Sports

The tennis team bageled Southampton 7-0, the swimming team defeated West Babylon 80-62 at the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter, the field hockey and girls volleyball teams cruised to easy wins, and the girls cross-country team placed second in the varsity A race in the Tom Knipfing invitational at Fireman’s Field in Ridge.

Many of the 17 grandchildren of the late Harry de Leyer, the Dutch-born horseman who, with a former plow horse, Snowman, scaled the heights of the show-jumping world, have ridden, but only one, Jason de Leyer, one of Andre and Christine de Leyer’s twin sons, is riding and showing at the moment.

The oysters I received 16 months ago, which barely filled a half-pint container at that point, had grown by Sept. 21 to over five inches in length in many cases. After cleaning, culling, and sorting, I had well over a bushel basket of tasty bivalves.

Ordinarily, fall would not be considered a time for ice hockey, but East End kids are playing the sport pretty much the year round now, primarily in rinks up the Island, though there’s hope, according to Chris Minardi, that a regulation-size rink under a bubble may be put up in Calverton soon.

A number of East Hampton High School teams, boys soccer, boys volleyball, boys and girls cross-country, field hockey, and girls tennis among them, continued to be competitive last week, with the fall season nearing the midway mark.

The homecoming football game was all you’d want it to be, at least for a while, before Rocky Point proved to be the better team.

The East Hampton High School boys soccer team looked good in its League IV opener versus Shoreham-Wading River and in its homecoming game with Stony Brook, and boys volleyball and boys cross-country each won their homecoming matchups.

East Hampton High’s female swimming, cross-country, field hockey, tennis, and volleyball squads did well in homecoming contests.

For those lovers of crab, it’s not too late to catch some. Good quantities can still be had over the next few weeks in various creeks, coves, and harbors, before they burrow in the mud and sand for their winter slumber.

A large group of tree swallows is called a gulp, which proves ornithologists are not without humor. Before the leaves change, gulps of swallows crowd our beaches. At Mecox Inlet, Sagaponack Pond, and the dunes that circle Napeague Harbor, hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of tree swallows collect.

The Bonac field hockey and boys volleyball teams were 3-0 as of Monday, while the footballers drubbed Wyandanch 50-8.

William Huffman, a 29-year-old member of the Full Throttle team that’s based at Chelsea Piers in New York City, won the Steve Tarpinian Memorial Mighty Hamptons Triathlon at Noyac’s Long Beach Sunday morning, topping a field of 314 finishers. 

There are plenty of bluefish by Jessup’s Neck, porgy fishing is solid in many areas, including the east side of Gardiner’s Island. Sea bass too, are mixed in the catch in the deeper water. Farther offshore, tuna — bigeye, bluefin, and yellowfin — remain plentiful, and at the Cartwright grounds south of Montauk, as well as the area near the Block Island windmills, fluke fishing has been good of late.

“It’s all about creating an experience that they can go home with and remember and always want to do again,” said Steven Lippman, who co-founded A Walk on Water 10 years ago to give special needs children a healing encounter with the waves. For the past seven years, the organization has been coming to Montauk to for a two-day event where everybody gets a neat wooden trophy and an "amazing day."

The basketball court at the Bridgehampton Child Care and Recreational Center was redone Sunday — the first step in a much larger plan that’s to include a new gymnasium, an indoor swimming pool, a regulation-size tennis court, and soccer, baseball, and kickball fields on the five-acre Sag Harbor Turnpike property.

American oystercatchers, which congregate in the marshes of our barrier beaches before flying south, are about the size of crows, and stout, with heavy white bellies, chocolate-colored wings, and pale pinkish legs. They wear a black executioner’s hood and have a long blood-orange oyster knife of a bill and yellow eyes circled by red eye rings.

Homecoming weekend here begins Friday with East Hampton High’s field hockey team facing off against Sayville on the high school’s turf field at 4:30 p.m. Saturday's games and festivities include Hall of Fame inductions, soccer and volleyball matches, cross country meets, a fall festival in the afternoon, and a football game under the lights.

Last Thursday was a thrilling day for Laura Hayward of Sagaponack, a hypo-birthing doula and practitioner of reiki. She helped deliver a baby, then she competed in the Hampton Classic for the first time. Here's how it all went down.

Led by Charlie Corwin, its junior quarterback, Finn Byrnes, a senior running back, Will Darrell, a senior tight end, Danny Lester, a senior wide receiver, and Richie Maio, a senior offensive and defensive lineman, the team looked quite good in a scrimmage with Oyster Bay. They are among 24 varsity players on East Hampton's football team this year.

Diane O’Donnell, who coaches East Hampton High School’s girls cross-country team, had all of her charges running in the Great Bonac 5K in Springs on Labor Day, and they did well, as did a Bonac alumnus, Erik Engstrom, in the 10K.

“Plenty of action around,” Sebastian Gorgone of Mrs. Sam's Bait and Tackle in East Hampton said of the local fishing scene. “You name it, you can probably catch it.”

Karl Cook, a 31-year-old Southern Californian who had not competed at the Hampton Classic before, not only won Friday’s $74,000 Grand Prix Qualifier, which entitled him and his 12-year-old Belgian Warmblood mare to go last in Sunday’s $410,000 Grand Prix, but won that class too, a very rare feat.

While the media’s dining room was loaded with high-caloric foods like doughnuts and fried chicken wings, it was a different story for the players, who were offered prepared proteins, carbohydrates, fruits, nuts, protein shakes, and sushi.

Though the East Hampton Soccer Club couldn’t muster a complement of six field players because of several absences, the five who contested a 7-on-7 league semifinal with Sag Harbor United, the playoffs’ top seed, at East Hampton’s Herrick Park on Aug. 30 acquitted themselves very well in a 4-1 loss. In the night’s other semifinal, a hotly contested struggle between F.C. Tuxpan and Liga De Gulag, Tuxpan prevailed 4-3.

The horse show was in full swing from 8 a.m. on opening day in Bridgehampton, with action in most of its six rings, the 2-to-4 and 5-to-7-year-old leadline divisions in the newly redone Grand Prix ring being the biggest draw.

Sag Harbor United, the 7-on-7 men’s soccer league’s leader, and Maidstone Market, which has been the league’s power year in, year out since 2007, were to have met in a regular season-ending game at East Hampton’s Herrick Park on Aug. 23, but the latter, because it could muster only four players, was forced to forfeit.

Dream became reality on Saturday in Amagansett for those willing to pay between $10,000 and $20,000 to play with John McEnroe, Mats Wilander, Mary Joe Fernandez, the Bryan twins, Gigi Fernandez, and Patrick McEnroe.

There are about a dozen locals, the most in recent memory, playing for Kevin Bunce Sr. and Mike Jablonski in regional 7s tournaments now.

Lucky enough to once again secure media credentials to cover the U.S. Open tennis tournament, I needed to do a bit of fishing myself to see who is really hooked on fishing.

The crowd of children and adults early on Friday afternoon, hours before its official reopening, were a clear indication that the renovated Lars Simenson Skatepark in Montauk is a hit. "What happened was a very organic process of people just building enthusiasm, community coming together . . . until we ended up with something that is world class," said a member of the Montauk Skatepark Coalition.