25 Years Ago in Bonac Sports: 05.30.19

May 12, 1994

“Well, did you win?” Mike Burns, the East Hampton High School boys track coach, was asked as he and his assistant, Kevin Barry, were on their way home from the school at about 8:30 Tuesday night.

“Did we win?” Burns replied, as if to ask such a question were the height of temerity. “By 30,” he said matter-of-factly, before he and Barry began to grin ear to ear.

That afternoon’s victory at Mattituck, by a convincing score of 86-58, had indeed been singular — Mattituck had not lost a league meet since 1987, the last time the Bonackers won the league title. Burns and Barry packed 53 competitors into the bus, which groaned under the weight, but the team sailed home, as it were, basking in the glow of the solid triumph that snapped the Tuckers’ 40-meet skein.

“It was all over before the relays,” Barry said. “Afterwards, the kids applauded Mike, and Mattituck’s kids, too, took their hats off to him. It was a good display of sportsmanship.”

“We were ahead all the way,” said Barry. “What broke their backs was our sweep in the 200, with Ron Gatlin, Milton Gomez, and Sean Knight. By that time the meet was more than half over. You have the 200, the 2-mile, the triple jump, and then the relays.”

The discus, usually among the first of the 18 events to be contested in a track meet, had to be held when the 200 came around. “They were playing a junior high ballgame, and since they knew Larry [Keller] could throw 150 feet or more, they held off,” said Barry. “They didn’t want a kid to be beaned.”



Janelle Kraus of Shelter Island, competing as an independent, ran what is believed to be the fastest girls 1,500 ever run on East Hampton High School’s track in the East Hampton-Mattituck meet Tuesday. The two-time county Class C cross-country champion won the event in five minutes and four seconds.

 

May 26, 1994

Finishing with a flourish, in the form of a three-shutout sweep of Hampton Bays, the East Hampton High School baseball team won the League Seven championship last week with a 16-2 record. It was the first time the Bonackers, coached by Jim Nicoletti, had won a league crown since 1991.

And it was the first time that Nicoletti, a 19-year veteran, could remember a Bonac team shutting out the opposition in three straight.

. . . With Guy Ficeto allowing just two hits, it was East Hampton 6, Hampton Bays 0 in game one, played here on May 18. The Bonackers won by a like score in game two at Hampton Bays last Thursday, with Ross Gload pitching a one-hitter and striking out 13. And on Friday, again at Hampton Bays, Steve Quick brought the curtain down on the Baymen with a two-hit 13-0 shutout.

. . . As of Monday, Gload not only led the county in home runs, with 15, and runs batted in, with 52, but also led the East Hampton pitching staff with a 6-0 record and a 1.46 earned run average. Ficeto and Quick were each at 5-1, Ficeto with a 2.22 e.r.a., and Quick with an e.r.a. of 2.63. As of Monday, Henry Meyer was the county’s third-leading hitter with a .520 average, shared with two others, was second in the home run department, with 7, and was second to Gload in runs batted in, with 33.



Saying he had to “face the facts” — to wit that Southampton Town would never smile on a level of sports car racing that might make the Bridgehampton Race Circuit viable — the owner, Robert M. Rubin, has presented plans to build two 18-hole golf courses, one public and one private, and some houses on the high-rolling 521-acre site, which commands views of Peconic Bay and sits atop a freshwater moraine.