The year 2023 began with Shelly Snyder Schaffer’s gift to East Hampton Town’s young people in the form of a large building abutting her family’s Round Swamp Farm that houses six pitching/batting “tunnels” managed by Vinny Alversa, who coaches East Hampton High School’s varsity baseball team.
“I wish there’d been something like this when I was growing up,” said Alversa, who remembers all too well the long drives to work out indoors in Bellport after school and on weekends, when Hub 44 opened.
What with youngsters’ baseball and softball skills being honed by Hub 44 instructors year round, and the two lighted all-weather fields at Stephen Hand’s Path that the Little League organization dedicated in the spring, East Hampton High School’s baseball and softball programs will undoubtedly be strengthened, just as the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter Hurricanes, who, in March repeated as the Y state champions, have strengthened the high school’s swimming teams. The boys soccer team, a county semifinalist this fall, has similarly been benefiting from youth feeder programs here, and the high school’s girls team, one of the few Bonac squads that has yet to compete on an equal footing with its opponents, is expected to soon.
Serendipitously, this surge in youngsters’ athletic development here — not to forget Biddy basketball and KID wrestling — has coincided with the hiring of Kathy Masterson, who turned Westhampton Beach into a sports power across the board during a 16-year tenure as the district’s athletic director. At the state’s athletic directors’ conference in Saratoga Springs in March, she was feted as Suffolk’s athletic director of the year, an accolade accorded her by her fellow A.D.s. Things have gone swimmingly sports-wise since Masterson took over the reins. East Hampton’s coaches have been singing her praises since her arrival, and when it comes to the games she is omnipresent.
Of course, it’s not all about winning, as presumably Masterson would agree. No less a winner than Carl Johnson, who was inducted this year into the state’s basketball Hall of Fame, and who has won three state championships as a player and four as a coach — apparently an unequaled record — said last spring that he “never talked to my junior high girls basketball team about winning.” Instead, “I told them it was about working toward getting better, about team goals. They came every day with smiles on their faces — they were happy to be there. They gave me 100 percent, and I resolved to give them 200 percent.”
Along the same line, Tom Cohill, head coach of the state-champion Hurricanes, said he and his fellow coaches had not gone up to the state meet in Buffalo “with the expectation of winning — we just wanted the kids to do their absolute best. And, obviously, they did.”
There were other winning teams here in 2023, teams that made it to the playoffs, including the boys basketball team; the baseball team — for the first time, perhaps, since 1994; the boys tennis team, which qualified eight of its 10 starters for the county individual tournament; the boys soccer team, which lost in penalty kicks to Huntington in a county semifinal, and the 10-4 field hockey team, one of whose midfielders, Emma McGrory, was recently cited by Newsday as an all-Long Island player.
Dan White, who has since returned to coach at Pierson (Sag Harbor) High School after having overseen East Hampton’s boys basketball teams for seven years, said following the season that he’d never before had three of his players — Luke Reese (basketball), Jack Dickinson (baseball), and Finn Byrnes (football) in this case — go on to play at the varsity level in college.
Moreover, eight other East Hampton senior student-athletes signed last month to play sports in college: Luke Castillo (lacrosse, Salve Regina), Melina Sarlo (lacrosse, Hofstra), Katie Kuneth (softball, SUNY Geneseo), McGrory (field hockey, Stonehill College), Thinley Edwards (lacrosse, Oberlin), Ryleigh O’Donnell (cross-country and track, Emory), Jack Cooper (lacrosse, Providence), and Charlie Corwin (lacrosse, Dickinson).
Another senior who competed and excelled under Bonac’s banner in the year past was Meredith Spolarich, an all-around athlete from Sag Harbor, who in the winter teamed up with Leslie Samuel of Bridgehampton, Melina Sarlo, and Ryleigh O’Donnell to top the county in the 4-by-400 indoor relay, and who in the spring won a county pentathlon championship. In the old days, Spolarich, who now is at the University of Virginia, could well have been a five-sport athlete — in field hockey, basketball, winter track, spring track, and softball. She said during an interview at The Star that she’d also like to try tennis and lacrosse too.
Snowboarding, alpine skiing, ice hockey, girls flag football, golf, padel, stand-up paddleboarding, and sailing were also in the news this year.
Cole Brauer, 29, who graduated from East Hampton High in 2012, became the first female ever to win the Bermuda One-Two sailing race, which began with a single-handed 668-nautical-mile leg from Newport, R.I., to St. George’s and ended with a double-handed return to Newport. She beat her nearest single-handed competitor to Bermuda by 18 hours.
Adam Nagler, 56, of Santa Barbara, Calif., who was taught how to stand-up paddleboard by Scott Bradley here in 2006, paddled into Vandeveer Marina’s launching ramp one Saturday afternoon in September looking no worse for the wear after having logged 1,000 waterborne miles spanning Myrtle Beach, S.C., Martha’s Vineyard, Newport, and Three Mile Harbor. It was the fifth 1,000-miler Nagler had undertaken to raise money to support mental health.
Noah Avallone, a 16-year-old part-time Montauker who has won numerous age-group championships throughout the country in snowboarding (not to mention surfing), has been invited to compete in the Youth Olympic Games to be held in South Korea in the coming month. Kieran Hildreth, a 15-year-old Montauker, pretty much swept to U14 alpine skiing championships in Vermont, Lake Placid, and Canada, and, in golf, James Bradley, a 16-year-old East Hamptoner who’s now at the Altitude Academy in Port St. Lucie, Fla., qualified in the spring for the U.S. junior amateur golf tournament, and Michael Clifford Levy, 15, an East Hampton Golf Club member, won the Long Island Golf Association’s boys championship.
Masterson having reacted favorably to a student petition, girls flag football made its debut at the high school for the first time in the spring. Interestingly, two East Hampton High grads, Teresa Schirrippa and Crystal Winter, have represented the United States in international women’s flag football competitions. Winter, who attended some of the team’s practices, said “the sport is growing like wildfire — even my 4-year-old daughter plays.”
Back to golf, some of the best collegiate golfers in the country vied in the Maidstone Club’s fourth 54-hole intercollegiate tournament over the course of two sunny days in October, breezing through the beautiful links-style course, which can bite you if the wind is blowing, the head pro, Eden Foster, said.
Luke Powell of U.C.L.A. won it. The runner-up was Nick Dunlap, of the University of Alabama, the national amateur champion. “They loved it,” Foster said afterward. “Multiple players and coaches said it was the best event they’ve played in their college careers.”
East Hampton’s homecoming football game at the end of October was rendered all the more dramatic owing to the fact that the team’s head coach, Joe McKee, was struck by a truck that morning as he was walking across Newtown Lane with flowers the seniors were to give to their mothers.
Jumping up at the last second so that he wouldn’t be dragged under, McKee “dodged a bullet,” said his elder brother, Bill. Fittingly, East Hampton won the game 35-14, Alex Davis’s two 75-yard touchdowns electrifying the crowd.
Masterson kept the hospitalized coach informed periodically as to how things were going and took a photo of the jubilant players at the end and sent it to him.
A moment later, looking up from her phone, she said to them, “He says he’s so proud of you.”
And we’ll leave it at that.