Taking up most of one wall in her office, Krista Brooks, East Hampton High’s girls basketball coach, has stats from all the games so that her players can see where they stand vis-à-vis the positions they play.
Asked Friday if they tended to avert their eyes, East Hampton having won no games this winter, the quiet-spoken coach, a former Hunter College power forward, “but long ago,” said no, that the stats, in which she really didn’t put all that much store, confirmed the improvement she’d seen.
“Everybody’s stats improved from last year to this,” she said. “We definitely improved, as players, as a team. The only issue was turnovers. We’ve got to eliminate them. They definitely affected us down the line — we need to improve in that department.”
The 0-20 season (which included a 1-point loss to Hampton Bays and a high game score of 44) notwithstanding, Brooks’s outlook is bright given the junior high numbers in East Hampton Town — the two dozen or so on the East Hampton Middle School’s roster had squared off in lively fashion during the halftime break at a game of Bonac alumnae and alumni at the high school the day before.
“The program is coming back,” she said. “This is the first year that we had a lot of freshmen come out for tryouts. There were at least 12 or more on the jayvee, about 80 percent of the team, and three on the varsity, which is a good indicator.”
Those freshmen — Claire McGovern, Baye Bogetti, and Caroline DiSunno — ought to be “very productive” next year, said the coach, who is looking for her two seniors-to-be, her daughter, Paige Cordone, and Eva Wojtusiak, to take on leadership roles. The varsity would be very young next year, but with such a baseline, things should be looking up, she said, in the next few years.
In the off-season she would schedule open gyms and try to schedule some games and, possibly, some clinics.
There was an East End league last summer, made up of six schools, including East Hampton, Southampton, Greenport, Southold, and Hampton Bays. “It might happen again,” Brooks said. “If no, we’ll try to get games.”
The main thing, she said, was that her players “shoot the year round . . . if they’re not playing, shoot. We took a lot of good shots this season and a lot didn’t fall,” she said with a smile.
The defense, an energetic, shifting zone, had been good, especially in the season’s first half, but poor shooting had hurt, “and we didn’t rebound as well as we should have.”
The players and the parents had, she added, been very supportive — her players, namely Alden Powers, Emma Silvera, Cordone, Wojtusiak, Tia Weiss, Kailey Marmeno, Ashley Peters, DiSunno, and McGovern, having overseen last Thursday’s alumnae/alumni game, which the Maroon team, Brooks’s team, had won 56-49. Her players had also taken charge at the team’s Pink Game that raised money for a family here affected by a cancer diagnosis.
Brooks is one of a number of coaches here — Joe McKee (football), Vinny Alversa (baseball), Annemarie Cangiolosi Brown (softball), Nicole Ficeto (field hockey), Josh Brussell (boys volleyball), and Jim Stewart and Ethan Mitchell (wrestling) come immediately to mind in this regard, not to mention Craig Brierley, whose boys swimming team just won its second straight league championship — working vigorously to assure that their teams remain strong year in, year out.
One of the above-named, Stewart, said Friday that two of his wrestlers, Santi Maya, a sophomore, at 113 pounds, and Nick Lombardo, a junior, at 195, had placed in the recent League V tournament at Eastport-South Manor High School, Maya finishing third and Lombardo, a first-year wrestler, fourth. In all, he and Mitchell had taken 20 competitors to that meet, which was won by
Hauppauge, the eventual county team champion.
Stewart and Mitchell are overseeing 30 youngsters in the Town Recreation Department’s youth wrestling practices at the high school on Monday and Tuesday nights, from 6 to 8, and Stewart again is helping Steve Redlus coach the East Hampton Middle School team, which, Stewart says, numbers 45, as it did last year.
“We’re trying to get as many coaches involved at every level, so that we’re all on the same page,” Stewart said.
At a recent three-way meet at East Moriches, “we had the biggest team by far,” he said, adding that “we’ve outgrown the wrestling room on the ground floor — we hope to be back in the basement soon.”
The middle school team is to play host to a triangular match — its sole home match of the season — at the high school Monday afternoon.