The Katy’s Courage 5K, the first road race of the season, which usually brings out a number of Pierson and East Hampton High School cross-country and long-distance runners, is to be held Saturday morning in Sag Harbor. The race, whose start-finish line is on Water Street, will be contested rain or shine starting at 8:30.
Then, at 2 p.m. that day, the two newly built turf Little League fields off Stephen Hand’s Path in East Hampton are to be dedicated.
The road race memorializes the late Katy Stewart, the daughter of James and Brigid Collins Stewart, who died of a rare form of liver cancer a dozen years ago at the age of 12. “May Katy’s courage, strength, determination, and spirit be a lesson to us all,” Deanna Lattanzio, a friend of Katy’s, wrote at the time.
Besides funding pediatric cancer research at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, the Katy’s Courage Foundation also underwrites scholarships awarded to local students who, in her father’s words, “exemplify remarkable courage, kindness, and empathy, as did Katy during her all too brief but exceptional lifetime.”
Check-in for the 3.1-mile race through the Village of Sag Harbor will be from 7 to 8:15 a.m.
Another beneficiary of the race is the Katy’s Kids@CMEE Center for Grieving Children. That program, begun in 2015, “offers play and expressive peer support opportunities for East End children and adolescents in collaboration with the Children’s Museum of the East End” in Bridgehampton.
As for East Hampton’s new all-weather Little League fields, John Grisch, the East Hampton Little League organization’s president, said this week that mild weather in the winter had led to the public-private project being brought in by the LandTek Group on time.
He added that he thought the combination of Shelly Schaffer’s Hub 44 building with its six hitting and pitching tunnels and the artificial turf fields to be dedicated Saturday will boost East Hampton’s baseball and softball programs. “It used to be,” he said, “that when Little League tryouts were held in the spring, the kids hadn’t touched a bat or a ball in eight months. We hope to put up more District 36 banners because of Hub 44 and the new fields.”
Saturday’s dedication ceremony — there will be hot dogs and hamburgers, Grisch said — is to be followed by four opening-season Little League National (11 and 12-year-old) and American (9 and 10-year-old) division baseball and softball games.
At 2:30, it will be the Montauk Fire Department versus the East Hampton Town P.B.A. in National division baseball, and the Amagansett Fire Department against Macrae Skye in National division softball.
American division baseball and softball games pairing Fifth & Dune with M&R Deli and Pipemasters with East Hampton Kiwanis are to follow.
Little League has “over 400” participants at present, Grisch said, more than it’s ever had.
The organization has also taken on the introductory T-ball program for first and second graders that Mark McKee used to oversee. The Saturday morning T-ball sessions, under Jeff Tupper, would begin “toward the end of April or at the beginning of May,” Grisch said.
The sight lines at the new fields were terrific, he added. Twenty-five-foot-high nets serve as the backstops and extend down the first and third-base lines.