January 12, 1995
The Pierson High School boys basketball team, which has been drubbed twice so far in League Seven action, pulled the upset of the season Tuesday by knocking off the Southampton Mariners 75-74.
The stunning come-from-behind win, accompanied by a cheering, clapping clamor in Pierson’s gym, served as a reminder of just what it is that makes high school basketball a magical experience.
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Barry Cox, East Hampton High’s girls basketball coach, works in gym classes here with 11 youngsters whose motor skills are impaired to varying degrees. A certified adapted physical education instructor, Cox works with some “one-on-one, with others in groups of three or four. With almost all of them I’ve seen a tremendous amount of progress, both in physical movement, self-awareness, and in sociability.”
Adapted physical educators, he added, work closely with parents, doctors, and therapists, “for you have to work with self-esteem too.”
. . . “No,” Cox replied in answer to a question, “there’s no reason a handicap can block you — what disabled athletes are doing nowadays is incredible. . . . My eighth grader with spina bifida would like a racing wheelchair. He’s interested in competing — in the shot-put and discus too.”
His sixth grader with cerebral palsy also needed a competition wheelchair, he said. “I’d like,” he said, “to see all of my kids compete.”
January 19, 1995
Led by Al Mothes and J.R. Wolfram, the East Hampton-Pierson bowling team came through big time at the East Hampton Bowl on Jan. 11, overwhelming the three-time defending league champion, Riverhead, 28-5.
The heady win vaulted East Hampton into first place in the league standings by 14.5 points and avenged a 20-13 loss to Riverhead on Dec. 13. “You should have seen them when they left — they were rather silent,” said Frank Libert, a father of one of Bonac’s bowlers.
The Bonac team, which includes Pierson students among its starters — Wolfram and Nick Mazzeo — thus is in position to win outright its first league title in 31 years. In 1981, under Joe Ambrose, the team shared the championship with William Floyd. Banners on the East Hampton High School gymnasium wall attest to league championships in 1962 and ’63.