June 8, 2000
Crystal Winter, an East Hampton High School sophomore, broke her own school record in the 400-meter hurdles in last weekend’s state qualifier meet, placing second in 66.9 seconds, thus bettering her previous mark of 69.3. Diane O’Donnell, one of her coaches, said Winter will not go to the state meet because she hadn’t met the state standard of 65.0, but O’Donnell is quite sure Winter, who began hurdling this season, will next year.
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Kyle Russell and Ben Turnbull will be carrying Bonac’s banner to the New York State track meet in Syracuse this weekend, and the odds are good, say their coaches, that they will come back as state champions — Russell in the shot-put and Turnbull in the 3,000-meter steeplechase.
A diamond in the rough in the latter event, Turnbull placed third over all and was the first Class B finisher in the state qualifier meet’s steeplechase at Longwood High School last weekend, breaking Sean Myhr’s school record and giving Bill Herzog and Kevin Barry reason to hope that, with crash courses in hurdling and spanning water jumps this week, he’ll win the state steeplechase among the Class B competitors in 9 minutes and 40 seconds or less.
June 15, 2000
Turning in what their coaches Bill Herzog and Kevin Barry called “incredible” performances, Ben Turnbull and Kyle Russell, East Hampton High’s representatives in the New York State track meet, held last weekend in Syracuse, came back with medals.
Russell, who became the third East Hampton representative — Sandy Fleischman, in tennis, and Gary Cowell, in triple jump, being the previous ones — to win an individual event in state competition, took the state Class B shot-put championship, besting his Mount Sinai rival, Alex Kretz, with a heave of 53 feet 10 1/2 inches.
Turnbull placed third among the Class B runners in the 3,200-meter race Friday, and followed up with a second-place finish in the 3,000-meter steeplechase Saturday.
He set school records in both events, running the 3,200 in 9 minutes and 24.87 seconds and completing the steeplechase — a grueling event featuring five long three-foot-high barriers and two eight-foot-long water jumps, one fronted by a barrier — in 9:55.18. It was only the fourth time Turnbull had raced in the 3,200, and only the third time that he’d done the steeplechase.
. . . It was quite a week for Russell, dubbed “the Gentle Giant” by East Hampton’s athletic director, Chris Tracey. On Thursday, as he was en route to Syracuse, the imposing senior was named as the male recipient of the Paul Yuska Award, the athletic awards dinner’s top honor, and he was also named the most valuable player in three sports — football, boys basketball, and boys spring track.
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Two rivals vied Saturday for the Montauk Triathlon championship with the younger of the two, Brooks Clark, 33, of West Chester, Pa., a former pro, emerging as the winner by one minute over Eben Jones, 39, of New Canaan, Conn., who used to be the top amateur in the United States and, at the ages of 30 and 35, won world age-group titles.
