The 8-1-1 East Hampton High School boys soccer team, as it turned out, finished as the runner-up to 9-1-0 Amityville in league play, by 1 point, and was accorded the fourth seed in the county’s Class A tournament, behind Half Hollow Hills West (9-1-0), Amityville, and Harborfields (7-1-1).
Consequently, East Hampton will play a first-round home game here tomorrow at 4 p.m. with the winner of the Hauppauge-Islip matchup -- Hauppauge being the fifth seed and Islip the last among the tourney’s 12 teams.
The semifinals are to be played Wednesday at the higher seeds, and the final is to be played at Diamond in the Pines in Coram on Saturday, April 24, at 5 p.m.
East Hampton’s girls swimming team, which finished the League III season with one loss, to the league champion, Sayville-Bayport, is to have a home league-championship meet tomorrow with Lindenhurst at the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter at 5 p.m. The other league-championship pairings tomorrow will be Harborfields at Sayville and West Babylon at West Islip.
Also tomorrow, and Saturday and Monday, the conference individual girls tennis tournament is to be played at Shoreham-Wading River High School -- from 10 a.m. tomorrow and Saturday, and from 3 p.m. on Monday. East Hampton’s first doubles team, Juliana Barahona and Sandrine Becht, and its second team, Eva Wojtusiak and Chiara Bedini, are expected to fare well.
Today, weather permitting, East Hampton’s very young but very good golf team is scheduled to play its final league match at the Rock Hill Country Club in Manorville, with Pierson and Center Moriches.
Rich King’s squad, which includes James Bradley, a freshman, Trevor Stachecki, a sophomore, J.P. Amaden, a sophomore, Nico Horan-Puglia, a freshman, Juan Palacios, a freshman, Aiden Cooper, a senior, Charles Goldsmith, a senior, and Carter Dickinson, an eighth grader, are taking a 6-0 record into the finale.
The Bonackers have beaten their perennial rival, Southampton, twice, by a scant 2 strokes the first time they met, but by 11 in their second meeting. The team’s aggregate score of 194 on Rock Hill’s tree-lined par-36 front nine in Friday’s match with Westhampton Beach and William Floyd “was our best -- by far,” said King.
Hesitant when asked to compare this team with excellent East Hampton ones of the past -- “because I really don’t know all the history” -- King allowed as how, “considering their ages, they are very good.”
Also today, East Hampton’s girls cross-country team, which, given Ava Engstrom’s recent return from quarantining, numbers the requisite five, is to run in the division meet at Sunken Meadow State Park in Kings Park.
”We’re even stronger this year,” Diane O’Donnell, the team’s coach, said during a telephone conversation Tuesday morning.
By all rights, the Bonackers should have finished the league season at 4-0, but a subsequent Section XI ruling changed the defending county Class B champion’s record to 2-2 given that East Hampton, in Engstrom’s Covid-caused absence, didn’t have five on the starting line in the meets with Mount Sinai and Amityville.
”We were all disappointed not to have been the league champs,” said the coach, who added that “because of Covid a lot of other teams were scoring four this season. We did so at the suggestion of the other coaches, but there were complaints about doing that in other leagues, though not in ours. So, we finished second, to Miller Place,” one of the teams the Bonackers beat. “We’re back to five now and we’re pretty confident we’ll beat everybody else again on Thursday.”
O’Donnell’s “five musketeers” are Dylan Cashin, Ryleigh O’Donnell, Emma Hren, Engstrom, and Bella Tarbet.
”They’re very close, and competitive, though not so much with each other,” O’Donnell said, adding that she hoped the girls could win another county championship at Sunken Meadow on April 22, as they had in the fall of 2019.
As for her low numbers, O’Donnell said she had tried to recruit more runners this past winter but had not been able to because of parental wariness when it came to the coronavirus. She hopes to have more than the requisite five come the fall.
”There are always good junior high runners around,” she said. “Though some will say, ‘I like volleyball,’ or ‘I like swimming,’ or ‘I’m running now, but I hate it.’ That happens a lot, but I’ll keep working on it.”