to have been in the high 50s, the temperature of the water was a frosty 47. Yet most of the Main Beach attendees, perhaps as many as 400, plunged, said Ryan, who went in twice, the second time with fellow members of the Ocean Rescue Squad.

    “It was just as bad the second time as it was the first,” he said, in reply to a question.

    As to how much money was raised for the East Hampton food pantries, “we don’t know yet,” he said during a conversation Monday morning. “Last year, with 500 to 600 there, we raised $21,000, so this year’s figure should be higher.”

    A tally was still being taken, he added, to determine which of East Hampton High School’s classes had won the trophy that is to be given to the class with the largest turnout.

    The Toga Family won the costume contest, Ryan said, with Supergrandma (Doreen Tibbets) second and the Polynesians (Mark Tompkins and his sons, Carson, 8, and Milo, 5) third.

    Marikate Ryan and Carly Drew were the Sparkle Girls, Heather Metcalf was described as “an angry bird,” Vicki Lippman and Corrine Wizelius were a penguin and a polar bear, “and,” said Ryan, “there was this one guy who wore a ‘Phantom of the Opera’ mask with a lobster on his head.” Lora Nelson, who was said to have planned to wear a turban and a fur coat, showed up instead “with a wreathy tiara,” as did Judy Haselton and Francesca Freeman. Laura Otto was “a purple squid.” John Ryan Sr. wore, as is his custom, a plunger on his head.

    The official starter this year, East Hampton Village Mayor Paul F. Rickenbach Jr., also plunged, as did East Hampton Town Councilman Dominick Stanzione, who was one of the judges of the costume contest. Supervisor Bill Wilkinson was there — “he always is at any event in which the Ocean Rescue Squad is involved,” said Ryan — but apparently demurred when it came to what Ryan has likened to an annual baptismal rite.

    Ryan added that, “contrary to what some people think, we don’t require that people jump in if they make a donation to the food pantries.”

    As for the number of those who did plunge, he said, “There wasn’t any space between the starting line and the Pavilion — it was all filled with people.”

    Many of the madcap participants, including the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter’s youth swim team, the Hurricanes, and the East Hampton High School’s boys swim team, were young, though there were some wizened participants also, among them an unidentified Santa Claus, sporting red suspenders.

    Undoubtedly, if there were a prize given out to the best-represented family, it would have gone to the Ryans, who sported three generations.

    Back to the Wainscott plunge, Mather said, in answer to a question, that “the Brazilians were there — well, I say Brazilians, but I don’t know for sure if they are. . . . At any rate, the Escola De Samba Boom drummers were great.”

    Afterward, the gathering, which raised money for Phoenix House, whose centers, one of which is in Wainscott, provide drug and alcohol abuse treatment, repaired to the Seafood Shop, where there was the Seafood Shop’s clam chowder, hot chocolate provided by Once Upon a Bagel, a Blue Duck cake, and Breadzilla’s Christmas cookies. space between the starting line and the Pavilion — it was all filled with people.”

    Many of the madcap participants, including the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter’s youth swim team, the Hurricanes, and the East Hampton High School’s boys swim team, were young, though there were some wizened participants also, among them an unidentified Santa Claus, sporting red suspenders.

    Undoubtedly, if there were a prize given out to the best-represented family, it would have gone to the Ryans, who sported three generations.

    Back to the Wainscott plunge, Mather said, in answer to a question, that “the Brazilians were there — well, I say Brazilians, but I don’t know for sure if they are. . . . At any rate, the Escola De Samba Boom drummers were great.”

    Afterward, the gathering, which raised money for Phoenix House, whose centers, one of which is in Wainscott, provide drug and alcohol abuse treatment, repaired to the Seafood Shop, where there was the Seafood Shop’s clam chowder, hot chocolate provided by Once Upon a Bagel, a Blue Duck cake, and Breadzilla’s Christmas cookies.

What strikes one in reviewing 2011’s sporting news here is that a large number of athletes, including East Hampton High’s best-ever golf team, the I-Tri girls of Springs, who until they’d begun triathlon training had not thought of themselves as athletes, much less triathletes, Laurel Wassner, who in June became the first woman ever to win the Montauk Triathlon, Luis Mancilla, a 19-year-old criminal justice student who fought in a Golden Gloves final in April, Kristyn Dunleavy, an East Hampton Town lifeguard who, with her Amherst teammates, won that school’s first national championship in women’s basketball, and Albert Woods, who became, at 82, an all-American, the result of multiple wins in the national long course swimming championships, exceeded their expectations:

    • “It shows what people can do when they put their minds to it,” Dunleavy said when asked about Amherst’s first-ever Division III win.

    • “He had the respect of his players — he got the most out of every one of them,” said Tom Bubka, a longtime assistant of Ed Petrie’s, at the ceremony last January in which East Hampton High School’s basketball court was named for the state’s winningest public high school coach, who had retired a couple of months before at the age of 78.

    • “I’ve never won a triathlon outright — not even a road race . . . I wasn’t expecting it. . . . I didn’t know I had it in me!” said the 35-year-old Laurel Wassner after becoming the first woman ever to win a triathlon here.

    • “Theresa Roden has changed the lives of these young women forever,” said Sinead FitzGibbon at the Old Montauk Athletic Club’s recent awards dinner. “It goes beyond boosting self-esteem — their bodies and minds have been transformed, their futures have been transformed.”

    • A sprinter in his youth, Woods said that when he reacquainted himself with the sport at the age of 70 he “didn’t have the wind for the 200 freestyle. But I wanted to do more events, so I decided to try the breaststroke. I had no idea I’d wind up being so good at it.”

    • “It was really like going into the lion’s den,” said the golf team’s coach, Claude Beudert, following its comeback win over perennial-champion Farmingdale at the Bethpage course. “That ride home with the Long Island trophy was so great. Everyone was euphoric. The feel of the trophy was mystical. . . .”

    The sporting gamut of the past 12 months was a broad one, with stories on adventure racing, rowing, sailing, equestrian show jumping, sports car racing, personal training, Pan-American karate and regional men’s physique competitions, synchro swimming, long-distance cycling, outrigger canoeing, and professional snowboarding appearing alongside accounts of East Hampton’s scholastic teams and adult entries in rugby, men’s soccer, and men’s and women’s slow-pitch softball.

    A national qualifier synchronized swimming meet was held at the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter, a “first,” as was the boys soccer team’s county championship, Zach Grossman’s county individual championship in golf, the freshman Dana Cebulski’s participation in the state’s girls cross-country meet, and an appearance by the girls soccer team in the county playoffs.

    Though not for the first time — she first went as an eighth grader — Marina Preiss, now a sophomore, swam in the 50 and 100 freestyle races at the state meet, recording personal records in both.

    In another high school-related matter, thanks largely to volunteer work in 2010 by Patrick Bistrian III, Whitmore’s Landscaping, and Lillie Irrigation, the baseball field, theretofore known for its short porch in left and left-center field, was regraded, resodded, and realigned, becoming as a result perhaps the best ball field in Suffolk County. Bonac’s “field of dreams” was dedicated in May, and it is said the team could realize its dreams of going all the way in the playoffs this coming spring.

    Moreover, the year marked the first time since 2006 that the Montauk Rugby Club, buoyed by the arrival of young tyros who had excelled in other sports, football, lacrosse, wrestling, and baseball among them, had made the Sweet 16 round of the national Division II tournament, which is to be contested in Virginia this spring; it was the first time in 12 years that a Schenck Fuels team had won a town men’s slow-pitch softball league championship, unleashing a torrent of home runs in the final games with Stephen Hand’s Equipment followed by a torrent of sprayed champagne, and it was the first time that John Howard, a former Hawaii Ironman winner and nationally known endurance athlete, had been at the Mighty Man Triathlon in Sag Harbor since it debuted under Ray Charron and Ambrose Salmini’s direction in 1980.

    Had the 64-year-old Californian not gone off course in the bicycle leg, costing him an estimated minute and a half, he would have had the fastest bike split of the day.

    It was the first year, as well, in which the Katy’s Courage 5K, in memory of Jim and Brigid Collins Stewart’s late 12-year-old daughter, was held, and the turnout of 1,600 participants, who contributed toward a scholarship fund in Katy Stewart’s name, blew the doors off the number (around 200) normally expected at a first-year road race here.

    Whether it came to communal, team, or individual efforts, the 51-year-old karate champion Joe Vetrano’s words seemed to echo through the sporting year just past: “You’re always trying to do better. It’s a lifelong process. There’s always room for improvement, no matter what we do.”