As of earlier this week, East Hampton High’s boys tennis team, arguably one of the top three teams in Suffolk County, was 2-2, the losses, to Ward Melville and Bayport-Blue Point, nonleague opponents, having come in truncated matches that were limited to single pro sets.
In the Bonackers’ first match of the season, they lost 6-1 at Ward Melville, but, because it had taken three hours to get there owing to a brush fire along the L.I.E., 10-game pro sets were played. Three were very close.
On March 23, again with pro sets being contested, eight-game sets this time, Bayport-Blue Point defeated East Hampton 4-3, leading this writer to say to Kevin McConville, East Hampton’s coach, that it was the best 2-2 team he’d heard of.
Meanwhile, McConville’s charges began the League IV season last week by bageling Southampton and Westhampton Beach, 7-0 matches in which the Bonackers did not drop a set.
Against Westhampton here last Thursday, McConville played Max Astilean, Nick Cooper, Kiefer Mitchell, and Henry Cooper at singles, and Jagger Cohen with Cameron Mitchell, Armando Rangel with Miguel Garcia, and Chris Pilarski with Jesse Cohen at doubles.
The lineup had been somewhat different in the match on March 28 with Southampton, when McConville had Nick Cooper play one, Kiefer Mitchell two, and Rangel three. The Mariners forfeited at fourth singles and at third doubles. Cohen, “an excellent doubles player who raises the level of his partners,” played at first doubles with Henry Cooper that day, and Jesse Cohen, Jagger’s older brother, played at second doubles with Garcia.
Astilean, the hard-hitting senior defending conference champion, drew a worthy opponent in Westhampton’s number-one, a higher-rated player than he, but won out 6-4, 6-3, a victory that McConville said raised Astilean’s U.T.R. (Universal Tennis Rating) somewhat.
Concerning these ratings, which are said to be more accurate than those that have been used by the United States Tennis Association, East Hampton’s coach said that “in the summer, every Sunday, U.T.R. tournaments are played at the Sportime Club in Amagansett. Opponents are paired according to their U.T.R. numbers. You might, for instance, find a 10-year-old boy playing against an older woman who has the same rating. . . . Max, at 8.2 or 8.3, is our highest-rated player. Ward Melville’s top two are 9-somethings. There’s a kid on Commack’s team, a junior, who’s an 11.3. He beat everybody on Long Island last year. Commack lost a number of good players, but their coach, Jimmy Delevante, who used to play professionally and is a full-time teaching pro now, is a great coach. I would say his team is the county’s best, with Ward Melville second, and us three, assuming we can beat Hills East here in a nonleaguer on May 1.”
In speaking of East Hampton’s 4-3 nonleague loss to Bayport-Blue Point, McConville said, “Westhampton beat Bayport-Blue Point 7-0. Does that make sense?”
“After we squeegeed,” the coach said of the rain-delayed game, “it was 6 o’clock. Also, I played three jayvee players that day because some of my varsity guys were at a school event.”
Westhampton is the second-best team in the league, McConville said, though the Ross School, which is to play here on April 27, “has a very good coach, Marcelo Reda, who formerly was the director at Future Stars. They’re good at first singles and first doubles. They’re 4-0, with wins over Miller Place, Mattituck, Mount Sinai, and Center Moriches.”
“Actually, my kids still want to play Ward Melville again,” McConville said in signing off.