Sports

Things were looking up on the local diamonds last week, from Little Leaguers up to the Hamptons Collegiate Baseball League’s Sag Harbor Whalers, who are hosting a number of day camps and clinics this summer.

Lots of bass between 30 and 50 pounds continue to be caught and released off Montauk. Finding fish in the new smaller slot size has been a challenge at times. Plenty of bluefish are mixed in too.

James Bradley, 16, has qualified for the U.S.G.A.’s national junior amateur in South Carolina in late July, and Michael Clifford-Levy, 15, won the Long Island Golf Association’s boys championship in Smithtown on June 21.

East Hampton’s 11-and-12-year-old baseball and softball all-star teams are on quests to win District 36 tournaments, and good things are expected.

On the night of June 14 almost 100 East Hampton High School athletes, which is to say about half the class of 2023, were honored at a senior awards dinner in the school’s cafeteria.

Two natives of Ethiopia now living in the Bronx were the male and female winners of Saturday’s 44th Shelter Island 10K. Earlier that day, a native of Belarus who lives in Southampton topped the men’s field in the Beacon of Hope 5K at the Montauk Lighthouse.

Junior lifeguard training for children 9 to 14 begins this weekend in East Hampton, Amagansett, and Montauk. The programs not only give kids the training they need to become lifeguards in the future, but they also teach them “the skills to be safe in the ocean,” according to the East Hampton Town website.

Given all of the supersize stripers now in Montauk, it’s still not too late to enter the popular Montauk Surf Masters Spring Shootout, which concludes on July 9. Bigger fish are clearly on the feed here.

This is the best time of year to observe chimney swifts locally as they burst through the skies over our villages. You’ll never see a chimney swift land, or even come close to street level. In their daily circuits, they can fly 500 miles a day in pursuit of something like 12,000 flying insects.

The Shelter Island 10K, in its 44th year, and the Beacon of Hope 5K in Montauk, in its second, are to be contested on Saturday. Runners could double-dip if they wanted to.

Recently here, the East Hampton Middle School baseball team enjoyed an undefeated season, the youth lacrosse program continued to have success, and, in Little League play, two no-hitters were pitched.

“A lot of big bass to over 50 pounds are around,” observed Capt. Savio Mizzi of Fishhooker Charters. “Fishing is literally off the hook.”

There were repeats in last weekend’s Montauk races, with William Huffman of New York City’s powerful Full Throttle triathlon team winning Saturday’s Robert J. Aaron memorial triathlon, and with Ryan Fowkes, coming off a great cross-country and track season at George Washington University, winning Sunday’s Montauk Mile.

From the softball diamond to the track, a trip down a sporting memory lane.

Seven Black South Fork basketball coaches, outstanding mentors from Bridgehampton, Southampton, and East Hampton, who, while growing up, were in turn mentored by outstanding coaches of a previous generation, were honored at the Bridgehampton Child Care and Recreational Center on Saturday for their “many efforts which have changed lives on and off the court.”

Tim Garvin, the South Fork Country Club’s popular director of golf and club administration, was recently honored by the Professional Golfers’ Association’s metropolitan section for having been an outstanding mentor to more than a dozen assistant professionals.

Out in Montauk, anglers for striped bass and bluefish are returning to the docks with sore arms. Porgy fishing has also been consistent, with fish up to three pounds.

Over the objections of Ed Collum, Kate Collum Gibbons, and other members of their family, which has lived next to East Hampton High School since before it was built in 1970, the East Hampton School Board on Tuesday resolved that lights will be installed at the turf athletic field. According to the board’s resolution, Musco LED towers would be installed at the edges of the field, allowing athletes to play games into the evening hours.

The Robert J. Aaron Memorial Mighty Montauk Triathlon and the Montauk Mile are to be contested this weekend, the triathlon Saturday morning at 7:30, the run on Sunday starting at 10:30.

It happened here, sports fans.

Jiu-jitsu is now a full-fledged elective class at the Ross School in East Hampton, taught in trimesters of 10 weeks at a time by Virva Hinnemo of Springs.

The Bridgehampton-Ross School baseball team, in only its second season as a varsity squad since its return from a 43-year hiatus, is set to play Chapel Field High School in upstate Saugerties on Saturday in a regional playoff game.

“Oh man, there are striped bass and bluefish everywhere,” Paul Apostolides said from behind his countertop. “The action has been truly fantastic. More people need to take advantage of it.”

Meredith Spolarich, a Pierson (Sag Harbor) High School senior competing for East Hampton High School’s girls track-and-field team, won the Suffolk County Class B pentathlon championship last Thursday in Kings Park on the strength of first-place finishes in the high jump, long jump, and shot-put.

The Bonackers’ Meredith Spolarich amassed 1,554 points, more than any of her competitors, in the pentathlon field events at Ward Melville High School on May 21.

On a “Big Day,” birding is just about numbers. It is spent, dawn to dusk, in search of birds; the goal to see as many different species as possible. May 13 was Global Big Day. The goal is always to find 100 species: We’ve never gotten there.

As the Bonackers battle on in the tennis playoffs, the Ross School Ravens won the county’s small schools championship last week, defeating the top seed, Bayport-Blue Point.

The top-seeded Pierson (Sag Harbor) High School baseball team was ousted from the county playoffs 6-3 by the Port Jefferson Royals in the May 19 finale contested before a large crowd at Sag Harbor’s Mashashimuet Park.

Gator-sized bluefish thrashed about near the surface one day; two days later it was spunky striped bass.

Seeded sixth in the county's Class A double-elimination bracket, East Hampton beat Comsewogue 13-5 here on May 17. It was possibly the first playoff win since the Ross Gload days of the 1990s. Bonac exited the playoffs the next day.