Sports

Friday was Spirit Night at Pierson (Sag Harbor) High School, and, fittingly, its basketball teams performed spiritedly in defeating Greenport-Southold and Center Moriches, while the East Hampton girls routed Smithtown Christian.

“This is the highest point total and placement in a league championship in the 18 winters I’ve been coaching,” Yani Cuesta, the veteran coach of East Hampton High’s girls winter track team, said. “So many stepped up to make this happen.”

East Hampton High School’s boys basketball team remained at the top of Division IV as of Monday given its two lopsided wins over Eastport-South Manor and Miller Place last week, and more from the week in sports.

The solitude that Kevin Shattenkirk enjoys at his house in Sag Harbor, on a three-acre parcel mostly surrounded by a nature preserve, is a far cry from his chosen occupation as a professional hockey player.

Looking for a walk and a challenge, I went to the Mulvihill Preserve in Noyac to hunt for wild chickadees. Hard? No. A unique reason to be in the woods? Yes. A winter activity for a winter bird.

Playing aggressively, and with everybody getting into the scoring act, the East Hampton High School boys basketball team took it to the Mount Sinai Mustangs in the early going of their clash here on Jan. 10, but ended up losing to the visitors by 5 points. Two days later, they redeemed themselves with a 60-57 win at Bayport-Blue Point.

On Saturday, teams of birders spread out across New York State to count freshwater ducks, saltwater ducks, and geese for the annual New York State Ornithological Association waterfowl count. Locally, from Shinnecock Inlet to Montauk Point, seven groups of birders faced winds and temperatures that were stubbornly in the mid-30s to peer into our ponds, bays, and coves. They located 31 species of waterfowl for a total of 10,451 birds. More than half that number, 5,303, were the familiar Canada goose.

“It was an extraordinarily competitive meet, and our athletes performed at a very high level. We’re looking strong as we head for the states and nationals,” Tom Cohill, head coach of the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter’s youth swim team, the Hurricanes, said on returning from a large regional Winterfest meet at the University of Maryland last weekend.

Two school relay records were set over the weekend by runners on Yani Cuesta’s East Hampton High School girls winter track team.

Sag Harbor may have a towering front line, while Bridgehampton rarely fields a player over 6 feet, but with these two teams it’s always a barnburner, and so it was Friday for three quarters.

Three years ago at this time, East Hampton High’s wrestling team, then coached by Jim Stewart with Ethan Mitchell as his assistant, won its first match in five years, edging West Babylon 46-41 thanks to Alex Vanegas’s win by pin at 145 pounds in the penultimate bout, marking the beginning of a resurgence in the sport’s fortunes here. 

Doug De Groot first had the idea of building a padel court accessible to the public here about eight years ago. Though it has taken a while — a puzzling permit denial prevented him from finishing one last year at the Buckskill Tennis Club, which he owns with his wife, Kathryn — he now, with Southampton Village’s blessing, has one up at the Triangle Tennis Club on Hampton Road.