Whaleboat Races

The Sag Harbor Express’s men’s team, for the first time ever apparently, won the village’s Harborfest Whalers Cup in an exciting final Sunday in which the tiller on the perennial-champion Team Whalers’ boat snapped about halfway through the course, scuttling its chances. The Express was said to have edged the John K. Ott crew “by a foot.”

The Express’s whaleboat crew comprised two men and two women — Terry McShane, his nephew, Thomas McShane, and Danielle Knecht and Sara Maninno, subbing for Isabel Runge, who had to return to work in Boston.

The Lady Whalers, Maddie Martin, Kristin Pettigrew, Phoebe Miller, and Amanda Stanis, all of them high school students, won the women’s and the junior divisions. 

Winners at E.H.I.T.

Jerry Cohen, one of the owners of the East Hampton Indoor-Outdoor Club, did well in recent tournaments there, winning, with Peter Newman, the men’s A doubles and the men’s 70-plus singles.

Other winners were Steve Camac, in men’s open singles; Rich Dunphy, in men’s A singles; Mort Seitelman and Joel Lefkowitz, men’s 70-plus doubles; Barbara Mueller, women’s open singles; Heather Gordon, women’s A singles; Heather Gordon and Lien Do, women’s A doubles; Heather and Seth Gordon, open mixed doubles, and Judy Carmichael and Anthony Maglione, mixed A doubles.

Bonac Sports

East Hampton High School’s field hockey team was 2-0 as of Tuesday, with 5-1 and 3-0 wins over Babylon and Greenport-Southold. Girls tennis, girls volleyball, boys soccer, and boys volleyball as of that day each had a win, while girls soccer was 0-3 and girls swimming was 0-1, having lost 100-88 at Connetquot Friday. The boys cross-country and girls cross-country teams and golf were to have opened their seasons here Tuesday.

September 3, 1992

Fred’s Big Guns came out smoking in the first game of the best-of-five East Hampton Town men’s slow-pitch softball league championship series Monday night as Stoney (WAD!) Notel blasted Ken Weldon’s first pitch in the bottom of the seventh inning over the left field fence, triggering a raucous victory celebration.

Pat Galbraith, the 10th-ranked doubles player in the world, who’ll play this week in the U.S. Open, and Pem Guerry, of Chattanooga, Tenn., his “amateur” partner, on Sunday won the eighth Huggy Bear tennis tournament, a Calcutta-type fund-raising extravaganza played host to by the Forstmann family, of Water Mill and Southampton.

. . . Following the awards ceremonies, Galbraith said, in parting, that he had won $60,000. Guerry, once he had recounted the news enthusiastically over the phone, said he had won $38,000.

“Four years ago,” Guerry said, when asked how their prizes stacked up against major events on the pro tour, “the winning doubles team at the Open split $80,000. It’s probably around $100,000 now.”

Despite the fact that Robert Rubin, owner of the Bridgehampton Race Circuit, has filed a development plan with the Southampton Town Planning Board to subdivide the 516-acre tract into 114 house lots, racing enthusiasts who lease the property said they are hopeful “The Bridge” will continue to function in the near future as a racetrack.

Dennis Macchio, the president of Hot Shoe Racing, and Clay Mears, the track’s marketing director, charted plans for an expanded and somewhat remodeled facility at a press conference Monday. The occasion was the news that Hot Shoe had signed a three-year lease with Rubin, ensuring racing at the Noyac site until 1995.

“We are taking a calculated risk,” Macchio said. “We are gambling that racing has a future here.”

Usually the Hampton Classic grand prix jump-off is decided by the clock; it is rare that only one rider in it goes clean, with no penalty points assessed. Yet on Sunday, Jeffrey Welles knew, once he had cleared “the bogey fence,” the 5-foot Harper’s Bazaar wall, which was the fourth of the jump-off’s nine obstacles, that time was on his side. Thus he and his 12-year-old German-bred mare, Serengeti, took their time, and, for the first time, the 30-year-old rider from Newtown, Conn., came away with the Crown Royal $30,000 top prize.

Serengeti tipped the wall’s top rail, but a backward glance by Welles revealed that it had not toppled, as had been the case with five of the jump-off’s nine riders, including the four — Anthony D’Ambrosio, Katie Prudent, Andre Dignelli, and Debbie Schaffner — who immediately preceded him.

. . . In other action on Sunday, McLain Ward, the 16-year-old son of Barney Ward, a veteran grand prix rider, won the Calvin Klein Show Jumping Derby for junior and amateur-owner riders, for the third straight year. The younger Ward also was one of the 35 contestants in the grand prix, having qualified on Friday.

“I guess you could say he’s the Jennifer Capriati of our circuit,” Marty Bauman, the show’s public relations director, said. “Usually, riders don’t come on the circuit until they’re 20 or 22. McLain’s been jumping in these events since his junior year of high school.”

September 10, 1992

Tim Egan, of East Hampton, won the 220-to-242-pound heavyweight national arm wrestling championship at McLean, Va., on Aug. 29.

. . . While he’s won state championships in Connecticut and New York, Egan, who is a meat cutter at the Montauk I.G.A. supermarket, had never won a national title before. 

. . . Asked if meat cutting were good practice for arm wrestling, the titleholder said no, though he allowed as how one of his former pursuits, tonging for clams, “might have helped.”

For his win — there was no cash prize, as in some regional tournaments — Egan will travel with the U.S. team to the world championships in Geneva in early November.

John Kenney, of New York City and Shelter Island, won Monday’s 10-kilometer Great Bonac Foot Race in Springs, besting a field of 200 in 32 minutes and 3 seconds.

“Pretty good, don’t you think, for a father of three,” said Kenney, who, at 36, is “no spring chicken.” Ed Stern, a Central Park Track Club teammate of Kenney’s, was the runner-up, in 33:02. 

Kenney, who set a course record of 31:41 in 1987 that was broken by Kevin Corliss’s 31:27 last year, led from the beginning. Stern broke away from a pack that included Sag Harbor’s Kevin Barry and Rich Webber after the first mile mark. Barry, a former two-time Bonac 10K winner, finished fifth, in 34:21, and Webber was seventh, in 35:04. Barbara Gubbins, of Southampton, who did not race last year, equaled her course-record time of 35:40, which she first posted in 1990.

Are there more stars in the universe than grains of sand on Earth? There could be. Carl Sagan once wrote that there are 100 billion galaxies, each with more than 100 billion stars! With each passing moment in time, stars are dying and new ones are popping up to take their place. But then, thousands of grains of sand are created every millisecond by erosion of rock.

The fact that the very large majority of stars are thousands and thousands of light-years away — one light-year is the distance light travels in one year at 186,000 miles per second — so humbles our ability to grasp the enormity of the universe. No wonder we spend hours watching television, eating fast food, and sleeping the night away. A star that is, say, only a mere 10 light- years away — close in astronomical terms — takes 10 light-years to be seen by someone on Earth. The star that you may be wishing on tonight could have died and become a dark star nine light-years ago. You are only witnessing light from its dying embers.

Our planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn were all observed and studied by the ancient Greeks and Romans, thus the deified names. Uranus and Neptune were not observed by humans until they were discovered by 17th-century astronomers. Lately, we have come to know, photograph, and name their 41 moons: Uranus has 27 and Neptune 14. Pluto, now known as a dwarf planet, less than two-tenths the size of the Earth, wasn’t observed until 1930, and recent evidence points to a planet beyond Pluto, but it has yet to be observed.

Pluto is 4.67 billion miles away. If we were fortunate to see reflected light from it, the light would reach our eyes 17.1 hours after it had left the dwarf planet. Our closest planets, Venus and Mars, get as close to us as 34 and 54 million miles away. On those nights it takes only 3.1 and 4.8 minutes for their light to reach our eyes.

Is there life on any of these planets other than on ours? That is the question of the day. Mars is the planet with the best chance in terms of temperature range and the fact that it has some water. But most of our world’s biologists think in terms of what’s living on Earth. Attempts to create life in our laboratories by combining this and that element with this and that stimulus are still in the cold fusion category of possibilities. 

The resurgence of blue-green algae, a.k.a. cyanobacteria — supposedly the first organisms on this planet and the ones that created the oxygen that allows us air breathers to survive and prosper — raises that question.

It’s kind of like that old saw, given enough monkeys and enough typewriters and an infinite amount of time, the Holy Bible and the Oxford English Dictionary would be rewritten, but many, many more times more probable. If it hasn’t happened on Mars or one of our other planets, or within our own galaxy, it has surely happened on some of Sagan’s billions upon billions of stars coming and going in all of the other universes’ galaxies. 

Will such life be based on photosynthesis and oxygen, as it was more than three billion years ago on Earth? No, but it will probably be based somehow on water.

And who knows, by the time we begin to find out, our planet, now in very serious trouble, might not be around to witness such a discovery.

Larry Penny can be reached via email at [email protected].

Caroline Cashin, who is in Tel Aviv with her husband, Ed, competing in the Epic Israel three-day mountain bike race today, recently became the first female ever to win Body Tech’s Pump ’n’ Run event at Amagansett’s Atlantic Avenue Beach.

“It’s strength, not speed,” she said during a conversation at the Truth Training fitness studio she and her husband run in East Hampton, down an alley between Mary’s Marvelous and the Villa Italian Specialties store, opposite the East Hampton railroad station.

“I’m going to have to change the rules,” Body Tech’s owner, Mike Bahel, said, with a broad smile, before saying he was just kidding. 

Bench presses, the event’s first phase, require men to press 60 percent of their body weight and women to press 35 percent of theirs, with three seconds per rep being deducted from the ensuing two-mile beach run between Atlantic and Indian Wells and back.

Cashin, 41, who had trained for the competition — three times a week at Truth Training, and weekly on the beach (with Beth Feit, Holly Li, and the Cashins’ 11-year-old daughter, Dylan), where they’d do push-ups, sprints, and planks — blew everyone away with her 172 reps, her previous best being 115.

Not that she could have walked the beach run, but the eight and a half minutes she’d banked pretty much assured her the victory — over Neil Falkenhan (71 reps), the perennial winner in recent years, and Mike Lentz, who she said was the fastest runner, among others.

In an account of 2015’s Pump ’n’ Run, Bahel said Cashin, whose reps had subtracted five minutes from her run that year, could have won it had not “her motherly instincts taken over.” He was referring to the fact that when Cashin’s then-8-year-old son, Liam, a late arrival from a junior tennis camp, had thrown in the towel after rounding the Indian Wells lifeguard stand, she tended to him rather than leave him in the dust, as it were. 

As for the women this year, Amanda Calabrese, a three-time national lifeguard tournament champion in beach flags who represents the United States in international lifesaving competitions, was second, said Cashin, Feit, who like Cashin is in her 40s, was third, and Dylan (85 reps) was fourth.

Body Tech’s website in May, in order to contradict “false rumors,” posted the following: “Ladies, lifting weights won’t make you big and bulky. You won’t look like a man. You don’t produce enough testosterone. It will actually enhance your feminine curves. Stop believing the false rumors.” 

Cashin, who left for Tel Aviv on Sunday, is among a number of 40-somethings, Feit, Sinead FitzGibbon, Li, and Sharon McCobb among them, who need no such reminding.

“There’s lots of us,” Cashin said, with a sly smile. “We’re kicking butt.”

She has done these Epic mountain bike races before: with Bahel in Cape Town in 2014, and with Dan Farnham (the acknowledged top mountain biker out here) in 2015.

The Epic races are said to be “the Tour de France of mountain biking.” 

The ones in Cape Town are eight-day stage races in mountains and valleys. After the 2015 one, Cashin said, “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done . . . apart from childbirth. That was the toughest.”

Next up for Body Tech is its Serpent’s Back Duathlon at Ed Ecker County Park off Montauk’s Navy Road on Oct. 8 at 10:30 a.m.

It was 50 summers ago that Carl Yastrzemski became my first role model who wasn’t my parents. That season the Hall of Famer from Bridgehampton became a household hero by winning the Triple Crown, pretty much willing the Boston Red Sox from Nowheresville to the World Series, and turning a legion of Little Leaguers like me into forever fans. In just seven months he helped make me a better player, a better son, a better East Ender.

I liked Yaz before I saw him in action. In the winter of 1966 my father, Larry, took a break from the building of our house in Wainscott, parked outside the Yastrzemski family home in Bridgehampton, and proceeded to tell me how Yaz made himself a Major League hitter as a kid. Sitting in our Impala on School Street, I was amazed by young Carl’s routines, which seemed like the stuff of superhero comics. Hitting rocks after laying irrigation pipes on his father’s potato farm. Swinging a sawed-off bat at tennis balls fired from a short distance by grown men on the family baseball team. Swinging a lead bat hundreds of times at a tennis ball hung from the ceiling in the garage during the winter, swaddled in a sheepskin coat.

My dad was an advertising man and a lay preacher. His Yaz talk was a kind of Madison Avenue sermon. Be like Yaz, he said without saying so, and you’ll be better. I did, and I was. During my first Little League season I hit five home runs, including two in one inning, pumped by countless hours of swinging a weighted bat. I pitched two shutouts, primed by countless hours of hurling a tennis ball at a garage door to an imaginary Yaz.

Yaz’s magical season began in Boston’s third game, when the left fielder temporarily protected a rookie pitcher’s ninth-inning no-hitter with a wide-receiver catch: over the shoulder, leaping, tumbling. By mid-July he had broken his season record of 20 homers, his strength and speed improved by an off-season conditioning program run like a Marine boot camp by a former trainer for Hungarian Olympic boxers. In mid-August he lifted the Sox after the season-ending beaning of the star slugger Tony Conigliaro, a handsome, charismatic Massachusetts native more popular in Boston than Yaz. 

The next game Yaz had four hits in a win. The game after that, he hit two three-run homers in a 12-11 victory. The game after that, he reduced an 8-1 deficit with a three-run homer, then scored the winning run after being hit by a pitch and stealing second. His heroics boosted the Sox to their second long winning streak in a month, putting them in their first serious pennant race in 19 years, a minor miracle considering that in Yaz’s six previous seasons they had finished a whopping 100 games under .500.

By now the South Fork was jazzed by Yaz. His daily dramatics buzzed beaches, post offices, parties, church services, even the store where I bought my monster magazines. He was the man on Wainscott’s rectangular baseball diamond, where I copied his cooler-than-cool batting habits: rubbing dirt on hands; hitching pants; tapping helmet; raising bat high, cocking elbow to eye level; swinging with the lethal efficiency of a striking cobra. He was The Man at the Village Restaurant in Bridgehampton, where my dad and I heard salty, peppery stories from the proprietor, Billy DePetris, a high-school teammate of Yaz who was nicknamed Cobra. A true-blue capital-C character, Billy D. celebrated Boston’s unlikely success by draping the restaurant in red socks.

My father fed my Yaz fever by building me a pitcher’s mound in our Wainscott backyard. Pushing off a rubber of two bricks, I threw fastballs, curves, and knucklers to Dad, who used an oversize mitt he bought with cigar labels, kneeled on a garden cushion, and sipped a martini from a cocktail glass placed by his left leg. I’m happy to report that while I broke his toe with a pitch, I never broke the glass.

Rooting for Yaz on his home turf was over-the-moon exciting, off-the-chart thrilling. For the first time I became my father’s battery mate. For the first time I was connected to a community outside my family, my school, my church. For the first time I had a cause outside myself. On the Island I discovered I didn’t have to be an island.

Yaz saved his best for last. He had seven hits in eight at-bats in the final two games of the season, leading the Sox to the pennant on the final day. He continued his blazing pace in the World Series, hitting .400 with three homers. He couldn’t save the underdog Sox from losing the series to the St. Louis Cardinals, the first sports loss that made me cry. I consoled myself in the off-season by hitting potatoes in Wainscott fields owned by my pal Pete Dankowski’s family, reading Yaz’s autobiography, and eating Big Yaz Special Fitness White Bread (“For youngsters of all ages . . . with extra milk protein for extra muscle!”). I didn’t care that it tasted like doughy wood pulp, or that it was about as nutritious as sawdust.

My parents gave me a rare gift in 1968, after Yaz won his third batting title and saved the American League from the embarrassment of a season without a full-time hitter over .300. That October my father invited Yaz’s parents, Carl Sr. and Hattie, to eat at our Wainscott house. My mother, Pat, a native of England, treated the dinner like a State Department affair. She bought new white plates at Hildreth’s in Southampton and served ham because, after all, all Polish people like ham, don’t they, dear?

Yaz’s folks brought me a ball and a photograph signed by their son. I lost the ball in the Wainscott woods within the week. I was so embarrassed, I didn’t tell my dad until Yaz’s Hall of Fame induction in 1989. The photo remains a treasured treasure. I used it as a show-and-tell prop during my talk, “Yazzamatazz: Carl Yastrzemski as Folk Hero, Role Model, and Cultural Icon,” last month at the Bridgehampton Museum’s Archives Building. The lecture took place on Aug. 18 — 50 years to the day that Tony Conigliaro went down for the season and Yaz’s stock went up forever.

Yaz played another 16 seasons, never reaching his ’67 heights. As the years rolled by, as I graduated from pitcher to writer, I began to fully appreciate his durability and flexibility, reliability, and loyalty. He played his entire 23-year career with the Sox, tying him for second longest tenure with one team with Brooks Robinson, the Baltimore Orioles’ Hall of Fame third baseman. That’s a pretty impressive feat in this free-for-all age of free agency, when players puddle-jump in search of that extra year of contract, that extra $10 million, that last chance to be a contender.

Al Kaline, the Hall of Fame outfielder, has called Yaz the best all-around player he played against during his 22-year career, which he spent with the Detroit Tigers. Indeed, Yaz did everything well. He’s one of only 15 Triple Crown winners, one of only four players who never struck out 100 times in a season over 20-plus years, the only left fielder with 27 career double plays. He basically owned Fenway Park’s 37-foot-high left field wall, fielding tricky caroms off the Green Monster’s wooden facade, metal scoreboard, and rivets with the canny, uncanny flair of a jai alai master.

Yaz chronically tinkered with his batting approach, dropping his hands from ear to chest level to adjust for age and injury. He played through crippling injuries, often creatively. In 1971 he protected a severely strained wrist by taping the bat to his right hand, frantically unraveling the tape as he ran to first base.

Whenever Yaz was counted out, he came back with a vengeance. In 1975 he redeemed a mediocre regular season with a brilliant postseason. In the playoffs he threw out three Oakland A’s runners, including speedsters Bert Campaneris and Reggie Jackson, from left field, switching from first base for the first time that season. Running to the dugout at the end of the inning, he made sure he passed by second base so he could scold Jackson for daring to test his arm.

Yaz was a remarkably clutch hitter throughout his career. He batted a robust .414 in his 21 biggest games, including the fabled 1978 one-shot playoff against the New York Yankees. He was clutch even when he wasn’t. Sox fans still mourn his pop-up against Rich (Goose) Gossage, the wickedly fast reliever, that ended the ’78 playoff with the tying run on third base. Yet during the same game he made a terrific running catch in left field, homered off Ron Guidry, that year’s best pitcher, and singled in a run off Gossage the inning before. The night before Gossage nervously predicted that he would face Yaz with the season on the line, a tribute to a hitter who could still murder fastballs at 39.

Yaz played the game properly, without fuss or fanfare. There are no YouTube videos of him flipping his bat after a meaningless homer or pointing his fingers to the sky after a pointless single. Yet his intensity was memorably savage and occasionally funny. Luis Tiant told me, during an interview for a story about the pitcher-dominated 1968 season, about striking out Yaz three straight times on rising fastballs when he was pitching for the Cleveland Indians. Each time Yaz grunted louder, swung harder, and twisted himself tighter. By the third strikeout he could have been Wile E. Coyote tunneling into the ground like a tornado.

This special brand of stoic, manic heroism made Yaz a popular pitchman. In 1969 he cried, “I want my Maypo!” to his mom in an ad for the maple-flavored oatmeal. In the early ’70s he praised Aqua Velva, a no-nonsense smell (“just a good, clean, refreshing fragrance that makes a man smell like a man”). In 1985, two years after retiring, he sold Miller Beer without talking about beer, a strange omission for someone who stocked the Sox team plane with cases of Coors when it was a mainly west-of-the-Rockies staple. Instead, he toasted the virtues of growing up in Bridgehampton among hard-working, good-living farmers.

The Tribe of Yaz has many members from all over the map. A sports psychologist whose top leaders include Yaz, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King Jr. A lawyer who mentioned Yaz’s No. 8 uniform number during her inauguration as a Vermont college’s eighth president. A retired steel plant supervisor who insists that Yaz’s ’67 exploits inspired him as an Army intelligence officer in Vietnam. The retired Houston Astros first baseman Jeff Bagwell, who lobbied Yaz, his childhood idol, to attend his Hall of Fame induction this summer. The comedian, actor, and writer Denis Leary, who in an episode of his TV series, “Rescue Me,” honored his favorite player by singing a few bars of “The Man They Call Yaz,” the theme song for Boston’s ’67 “Impossible Dream” team. (Sample lyric: “Although Yastrzemski is a lengthy name / It fits quite nicely in our Hall of Fame.”)

Yaz belongs to the pop culture hall of fame too. He’s the only known human being to appear on “The Simpsons” (as a cartoon version of his ’73 baseball-card self, notable for his unusually long sideburns); in the film “The Shining” (as a signature on a bat used as a wife’s weapon against her dangerously crazy husband); in a Phish concert (as a muse and a mantra), and on bostonterrierhub.com (as the breed’s second most popular name).

Members of the Tribe of Yaz admire him as a gifted player with a global reach, a hero familiar enough to be an honorary uncle, a lunch-pail legend. Jews have Sandy Koufax, Italians have Joe DiMaggio. The rest of us, including Poles and English-Germans, have Yaz. 

Yaz became my go-to guy again during the 2007 playoffs, when the Red Sox were down three games to one in their series against the Cleveland Indians. I watched the fifth game at my mother’s house while eating ham on china she bought for our 1968 State Department dinner with Yaz’s parents. After the Sox won, Mom and I decided to repeat our ham-and-white-plate special. Result: The Sox won both games on their way to their second world championship in three years and their third in 89 years.

Yes, even 24 years after he retired, even 40 years after he became my third role model, Yaz had some Major League mojo.

A former resident of Wainscott, Geoff Gehman devoted a chapter to Carl Yastrzemski in his memoir, “The Kingdom of the Kid: Growing Up in the Long-Lost Hamptons” (SUNY Press). He lives in Bethlehem, Pa. His email address is [email protected].

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Correction: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this article referred to Red Sox pennants hung outside the Village Restaurant.  Billy DePetris had hung actual red socks outside the restaurant. 

When he heard that the football program at East Hampton High School was folding — at least for the time being — Kevin Bunce, who coaches the Montauk Rugby Club’s junior players, asked the football coach, Joe McKee, if he wouldn’t talk up rugby as a “positive alternative.”

“These kids have an opportunity to make all their hard work in the past several weeks pay off,” Bunce said during a conversation at The Star this week. “You don’t want them staying at home and doing nothing — there are problems at the high school, with alcohol and drugs, everybody knows it, though nobody ever says anything about it. If we had a good turnout — they’d be surprised at what they could do — we could field a varsity 7s team that would play, like our jayvee team, in a tristate league this fall. And it’s not only the football players — there were cuts in soccer and boys volleyball too. They all should know we’re there for them. We’re not looking to be world-beaters, we just want to teach them a fun sport. Once they play it, they’ll love it.” 

There were, he and Paul Cleary, one of Montauk’s former coaches, said, many things to recommend rugby. It was, to begin with, a safer contact sport than football (an assertion borne out, they said, by statistics), and a more democratic one. “Everyone gets to touch the ball,” said Cleary. “Anyone can score, everybody plays.” And the camaraderie that rugby inspired, they said, was exceptional.

“They say about rugby, ‘You don’t just play, you belong,’ ” Bunce said.

“I came here [from Ireland] 25 years ago. I wouldn’t have stayed if there hadn’t been a rugby team,” Cleary said. “It’s like a big old family, wherever you go. You can have fun all your life playing it.”

Moreover, rugby could open doors that might otherwise be closed, they said, to college and to international play. A half-dozen locals had played the sport throughout the world, said Bunce — Frank Bistrian, Chris Carney, Rob Balnis, John Glennon, and his nephew Mike Bunce Jr. among them.

As for college, Bunce said that given his and some of his fellow ruggers’ long tenures here — “I’ve been around Montauk rugby for 30 years, Rich [Brierley] has been around for 35 — we’re friends with a lot of the college coaches and rugby union administrators now, and they listen to us.”

Further, one couldn’t wish for a better coaching staff, what with the experience that Montauk Rugby Club members such as Cleary, he, Rich Brierley, Garth Wakeford, Gordon Trotter, and Carney, Balnis, and his nephew could offer.

“We’ve got 200 years of experience,” Bunce said with a hearty laugh.

Perhaps the downturn in football — he’d heard, he said, that Southampton’s football program was hurting too numbers-wise — would signal an upturn in Montauk rugby, which also needed some bolstering at the club level, said Bunce.

Ultimately, the two sports, he added, would reinforce rather than vie with each other. “The football players could play friendly games with us in the spring, and play football in the fall.”

Of one thing he was convinced: that the chances when it came to college recruitment lay heavily in rugby’s favor.

“When Jesus Barranco, who’s now at the State University at Albany, one of the leaders on the rugby club there, asked me a few years ago what he needed to do to play D-1 football, I said to him, ‘First, get in shape, two, forget about it. . . . If colleges are looking at them for football, I guarantee they’ll look at them for rugby.”

The jayvee team he mentioned had players on it from East Hampton (Kevin Bunce Jr., Nick Wyche, Daniel Ortiz, Nick Lombardo, “and a couple of others”), Mattituck, Shoreham-Wading River, Riverhead, and Babylon. The jayvee 7s season — and perhaps the varsity’s should a dozen sign on — is to begin with a tournament on Sept. 24.

“We’ll play five games a weekend for six weekends, and everyone will get to play. We’ll have unlimited subs, which is great. They will have had 90 minutes of rugby when they’re done. Any kid from the high school is welcome. We practice Tuesday and Thursday nights at Herrick Park at 6:30.”

Saturday, September 23

BOYS SOCCER, East Hampton at Babylon, nonleague, 10 a.m.

RUGBY, Montauk Rugby Club at Brooklyn, 1 p.m.

GIRLS SOCCER, East Hampton at Hauppauge, 3:30 p.m.

Monday, September 25

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

FIELD HOCKEY, East Hampton vs. Pierson-Bridgehampton, Mashashimuet Park, Sag Harbor, 4:30 p.m.

BOYS VOLLEYBALL, East Islip at East Hampton, 5 p.m.

GIRLS VOLLEYBALL, East Hampton at Mount Sinai, 5 p.m.

Tuesday, September 26

GIRLS SWIMMING, Ward Melville vs. East Hampton, mandatory nonleague, Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter, 5 p.m.

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

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

Wednesday, September 27

BOYS SOCCER, Bayport-Blue Point at East Hampton, 4:30 p.m.

FIELD HOCKEY, East Hampton at Bayport-Blue Point, 4:30 p.m.

GIRLS TENNIS, William Floyd at East Hampton, 4 p.m.

BOYS VOLLEYBALL, Walt Whitman at East Hampton, 5 p.m.

BADMINTON, open play, Amagansett School, 6 p.m.

MEN’S SOCCER, 7-on-7 league, Bill Miller vs. Sag Harbor United, 6:30 p.m.; Tuxpan vs. Bateman Painting, 7:25, and Tortorella Pools vs. Maidstone Market, 8:20, Herrick Park, East Hampton.

Hoops Academy

Nicholas Worrall, a 2004 graduate of East Hampton High School, said during a recent conversation at The Star that he was encouraged by the turnouts at two three-hour Hamptons Hoops Academy clinics at the Sportime Arena in Amagansett this summer to broaden the Academy’s reach here next year.

Rondae Hollis-Jefferson of the Brooklyn Nets was at one of them, Serge Ibaka of the Toronto Raptors was at the other. Marcus Edwards, the former East Hampton High School star, who played basketball at Babson College, helped Worrall, a University of Washington graduate, run the clinics, which, said Worrall, attracted 32 youngsters in all. “They were put together at the last moment, so, considering, the turnouts — we had 18 at the first and 14 at the other — were great. I’d like to see more local kids involved next summer, kids from Bridgehampton, Sag Harbor, and from the local community, and, obviously, kids from the city. I’d like to offer scholarships eventually, and to have charity angles also. If I could do three of these next summer — one with 50, say, and two with 30 — it would be good.”

Hamptons Hoops Academy has a Facebook page, with photos and videos. Worrall’s email is [email protected].

Gutsy Volleyballers

Kathy McGeehan’s young East Hampton High School girls volleyball team bids fair to be a tough out come the playoffs given its experience thus far. East Hampton in recent games shut out Shoreham-Wading River, overcoming a 23-17 deficit in the third to do so, kept it close in a 3-0 loss to Westhampton Beach, and lost in five to Sayville, which beat Westhampton on Monday. 

Moreover, McGeehan said Tuesday morning that once certain things were corrected, she expected the team to be even better. Mikela Junemann, an outside hitter, is leading the way when it comes to kills, though others — Madyson Neff and Ella Gurney among them — are contributing with their net play as well, and Zoe Leach and Molly Mamay have been anchoring the defense.

Girls Tennis Results

East Hampton High’s girls tennis team has been taking its lumps lately, losing league matches to William Floyd, Westhampton Beach, and Eastport-South Manor — League VII’s top three — while defeating McGann-Mercy and Mattituck. On Monday, the team, whose overall record was 2-5 as of Tuesday, lost 5-2 at Westhampton Beach, with Pamela Pillco, the number-two, and Eva Wojtusiak, at four, winning in singles. Rebecca Kuperschmid lost a three-setter at number-one. The doubles teams were swept, each in straight sets.

Kaylee Mendelman’s three-set win at third singles assured East Hampton of a 4-3 win here over Mercy on Sept. 7. Katie Helfand’s young crew defeated Mattituck 6-1, with the sole loss coming at fourth singles. Pillco was the only winner in the 6-1 loss to Floyd, whose league record stood at 5-0 as of earlier this week.

Badminton Begins

Dick Baker of Saunders & Associates has announced that weekly badminton play at the Amagansett School is to begin Wednesday. “It’s our 37th season,” said Baker, whose phone number is 516-819-2698.

Golf Win

The East Hampton High School golf team bageled William Floyd 9-0 Monday at the South Fork Country Club in Amagansett. Turner Foster, the defending county champion, shot an even-par 34 on the front nine, and Nate Wright and Jackson Murphy shot 37s.

September 10, 1992

Eleven years after having been told she had a less-than-one-in-10 chance to survive, Karen Kalbacher, 31, a former East Hampton resident, is about to participate in a monthlong 1,662-mile fund-raising bicycle ride from Victoria, British Columbia, to Tijuana, Mexico.

The public relations director of the Massachusetts Special Olympics, Kalbacher was feted by her surgeon last year after having gone five years without a flare-up of the rare muscle cancer that was discovered in her junior year at Boston College. She hopes to raise $12,000 through her participation in the West Coast trek.

. . . “There was a stigma attached to having cancer when I was sick — there still is to some extent,” said Kalbacher. “It wasn’t talked about, but talking about it helps the healing process. I was fortunate to have a wonderful surgeon. . . . With my supportive family and surgeon, I feel pretty fortunate.”

Going into Tuesday’s men’s slow-pitch league showdown between the Tipperary Inn and Fred’s Big Guns, billed by some as “The Gunfight at the I’m Okay, You’re Not Okay Corral,” the series was tied at 2-2.

Tipperary, thanks largely to Barry Mackin, whose three-run home run in the top of the first inning set the tone, won the pivotal game, 16-3.

September 17, 1992

Jeffrey Banger, 31, temporarily of Los Alamos, N.M., and Margot Lulla, 27, of New York City and Amagansett, repeated Saturday as winners of the Fithampton triathlon in Sag Harbor.

Lulla, who was as buoyant after the demanding event as she was on exiting the water, was about five minutes slower than last year, but that was probably owing to the lack of competition. Joan Cerrina, 36, of Mattituck, the women’s runner-up, was almost nine minutes behind the front-runner. 

. . . Lulla said she had only competed in one other triathlon this summer — the Danskin women’s triathlon, “the most competitive in the country,” winning her age group, and finishing “about 26th” in a field of 800.

“Margot, you stud! You looked good out there,” said a fellow competitor as Lulla, who works for a leverage buyout firm, smiled.

Turning to football, David MacGarva, the head coach, is playing a 4-4 defensive lineup this year, taking advantage of two big defensive tackles in Gus Gomez (230) and Gavin Menu (245). 

They’ll be backed by Paul Poutouves and Brandon Albert at inside linebacker. The defensive ends, who’ll play opposite the offensive tackles, will be Larry Keller (235) and John Hayes (225). Ron Taylor and Trevor Darrell hold down the outside linebacker positions. Todd Carberry and Kenny Brabant are the cornerbacks and Brendan Collins is the free safety. Marcus Borowsky is the quarterback.

Diane O’Donnell, the new coach of East Hampton High School’s new girls cross-country team, and her husband, Bill, were members of the second-place coed division team in Sunday’s 50-mile Ocean-to-Sound Relay in Nassau County. . . . Ms. O’Donnell, a top Long Island masters long-distance runner, is trying hard to gain recruits for the girls running program. She’s been given the okay to have eighth graders on the team.

September 24, 1992

Joe O’Connell and Genie Gavenchak won singles championships recently at the Dunes Racquet Club in Amagansett. Tony Tarmaro and Dan Brodsky won the men’s doubles title by defeating O’Connell and Marshall Wendell. The women’s doubles was won by Ann Clemente and Ruth Preven over Jane Singer and Ester Ansel. John Goodman, the club’s professional, noted that O’Connell has now won Dunes singles championships in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s.

A Costa Rican team that included a number of players who, with Deportivo Saprissa, won six Costa Rican national soccer titles in the 1970s, considered a world record, played an exhibition game with a local all-star team Saturday at East Hampton High School. Saprissa won 5-1. East Hampton’s lone goal, on a penalty kick, was scored by Jorge Contreras.

. . . The locals said that had he not been in Brazil, Pelé, the retired professional soccer great, who has a house in Springs, would have played with them.

Two of East Hampton High’s teams, field hockey and boys soccer, engaged in riveting battles on the high school’s turf field this past week, the boys versus Amityville, the League VI leader, and the girls versus Shoreham-Wading River, which came in as Division II’s runner-up.

The boys wound up losing 3-2 and the girls wound up winning 1-0, though, as aforesaid, both contests merited the spectators’ attention.

“That was a big win,” Robyn Mott, the field hockey coach, told her delighted charges after Saturday morning’s tilt with Shoreham, whose league record, as a result, dropped to 3-2 while East Hampton’s overall mark improved to 4-1. (The Bonackers were 2-1 in league play as of Monday.)

Cate Wicker was the heroine, banging in a cross from Emily Nicholson with somewhat less than a minute and a half left to play in regulation. 

It was the second win in two days for the Bonackers, who had on Friday shut out Babylon 3-0 in an away match. Lina Bistrian and E. Bistrian scored the goals with Maya Schultz and Wicker getting assists. Of that game Mott said, “We had 37 shots on goal, but only put three in. We’re working on finishing.”

As for the team’s sole loss, to Sayville, by a score of 2-1, she said, “It was 1-1 going into the half — they scored on a penalty corner with time expired. They scored again in the early minutes of the second, and while we dominated after that we couldn’t score.”

E. Bistrian, with her free hit lifts that sail over opponents’ heads, long strides, and deft ball-handling, was the best player on the field Saturday. “She does all the work while others get the glory,” Mott said, with a laugh. 

The teams matched up well. Shoreham was awarded three straight corner plays about 10 minutes into the first 30-minute half, but came away empty. Schultz broke in on the visitors’ goal midway through the period, but shot wide to the right. That was the Bonackers’ best chance in the first frame, which ended scoreless.

“We have to get moving,” Mott said during a timeout with 13:37 left on the clock. “We haven’t had a corner play in this half. We have to move the ball faster. It’s now or never.”

Apparently her charges listened, for they were awarded a penalty corner several minutes later, but Shoreham’s goalie made the save. 

East Hampton’s defenders meanwhile continued to feed Bistrian and other forwards after having poked the ball from attackers’ sticks, keeping the pressure on as the clock wound down. Finally, Wicker’s shot, which thudded against the backboard, gave East Hampton the victory, with 1:21 left to play.

“They were exhausted,” Mott said in the postgame huddle. “We were not, because we’ve done the extra 101 yards.”

In answer to a question, Mott said Maddie Schenck, a senior who is tending East Hampton’s goal, had been called on to make a couple of saves.

“In all my years of coaching this is one of my better all-around teams,” the coach added. “Our depth helps — everybody plays.”

As for the boys soccer game, played here last Thursday, Amityville, a well-organized team (as is East Hampton) broke the ice about two and a half minutes in as Oscar Hernandez, after beating an East Hampton defender, put a hard shot by Kurt Matthews, East Hampton’s junior goaltender.

Justin Carpio, a senior midfielder, was taken down in the box by an Amityville defender with 18 minutes to go in the half, and cashed in on the subsequent penalty kick, sending the ball into the left corner of the nets as the Warriors’ goalie dived toward the right.

Matthews, with the score tied at 1-1, was called on to make two diving saves about midway through the period, keeping the Bonackers in the game, but a high kick over the defense with 11:16 to play in the first period landed on the feet of Kymani Hines, the center forward, who sped toward Matthews, beating him easily from in close.

The visitors clearly had the best of it in the first half, though in the second East Hampton, which went into the break down 2-1, adjusted, dropping back rather than chasing the ball, and thus creating more chances. 

The change in tactics produced the hoped-for breaks, and, in the 55th minute, Wilmur Guzman capped one of them with a diving header that converted a right-to-left cross from Carpio and tied the score at 2-2.

The game was very evenly played from there on in. Manfred Barros, one of East Hampton’s defenders, kicked away a shot headed for a temporarily empty goal with about 17 minutes left to play, though Amityville was to capitalize soon after as Hernandez fired in a right-to-left shot through a crowd from about 15 yards out to wrest the lead back for the visitors, at 3-2.

East Hampton did not quit, however. Its defenders — Noah Gualtieri, Zane Musnicki, and Barros in particular — and its forwards continued to play spiritedly. Bonac’s last best chance came with 8:18 left when Alberto Gallegos, who had come off the bench, was stopped by Amityville’s keeper at point-blank range.

Afterward, McGovern, who has taken over the head-coaching reins from Rich King, said, “There’s a reason they’re in first place.”

As for East Hampton, “We’ve been playing well — our losses have been by one goal. We’re just not finishing. . . . We need a win.”

The team got it at Mount Sinai the next day. Miller Place, winless as of Monday, was to have played here Tuesday.