September 4, 1986

    In the limelight on Aug. 26, after he had upset John McEnroe 1-6, 6-1, 6-3, 6-3 in the first round of the United States Open, Paul Annacone, the 23-year-old East Hampton-reared tennis professional, found himself cast out of it two days later as he lost 4-6, 4-6, 6-3, 6-4, 7-6 to Aaron Krickstein in the second round.

    “It’s been a pretty draining week for Paul,” said his father, Dominic, on Tuesday. “For me too. I just hope he maintains his sanity through all this. . . . I have a lot of respect for these pros — emotionally, tournament tennis is incredibly wearing.”

—

    Milan Holecek, a Czechoslovak singles and doubles champion who has spent the last two summers teaching at the Buckskill Tennis Club in East Hampton, said recently he knew why the Czechs were so good. “The problem in the United States is that those who have enough money to pay for all the training and traveling are usually not hungry enough to get good.”

    “I used to teach a kid in Florida who had great potential and claimed to be extremely interested in tennis, but he wasn’t willing to work — he really didn’t need to. That would never happen in Czechoslovakia, where he would have been fighting for his life to qualify for playing abroad.”

    . . . He looks for another Czech sweep at the United States Open this year. “Lendl will win. . . . Among the women, Martina will win — no question. She is stronger than all the other women put together.” — Philip Boroff

—

    Kevin Barry of Shelter Island and Dr. Bob Semlear of Sag Harbor were in the van of Monday’s 6.2-mile Great Bonac Foot Race, as they had been a week before in a 3-miler here to benefit the American Cancer Society, but this time Barry won, in 33 minutes and 4 seconds, besting his training partner, Semlear, by 57 seconds.

September 11, 1986

    East Hampton High School’s football coach, Ted Meyer, thinks the Bonackers, with 13 returning lettermen, “really have a good chance” to win League Seven, and thus gain a postseason Division Three playoff spot.

    . . . The offensive line, which Meyer says “can be one of the best East Hampton has ever had,” includes, at center, Bill Barbour, a 6-0, 202-pound sophomore; at guard, Peter Cooper, a 6-0, 190-pound senior, and Orlando Blowe, a 6-2, 205-pound senior, and, at tackle, David DiSunno, a 6-3, 225-pound junior, and Joe Luksic, a 6-1, 195-pound senior. Barbour’s backup will be Jason Menu, a junior; Cooper and Blowe’s, Steven Loper and David Carmichael, both juniors, and DiSunno and Luksic’s, Rich Ross and Bill Almeraz, both seniors.

September 18, 1986

    Jim Bolster, 31, the Columbia University swimming coach, repeated Saturday as champion of the Mighty Hamptons Triathlon in Sag Harbor, besting 501 other entrants over a 36-mile course in 2 hours, 35 minutes, and 44 seconds.

    Bolster won Mighty Hamptons last year in 2:41:36, but in Saturday’s race choppy seas in Noyac Bay caused the swim leg, ordinarily a mile and a half, to be cut by a half-mile.

    . . . Bolster said that the swim was “brutal . . . one of the roughest” he had experienced. His left hand and elbow were skinned as the result of a fall in the 25-mile bicycle leg on a newly paved stretch of road. Despite that, he logged the fastest bike time of the day, a 1:07:54, building up a six-minute lead going into the 10-mile run.

    It wasn’t just the boys soccer team that began its season on the right foot: East Hampton High’s girls team on Friday, behind the scoring of Raffi Franey (two goals) and Amanda Seekamp, and the goaltending of Kathryn Hess, shut out McGann-Mercy 3-0 in a nonleague game played at the Riverhead school.

    East Hampton’s girls volleyball team, likewise, shut out Amityville on Friday by scores of 25-13, 25-9, and 25-14. The kills were pretty evenly distributed among Melanie Mackin (six), Katla Thorsen (five), and Charlotte Wiltshire (five). Melissa Perez and Raya O’Neal, the setter, each had four.

    O’Neal, moreover, had 21 assists, Jenna Budd had 17 service aces, and Maggie Pizzo, the libero, had 12 receptions and nine digs.

    Newsday on Tuesday had Kathy McGeehan’s girls ranked 10th on Long Island, two notches behind Bellport, a fellow Class A school.

    In discussing the A teams, Newsday said, “If sophomore Raya O’Neal develops into a top-flight setter, then 2009 county champion East Hampton could win its second county title in three seasons.”

    Bonac’s football team, on the other hand, looks as if it may be in for a long campaign. In their Division III opener at Harborfields Saturday, the Bonackers were defeated 46-6. The Tornadoes were said to have subbed liberally in the second half. Cortland Heneveld scored East Hampton’s lone touchdown, on a 21-yard run in the fourth quarter.

    Kings Park, which lost 31-7 Saturday to Islip, the Island’s fifth-ranked small school team, is to play here on Saturday at 2 p.m.

    The defending Long Island-champion golf team was to have started its season at Center Moriches Tuesday.

    Becky Schwartz, who coaches East Hampton’s field hockey team, said its opener here tomorrow, with Greenport-Southold, will also serve as a fund-raiser for cancer research.

    “It was Tuesday late,” Irene Silverman began in recounting her hole in one, the sole one of the summer at the South Fork Country Club in Amagansett.

    The scene: the par 3, 143-yard ninth hole on Sept. 6.

    The pairing: Irene and her husband, Sidney.

    The gallery: no one.

    “I would tell you what club I used, but it’s very embarrassing,” said the Star copy editor. “I’m not a good golfer. I’m very bad, in fact. . . . It was a kind of miracle.”

    She hit the ball “in the direction of the green,” but that was the last she knew until, following a wide-ranging search, she came upon it nestled at the bottom of the hole next to the pin.

    “ ‘It couldn’t possibly be!’ ” she recalled herself saying.

    Asked if she had bought a round for everyone, as is the tradition, Silverman said, “I would have been glad to — we have hole-in-one insurance — but, as I said, no one was around. I’ll do it this weekend if they want. . . .”

    In case her interviewer required proof, she showed him, with some hesitation, a photo of the ball in the hole that she’d taken with her iPhone.

    “You know Newsday publishes a list of holes in one every week — you should tell the world!” this writer said.

    “Don’t worry, it’s on Facebook,” she said.

    East Hampton High’s boys soccer team got its season off on the right foot, besting Mattituck, the defending Long Island Class B champion, 4-0 in a nonleaguer played at the North Fork school’s field Saturday.

    The game was East Hampton’s first in the Bridgehampton National Bank East End Cup tournament, a tourney contested by 10 teams that Mattituck won last year (as it had the previous two years as well).

    East Hampton, which was to have played two other nonleague tournament games at home this week — with Hampton Bays Tuesday and with Center Moriches this afternoon — ostensibly won the East End Cup last year, but the realization that it was carrying an ineligible player on the roster resulted in its forfeiting the team’s three wins, including a 4-3 overtime one over Mattituck.

    On Saturday, however, it was pretty much all East Hampton, though after taking a 1-0 lead on Milton Farez’s header in the 11th minute, the Bonackers slacked off for a while, a period of desultory play that Nick West rendered more palatable with a diving header in the 18th minute — the prettiest goal of the day.

    (Later, when asked about the slack period, Rich King, Bonac’s coach, said the level of his players’ fitness was not yet what it should be.)

    Esteban Aguilar, East Hampton’s goalkeeper, was called on to make his first genuine save in the 30th minute, and three minutes later Mario Olaya, who orchestrates Bonac’s offense, made it 3-0 with an assist from Juan Carlos Barrientos.

    In the minutes leading up to halftime, Esteban Valverde, who, like West, is a talented freshman, blew a point-blank shot, and a blast by Olaya from the left side bounced off the upper-right post.

    Every now and then, as it did early in the second half, Mattituck would launch a counteroffensive following an unconverted East Hampton corner kick, but invariably Angel Garces, the stopper, and Denis Espana, a fellow defender, were up to the task.

    Farez scored Bonac’s fourth goal in the 54th minute, easily pushing in the ball that Alex Serna had passed him following the rebound of a shot that Donte Donega, a sophomore forward, had taken from about 12 yards out.

    And that was it scoring-wise for East Hampton, though it took a great diving, one-handed save by Mattituck’s keeper, Austin Scoggin, to prevent  Esteban Vargas from making it 5-0 near the game’s end.

    King told his charges in the huddle afterward that while it was “a good start,” there was “a lot of work to do . . . there were some good things, but there are some things we have to work on.”

    Losing Brandon West to graduation (he’s going to Division III-power Messiah College in Grantham, Pa.) had obviously hurt, but Aguilar, who had been the junior varsity’s goalie for two years before he understudied West last season, was, said King, “more than capable.”

    “I would hope we’ll get to the playoffs, but that remains to be seen,” the coach said in parting.

    With 29 players on its roster, among them a number of athletes who’ve made their marks in other sports such as football, lacrosse, and wrestling — even baseball — the Montauk Rugby Club has great expectations for the Met Union’s Division II fall season.

    The side tied for fourth in the eight-team league last year, missing out on the playoffs by one point. The team that went to the playoffs, North Jersey, fell to the Sharks in a division opener Saturday by a score of 42-36.

    The locals, who traveled with 22, jumped out to a 22-10 lead by halftime, though North Jersey came back to take a 36-35 lead with four or five minutes to go, according to Rich Brierley, Montauk’s coach.

    Ricardo Salmeron, who was playing fullback that day, clinched the win, assisted by Mike Bunce, Montauk’s premier player, who had swept the weak side of a scrum before passing off. Though Salmeron touched the ball down in a corner of North Jersey’s try zone, Gordon Trotter’s angled two-point conversion kick was good for the aforementioned 42-36 final.

    Salmeron scored two tries for the Sharks that day, with Mark Scioscia (an all-Big East lacrosse player when he was at Villanova), Zach Brenneman (a lacrosse pro and former Notre Dame all-American playing in his first rugby game), and Brenden Mott at one each. Trotter’s kicking accounted for 12 points.

Montauk’s core, said Rich Brierley, comprises Bunce, who plays for Boston’s Super League side in the spring and was Montauk’s most valuable player last season, Scott and James Abran, Danny Fagin, and Nick Lawler, all of them forwards.

But the list of those playing forward positions doesn’t end there. In addition to the above-named there are Jarrel Walker, who played football for C.W. Post and arena football upon graduation; Connor Miller, a former wrestler;  Hamish Cuthbertson and James Lock, each of whom Brierley rates highly, and Paul Jones, an impact player, “the key to our rotation.”

Montauk’s forward pack, then, is packed. “As they say,” said Brierley. “Your forwards decide whether you win or lose, and your backs decide by how much.”

Trotter, after having played sparingly last fall, is back to lead the backs from his fly-half position. This group also includes Ryan Borowsky, at inside center, Scioscia, at outside center, Salmeron, at fullback, and Brian Powell, Brenneman, Mott, and Erik Brierley on the wings. Matt Brierley, Rich Brierley’s son, has a broken arm at the moment, though he may be back in action in the next couple of weeks.

Andy Reilly’s retirement a couple of years ago left the Sharks with a big hole to fill at scrum half, but Brierley reported Monday that Brian Anderson had been impressive in his scrum half debut. “He and Gordon are essentially the links between the forwards and the backs, and they worked well together,” said the coach, who filled in at scrum half at times last season.

    “It’s a difficult position — you have to play smart around the breakdowns, you have to be quick off the penalties . . . it’s a position you have to play a lot, though Brian has been one of our biggest pluses.”

    In the old days, when Montauk made appearances in national Final Fours, “We’d get two or three new players a year,” said Brierley. “We got six or seven this year. Moreover, they’re local, and they’re U.S. citizens. Even our foreign-born players are U.S. citizens now.”

    Asked if the side had any weaknesses, Brierley replied, “Ball-handling — trying to make passes under pressure. If you drop the ball in rugby that’s a turnover. But it will come in time.”

    Montauk has a bye this Saturday, but will be home to the Princeton Athletic Club on Saturday, Sept. 24. Danbury (Conn.) is to play here on Oct. 1. Montauk is to play Lansdowne in New York City on Oct. 8. Union (New Jersey) is to play here on Oct. 15. The Sharks are to play at Bayonne on Oct. 22, and at Rockaway on Oct. 29. The regular season is to end with the Connecticut Yankees here on Nov. 5.

    Brierley said he thinks “the two Connecticut teams” will be Montauk’s biggest rivals.

    The story of how Harry de Leyer came to ride Snowman, a plow horse he rescued from the glue factory at the cost of $80 in 1956, to national show jumping championships is one of this country’s most compelling sports stories.

    And though more than 50 years have passed since the events described in Elizabeth Letts’s “The Eighty-Dollar Champion: Snowman, the Horse That Inspired a Nation” (Ballantine Books), the chronicle of de Leyer and his Cinderella jumper — show jumping’s equivalent to Seabiscuit — has not lost its legs: It hit 10th on The New York Times’s hardcover nonfiction list during the week of the Hampton Classic.

    De Leyer, who is to turn 84 on Wednesday, was to have signed copies of the book at the Classic on its first day, but Irene, the hurricane turned tropical storm, persuaded him not to make the trip up from his farm in Dyke, Va.

    During a telephone conversation last week, de Leyer said he would be signing copies, however, at the big shows in Washington, D.C., Lexington, Ky., and Harrisburg, Pa.

    When asked if he still was competing — as he had vowed he would do as long as he lived when interviewed by this writer at East Hampton’s East End Stables a number of years ago — the crowd-pleasing rider known as the Flying Dutchman and the Galloping Grandfather said, heartily, “Oh yeah, I’m still competing.”

    “On jumpers?”

    “Oh yeah, I still do that.”

    He had, in fact, been a member of the bronze-medal winning men’s jumping team at the 2009 Washington International Horse Show. Not bad for an 82-year-old, one who, by the way, had broken his back in several places at the age of 77 in a fall from a 16-foot-high hay bale loading platform.

    All together, he said in reply to a question, he had eight children, all of whom are involved in the equestrian business, 19 grandchildren, and “one . . . I think two great-grandchildren.”

    A native of St. Oedenrode, Holland, de Leyer first got on a horse when he was 4 years old and began jumping when he was 9. As a teenage 4-H club instructor he did underground work for the Dutch in World War II, after which he became the leading rider on Holland’s junior equestrian team, which toured Belgium, Luxembourg, and France. He went to the London Olympics in 1948 as an alternate.

    His and his family’s contact with American paratroopers, whom he first met when they parachuted into his village, enabled him in 1950, at the age of 22, to get his first job in America, on a tobacco farm in Greensboro, N.C., where he schooled and showed some horses locally, attracting the attention of Mickey Walsh, a top trainer, at one of them.

    Because of Walsh, de Leyer moved on to manage farms — and to breed and to show horses — in western Pennsylvania and Lynchburg, Va. The owner of the latter farm, David Dillard, president of the Old Dominion Box Company and inventor of the six-pack, “gave me my start in the horse business. He said to me, ‘Harry, there are only four horses here — you’ll get bored. Get some horses and teach the high school kids.’ I told him I didn’t have any capital to buy horses. He gave me the money, and that’s the way I got started.”

    Soon after, in 1954, he became the riding instructor at the Knox School, a private girls school in St. James, a position that he held for 22 years.

    He was looking for a schooling horse able to carry his heavier students when, at an auction in New Holland, Pa., in 1956, he made the acquaintance of the former plow horse, an unkempt 8-year-old gray gelding who was to become Snowman, as he was about to be carted away to a slaughterhouse in Northport.

    “He was wide and quiet and he had an intelligent head and good legs,” de Leyer said.

    But the owner advised against a sale. “He said he wasn’t sound. He said he had a hole in his shoulder from pulling a plow.”

    Nevertheless, the deal was made. De Leyer paid $60 for the horse and a $20 van charge. The seller said he could have the $60 back if it didn’t work out.

    Since de Leyer already had a good jumper in St. John, whom he’d bought at a racetrack in Charleston, W.Va., and since Snowman, who had been thus named by his children once he had been cleaned up, hadn’t shown much proclivity for jumping — “he stumbled over the poles of a two and a half-to-three-foot jump and he ran like he was drunk, to the right and left” — de Leyer sold him, for $160, to a chiropractor who lived several miles down the road and was looking for a nice quiet horse to ride on the trails.

    “Then, one day, clip, clop, clip, clop, he comes right in and stood there in my ring where I teach him. I called the doc to come pick him up. He told me that he jumped the fence. I told him to raise it.”

    It soon became apparent that it didn’t matter how high the fence was raised. One day, Snowman arrived in de Leyer’s ring dragging a log and a 30-foot halter, having worked the log under the fence before rearing back and vaulting it.

    De Leyer said he agreed with the chiropractor to board Snowman at Knox, “but he never paid me anything. I called him to talk about it and he said, ‘You keep him — we’ll call it even.’ ”

    And so, despite the fact that “he didn’t look anything like a jumper — he was very long in the body, he was only 16 hands” — the horseman began to school Snowman seriously indoors in the winter of 1957.

    “In the beginning he couldn’t shorten his stride. He would weave, and by doing that he would find his spot. . . . Yes, you could ride him that way, but you better sit good and tight! And with him weaving like a drunkard you are losing time. . . .”

    “I showed him in 1958. He was the champion at Madison Square Garden and all over the U.S. He won the most points for five years! He could jump the biggest jumps, 7 feet 2 inches. He was a freak of nature.”

    “There’s a picture of that in the book. A huge set of parallel bars. At the Fairfield show in 1958. It was the first time I showed him off the Island. I don’t have the reins, you see? Just my knees. . . . I gave him his head all the time. . . . No, I never fell off him.”

    De Leyer said his Hall of Fame horse, who was officially retired at a ceremony in Madison Square Garden in 1969, and who lived to be 28, “was champion at the Southampton Horse Show, which later became the Hampton Classic. They used to have it on a farm next to the water, near where those old-fashioned cars were” — Henry Austin Clark’s Long Island Automotive Museum.

    De Leyer was last at the Classic in 2006, “but I didn’t show.”

    He had good reason: He had, as Letts describes in an epilogue to her best seller, fallen from the aforementioned loading platform the previous year.

    The E.M.T.s initially found him to be quite headstrong, determined to stand up on his own despite the fact, as it later became clear at the University of Virginia’s hospital, that he had broken his back in several places and had water on the brain.

    “They had to tie me up, but I knew how to unzip it! I escaped — just like Snowman!”

    The 30th anniversary of the Mighty Hamptons Triathlon, which debuted in 1982 with a number of the then-new sport’s elite competitors, including three Hawaiian Ironman champions, was celebrated at Long Beach in Noyac Sunday by a field almost five times as large as the first one, bearing out John Howard’s prediction that first year that participatory sports were the future.

    Howard, the 64-year-old 1981 Ironman champion from Encinitas, Calif., who has set cycling speed and endurance records, and who, according to his count, has coached 176 national cycling champions, 16 world champions, and two Olympic cycling gold medalists, was the 30th anniversary’s guest of honor.

    It was his first appearance here since that first year, when Dave Scott, the first inductee into the Triathlon Hall of Fame, won, and the long absence resulted in his going off-course in the 23.8-mile bicycle leg, which he thought might have cost him between a minute to a minute and a half.

    Howard did the bike leg for an exhibition relay team put together by the race director Steve Tarpinian, who later said that that trio (Adam Kuklinski was the runner), while unofficial, was the first in Mighty Hamptons history to break two hours.

    “We thought we might even be able to beat the winner’s time,” said Tarpinian, but Tom Eickelberg’s 1:57:18 proved to be two and a half minutes faster than Tarpinian, Howard, and Kuklinski’s 1:59:52.

    Tarpinian was one of the first out of the water, in 20:14, Howard’s bike time was 1:01:13, and Kuklinski did the 10K run in 36:15.

    Eickelberg, a 22-year-old pro from Babylon, was the first to finish the 1.5-kilometer (.93-mile) swim, in 18:43, and had the best 10K run split as well, 35:52. The runner-up, Craig Foos, 34, of New York City, had the fastest bike split, 59:22.

    Howard, despite veering off-course, traversed the rolling terrain on a bicycle Tarpinian had lent him very swiftly, coming in just 41 seconds after Eickelberg. Later, he said he probably would have been five minutes faster in his prime. . . . “But while I don’t have the power I did in the ’80s, I do have the enthusiasm still. My point of view at 64 is to stay active.”

    Asked how many triathlons he’d done over the years, Howard, who placed third, first, and sixth in Hawaii Ironman competitions, said, “I don’t keep track . . . I don’t do them anymore, but I still swim and run. I don’t want to lose the disciplines. The bike is therapy for me.”

    As for the athletic potential of human beings, Howard, who also races a modified 1970 BMW in vintage races, was sanguine. “Oh definitely we can improve — in every athletic endeavor. The times are still coming down.”

    Eickelberg, who is sponsored by Power Bar and trained by Mike Monastero and Doug Williamson, co-owners of the Babylon Bike Shop, where he works, said it was his first time here. “I don’t think I’ve lost on Long Island in the last couple of years,” he said in answer to a question, “but it’s a small pond.”

    The women’s winner, and seventh over all, in 2:07:32, was Amy Bevilacqua, 37, of Wilton, Conn., a mother of four children ages 8, 6, 4, and 2.

    “I was lapped by some amazing women pros in the swim of a race in Des Moines recently and they made me get out! That’s why I’m here,” she said with a laugh.

    Nothing went amiss for her on Sunday, however. “It was a lovely swim today. I was in the second wave . . . everything was perfect. I’m more of a biker and runner; I have to work on my swim.”

    This would probably be her last triathlon of the season, Bevilacqua said, though she’s planning to do a cycling road race in the Adirondacks soon. “I’ve never ridden in a pack — I’ll have to talk to John Howard about it.”

    The first year she did Mighty Hamptons, in 2002, she “was pregnant, though I didn’t know it at the time. I did it in 2007 too, though I had a 6-month-old then. It’s been nice having two years not being pregnant!” she said, laughing again.

    The winning women’s relay team that day, in 2:22:33, were locals. Amanda Husslein did the swim in 24:33, Jenny Keller did the bike in 1:12:05, and Sharon McCobb did the run in 43:05.

    David Powers, 44, of Wainscott was second out of the water and slipped to sixth. He was slowed down a bit on the run by a strained calf muscle.

    Charles Whalen, 50, of Montauk, whose time was 2:14:19, placed first in the 50-to-54-year-old men’s group. John Broich, 50, of Sag Harbor was second. His time was 2:15:16.

    Dan Roberts, 38, of East Hampton, who finished 10 seconds behind Broich, placed third in the men’s 35-39s, and Erin Tintle, 39, of East Hampton was second in the women’s 35-39s in 2:34:32.

    The youngest participant was 16-year-old Hunter Owens of Stony Brook. His time was 2:39:38. Odd Sangesland, 82, of Plainview was the eldest triathlete. He finished in 4:20:12.

Thursday, September 22

GOLF, East Hampton at Westhampton Beach, 4 p.m.

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

Saturday, September 24

HAMPTONS MARATHON, with half-marathon and 5K, Springs School, 8 a.m.

GIRLS SOCCER, Elwood-John Glenn at East Hampton, 10 a.m.

BOYS VOLLEYBALL, Eastport-South Manor at East Hampton, 10 a.m.

FIELD HOCKEY, Hampton Bays at East Hampton, 10:30 a.m.

GIRLS VOLLEYBALL, Bayport-Blue Point at East Hampton, nonleague, 1 p.m.

RUGBY, Princeton Athletic Club vs. Montauk Rugby Club, Herrick Park, East Hampton, 1 p.m.

GIRLS TENNIS, McGann-Mercy at East Hampton, 2 p.m.

GIRLS SWIMMING, Half Hollow Hills vs. East Hampton, Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter, 2 p.m.

BOYS SOCCER, Amityville at East Hampton, 3:30 p.m.

FOOTBALL, homecoming game, Eastport-South Manor at East Hampton, 7 p.m.

Monday, September 26

GIRLS VOLLEYBALL, Miller Place at East Hampton, 4 p.m.

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

BOYS VOLLEYBALL, East Hampton at Sachem East, nonleague, 6:45 p.m.

Tuesday, September 27

GOLF, Pierson vs. East Hampton, South Fork Country Club, Amagansett, 4 p.m.

FIELD HOCKEY, East Hampton at Port Jefferson, 4:30 p.m.

GIRLS CROSS-COUNTRY, Westhampton Beach vs. East Hampton, Indian Island County Park, Riverhead, 4:30 p.m.

BOYS CROSS-COUNTRY, East Hampton vs. Miller Place, Sunken Meadow State Park, Kings Park, 4:30 p.m.

    When questioned on Aug. 31 about the coming fall sports season at East Hampton High School, Joe Vas, who’s in his fifth year as athletic director, was sanguine.

    “Girls volleyball is always good, boys soccer will be good, boys volleyball will be good, golf will be good, girls tennis will be good, both girls and boys cross-country should be good, girls soccer has great numbers, football has good numbers, though not a lot of size — they’ve got to stay healthy — field hockey, whose numbers have been down the past couple of years, has a good turnout again, and, of course, girls swimming should be very good.”

    The football team was to have participated last Thursday in a four-way scrimmage at Southampton High School, along with the Mariners, Greenport, and Hampton Bays.

    A preseason pick to finish last among the 12 schools in its division, the Bonackers, who consequently won’t have to face any of the top three — Sayville, Huntington, and Bellport — won’t be pressured to live up to great expectations.

    Speaking of football, and of concussions, Vas, who noted that “you don’t have to play football or lacrosse to get them — in fact, you don’t even have to be hit in the head to bruise your brain,” said that Randi Cherill, the school’s trainer, had recently given “Impact” neuro cognitive function tests to all the high school’s athletes, with the exception of tennis and track, as part of the required physicals.

    “I love it,” Cherill later said of the test that is under the aegis of St. Charles Hospital. “It tests memory, recall, reaction time . . . it takes over 30 minutes to administer, and it establishes a baseline, so a comparison can be made should you get injured. Most of the schools in Section XI are doing it.”

    Back to the fall’s prospects, Vas said, “We’ve got the numbers to be competitive across the board. How well we do in each of the [11] sports will depend on the kids. We certainly have the opportunity to be successful.”

    Giving a talk to about 200 athletes gathered around him on the high school’s turf field early last Thursday morning, the A.D. said, “If you’re all-in, things will generally go your way. We’re building a strong program here. I’m really excited. We have an outstanding coaching staff, and every varsity coach who needs one will have a paid assistant. . . . Our year will go as our senior leadership goes. If you reach for the sky, we’ll skyrocket. We go as you go. And remember, my door is always open.”

    Among the new coaches is Michelle Kennedy, who has taken over girls tennis from Jim Nicoletti. Kennedy, who’s the school librarian, played the sport at Salve Regina. She may be assisted by one of the East Hampton Indoor/Outdoor club’s pros.    

    Kalie Peters will assist Becky Schwartz with the varsity field hockey team; Robyn Mott will be the junior varsity field hockey coach; Will Collins will be the jayvee boys volleyball coach, and Josh Brussell, the former jayvee coach, will assist the boys varsity coach, Dan Weaver.

    Sara Faraone will assist Kathy McGeehan with the varsity girls volleyball team, Nicole Calloway will be the girls jayvee volleyball coach, Tiffany Lamprecht will assist Mike Vitulli with the varsity girls soccer team, and John McGeehan, the girls swimming coach, will be assisted by Meg Preiss and Angelika Cruz.

    On Friday afternoon Vas said there was to be a “family community track night,” in which, from 3 to 6 , there were to have been various competitions for kids of all ages.

    A committee, he added, had been named to consider nominations for Bonac’s first Hall Of Fame class.

    Jim Nicoletti is the president, Ellen Cooper and Ed Bahns are the vice presidents, and Kathy McGeehan is the treasurer. The board members are Dick Cooney and Mike Burns, both former East Hampton School District athletic directors, Bill Herzog, Erin Abran, and Sandy Vorpahl.

    “There will be two longtime East Hampton residents appointed too,” he said. “Our plan is to announce the members of the first class at our June athletic awards dinner and to induct them at the following homecoming. . . . People can nominate athletes, entire teams, coaches. . . .”

    This year’s homecoming will be on Sept. 24. Eastport-South Manor will be the football team’s opponent, in a night game. “Just about every team will have a contest during homecoming week, we’ll have a carnival, a dance, a bonfire. . . It should be a lot of fun.”

    Concerning another subject, Vas said he will buy new schowcases for the school’s trophies, plaques, and memorabilia, rather than stick with the old ones. “I’d like to do it right,” he said.    

    McLain Ward, who had to be feeling a bit effervescent after sweeping with characteristic aplomb through the Hampton Classic’s major prize money classes last week, a streak capped Sunday afternoon by a record sixth Hampton Classic Grand Prix win (and third in a row), cradled in his lap the magnum of Louis Roederer Champagne he’d been given, popped the sizable cork, and invited those who’d attended the show-ending press conference to share in a round.

    Multiple wins and high placings are nothing new to the taut, sandy-haired 34-year-old two-time Olympic gold medalist from Brewster, N.Y. Considered America’s top show jumping rider and among the top three in the world, it could fairly be said he outdid even himself in the foreshortened show’s five-day run, winning not only the $250,000 FTI Grand Prix, but also the $50,000 Spy Coast Farm Grand Prix Qualifier, the $30,000 Nicolock Open Jumper Challenge (in which he also took third and fourth), and the $15,000 Prudential Douglas Elliman (1.45-meter) Open.

    This is not to mention a second-place finish in the $7,500 Pilatus (1.45-meter) Open Jumper competition and a fourth in the $30,000 Split Rock Farm 6-year-old Young Jumper Class, Round 3.

    With the $75,000 he won on Grant Road Partners’ German-bred grey, Antares F, in the Grand Prix, besting a cordial rival, Kent Farrington, and Uceko, “by less than a stride,” Ward rode away, all told, with about $115,000 in prize money.

    Asked what made him so good — Ward seems to stand in relation to his competitors as Tiger Woods once did in golf — Marty Bauman, the Classic’s press officer, said, “McLain’s not just a great rider — he’s a great horseman. He treats his horses as the athletes they are, 52 weeks a year. He never overuses them — he trains them with care so that they always peak at the right times.”

    Ward, himself, who won the Grand Prix jump-off by two-10ths of a second over Farrington, said he considered the Classic “the best show in the country,” and that, consequently, “I always come with my best horses. I feel the event is worthy of that.”

    Bauman, despite being a great fan of Ward’s, confessed at the press conference that he and others thought Farrington, winner of the recent King George Grand Prix in England, who went first among seven horse-and-rider combinations in the jump-off, might have it sewed up with his and Uceko’s 32.96 second circuit of the pared-down seven obstacle course.

    Lisa Deslauriers and Vicomte D, the second to go, were eliminated when her horse balked and threw her off at the fourth obstacle, the 1.69-meter red brick wall. Norman Dello Joio and Notre Star dropped a rail with two fences left. That brought on Antares F and Ward, who traced his winning time of 32.78 seconds to having shaved a stride — or, as he was to say later, maybe even less than a stride — between the second jump-off obstacle, the ASPCA wall, and the third, a double vertical near the center of the V.I.P. tent.

    At that point, with three competitors — Audrey Coulter, Lucy Davis, and Ljubov Kochetova — remaining, the announcer said they should keep in mind Ward and Antares F had landed on the far side of the red brick wall at 19 seconds.

    Coulter, an 18-year-old San Franciscan riding Victory DA, trailed Ward by three seconds at the wall, and pulled the last rail. Davis, also 18, from Los Angeles, and Nemo 119 skirted the wall entirely, and Kochetova, the Classic’s first Russian competitor, and her 7-year-old Oldenburg stallion, the youngest horse in the Grand Prix, went clean in 40.11 seconds, which was good for third place.

    Thirty-three horse-and-rider combinations contested Guilherme Jorge’s tough 13-fence (16-effort) first round, and most came to grief at one point or another, with the 1.6-meter Jaguar vertical and the Nespresso oxer near the in-gate, the water-reflecting Liverpool combination midway through the course, and the airy “bridge” off a 270-degree turn over worn ground in front of the V.I.P. tent taking most of the hits. The triple combination that preceded the last jump, the massive square FTI oxer, figured to be a problem, but was not so.

    In former days the Grand Prix qualifier winner would have been the last to go out on the course, though nowadays the order of go is determined by a draw. Ward, who went 12th, going clear in 80.98 seconds, well within the allotted 86, said he didn’t mind at all being in the middle.

    “Besides McLain Ward there’s one other name that comes to mind this week — Irene,” Bauman said before the Grand Prix’s top three answered questions. “Seven days ago at this very moment we weren’t sure we would be here today, but the fact we are is a reflection of the Hampton Classic’s leadership. In Shanette Barth Cohen we’ve got the most amazing executive director of any horse show anywhere.”

    For her part, Barth Cohen said she’d never doubted that there would be a show, though the question as to when it would begin [Aug. 31 as it turned out] remained open as the hurricane turned tropical storm approached.

    Dennis Shaughnessy, who heads FTI Consulting, said he knew the Classic’s staff was able, “but I didn’t know they were magicians,” he added, concerning the efficient tear-down and rapid resurrection of the show’s 100 tents and 1,600 stables. At 5:30 p.m. Sunday [Aug. 28], you would have thought there would be no way that they’d ever be able to hold a world class horse show here.”