Sports

Two East Hamptoners report on their experiences at the New York City Marathon.

When the Ross School’s student-athletes convened for the fall athletic awards ceremony on Nov. 9, they were in for a surprise: the debut of the school’s official mascot, the Ross Raven, in a sleek, brand-new costume, who bounded into the gymnasium with high energy and high-fives all around.

Amanda Calabrese, who joined East Hampton’s junior lifeguard program at the age of 7, and who is 25 and a resident of San Francisco now, continues to excel in lifeguarding competitions.

About 25 years ago, I recall jumping aboard the Viking Starship for the five-hour ride to Nomans (both the island and the area near Cuttyhunk) to target blackfish. Those trips were extremely popular, and one could retain 10 fish over 14 inches in length. Most of the time, the fishing was off-the-charts good.

The Shelter Island and Ross School girls volleyball teams contended for the county (and Long Island) Class D championship at East Hampton High School on Nov. 7, with the Islanders, as they did last year, coming out on top.

Strong winds and a deluge about five minutes into the race did not deter 200 or so contestants — a field that included runners, bicyclists, scooters, and strollers — from traversing on Sunday morning the 3.3 miles that separate Montauk’s Post Office from George Watson’s Dock bar and restaurant.

Dylan Cashin, an East Hampton High School junior who led the girls cross-country team to a league championship this season, qualified to compete in the coming state meet by finishing fifth in the county Class B 5K at Sunken Meadow State Park Friday.

The bay scallop season in waters under the East Hampton Town Trustees’ jurisdiction will open on Sunday at sunrise. Residents holding a town shellfish permit can continue to harvest them until sunset on March 31.

Joy, and then heartache! With less than a minute to go in Wednesday's Class C Long Island field hockey championship, Sag Harbor had its last chance to tie the game against Carle Place, and it appeared that it did, until the referee annulled the goal by the Whalers' Meredith Spolarich. The Frogs won 2-1.

Peter Ciaccia, who organized and directed New York Road Runner events for 20 years, including the TCS New York City Marathon that is to be run throughout the city’s five boroughs Sunday, will have two goals in mind on the Verrazano Bridge: crossing the 26.2-mile race’s finish line, and raising as much money as he can through his Need 2 Feed gofundme effort so that the Montauk Food Pantry can continue to feed more than 200 needy families and homebound people in that hamlet.

McMahon’s won its third straight East Hampton Town men’s slow-pitch softball league championship at the Terry King ball field in Amagansett on Oct. 25, besting Sand & Sea Construction 17-10, thus winning the best-of-five final series three games to one.

Chris Miller at Westlake Marina in Montauk confirmed that the fishing has been good on several fronts. “The bass fishing is holding up,” he said. “Sea bass too have been cooperating, but many are focused on blackfish, which has been very good since the season opened two weeks ago.”

The Bonackers, in “their best game of the season,” according to Joe McKee, their coach, won 41-20 at Eastport-South Manor Friday night, capping their return to Division III football with a 2-6 record. Plus more in local sports action.

The best team did not win in a Class A semifinal soccer playoff game contested here with Half Hollow Hills West Monday. East Hampton's 1-0 loss left Don McGovern, his players, and a crowd that had filled the bleachers stunned.

Caeleigh Schuster, arguably the best field hockey goalie East Hampton High has had since the mid-1990s, came under fire right away in Saturday’s county Class B final between the Bonackers and Rocky Point. It was a battle that the Bonackers were eventually to lose 4-3 in overtime, but their gritty play throughout the fray could not be faulted.

Two of East Hampton High’s playoff teams, field hockey and boys soccer, advanced in the county playoffs this week, the field hockey team by way of a 2-1 win at Harborfields on Wednesday and the boys soccer team as the result of a 2-1 quarterfinal-round win here Thursday over a tough East Islip squad.

The 1-5 Bonackers aren't quite there yet, as a 42-7 loss to undefeated Half Hollow Hills West on Saturday showed.

Eight of East Hampton High's 11 fall teams, seven of which finished with winning records in league competition, made the postseason, and two of those teams, boys soccer and girls cross-country, were league champions.

The most exciting cross-country meets Kevin Barry has seen in his 35 years of coaching took place within a few minutes of each other at East Hampton High School on Oct. 18.

"The blackfish bite has been very solid," said Ken Morse at Tight Lines Tackle in Sag Harbor. "Lots of small fish, but many are still catching their limits." Surfcasters along the ocean beaches are finding action too.

Bird populations have declined steeply over the last 50 years, but the North American Bird Conservation Initiative's "State of the Birds 2022" report, published in early October, balanced the gloom with some success stories and offered strategies for future action which would "bring birds back."

Thanks largely to the superb goaltending of Caeleigh Schuster, who has come up big for her teammates all season long, the East Hampton High School field hockey team defeated East Islip in a first-round playoff game here Monday. The hard-fought contest wasn’t decided until the second round of shootouts that followed a 1-1 tie in regulation and two scoreless 7-on-7 overtime periods.

Last week, East Hampton High’s boys soccer team won the program’s first league championship since 2014, and the boys cross-country team won the varsity B race at an invitational meet at Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx.

The first half of Saturday morning’s high school football game here belonged to Harborfields, which led 28-0 at the halftime break. But the second half was pretty much East Hampton’s, which led Joe McKee, Bonac’s head coach, to say after the 34-14 loss that while he was proud of his players he wondered why they hadn’t played with the same verve in the first half as they had in the second.

While the fishing for striped bass has been strong in Montauk, it was out of my reach, so I decided to take advantage of the sunny and windless conditions on Saturday morning for the opening of blackfish season in waters outside Long Island Sound.

Pickup games open to all in the  world’s fastest sport, badminton, have begun to be played again on Monday and Wednesday evenings from 7 to 9 at the Amagansett School, and will be through May.

Our original 13-day vacation had already been cut short, then I tested positive for Covid. Hello to quarantine at home, which was still 420 miles away. For those not in quarantine, the fishing scene bounced back quite nicely after nearly a week of northeasterly wind and rain.

First light in Sag Harbor during autumn and the place belongs to the fish crows. They show up all at once, 100 landing in the big tree at M&T bank. As the day brightens, they spread out across the village into smaller groups. For a bird whose diet ranges from piping plover eggs to candy bars, Sag Harbor is a perfect foraging ground.

After Friday’s 2-1 loss here to Eastport-South Manor, Don McGovern, who coaches East Hampton High’s boys soccer team, which had just seen a nine-game winning streak snapped, asked if his players could tell him why they’d lost.

East Hampton High School’s football team lost 20-13 to Amityville here on Saturday, dropping its record to 1-4, but the Bonackers made some big plays, and led 13-12 early in the fourth quarter.