Sports

The eastern phoebe is just starting to show up on the East End after a winter down South, bringing with it the promise of coming warmth and humidity — and bird song.

In the last two weeks, ospreys have started to return to the East End from their wintering grounds in Central and South America. They’re a sign of spring, and a constant visual reminder that our actions directly affect birds.

Last year, for the first time in more than a decade, an East Hampton High School softball team, a very young squad with only two senior starters, earned a berth in the county playoffs, convincing the coaches, Annemarie Brown and Melanie Anderson, that “we’re starting to get back on track.”

Last weekend, for the first time in its 19-year history, the Hurricanes, the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter’s 8-to-19-year-old swim team, won a state championship.

Having got off to a slow start in Friday’s state Class C semifinal, the Pierson High School boys basketball team came on strong in the second quarter, erasing an 11-point first-quarter deficit, taking a 4 point lead into the halftime break, and pulling ahead by 9 points in the fourth quarter. Alas, it was not enough to advance to the finals.

Bridgehampton, with virtually the same team that posted a 14-1 record in jayvee competition last spring, will play in a league with Pierson, Hampton Bays, Port Jefferson, Southold, Greenport, and Shelter Island.

The American woodcock knows a thing or two about a good display. No bird on the East End of Long Island comes close to rivaling its spring show.

Leo Butler’s last-second fallaway bank shot sends the Sag Harbor school to the state Class C basketball semifinal in Glens Falls on Friday.

Bridgehampton High School’s young boys basketball players fought to the end against their taller Chapel Field Christian School counterparts in a state regional semifinal game at Westhampton Beach Tuesday, losing 56-47.

The all-day Katy’s Courage fund-raiser for pediatric cancer research will begin Saturday with a kids and parents hockey game at the Buckskill Winter Club, where popular curling lessons are also now available.

While the great blue heron, the largest heron in North America, is not our only winter heron (black-crowned night herons roost locally all winter), it’s the only one you’re likely to see.

For most of the Class C Long Island championship playoff game at Centereach High School Wednesday afternoon, the Pierson Whalers trailed Carle Place, but a Cecil Munshin 3-pointer in the fourth quarter kicked off the turnaround.

With things finally getting back to normal Covid-wise, Bonac’s baseball, softball, boys tennis, boys and girls track, and boys and girls lacrosse teams are to begin practicing Monday.

Christy Davis, the legendary 69-year-old Mavericks surfer and onetime East Hampton High science teacher, is the subject of a documentary film that recounts the heart attack he suffered at the notorious break in 2019 and his collision almost a year earlier with an underwater rock that resulted in a broken neck bone and two broken upper spinal vertebrae.

At the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter Sunday there are to be testing and training sessions for new and returning junior lifeguards, Nippers, and still-water and ocean lifeguards.

Pigeons are extremely sensitive to low frequency sounds; they can see into the ultraviolet range of light, and they are able to detect minute changes in air pressure. They don’t keep the tidiest of homes, allowing feces, and even dead nestlings, to remain in the nest, and since they reuse their nests, they get bigger and nastier as time goes on.

The Mariners defeated Sag Harbor's Whalers in the county B-C-D championship Tuesday and will now play Class A Kings Park Friday night for the county small schools title. Pierson's first game in the state tourney is March 9.

The white-throated sparrow’s song “is a lament,” George Gladden wrote, “a lament which is wistful and ineffably plaintive, but in which there is no despair, only sweet hopefulness.”

At Amagansett’s Sportime Arena, three indoor soccer championship games were played Saturday, with F.C. Napoli, in the men’s open division, the East Hampton Futbol Club, in the women’s division, and Fenix Club, in the men’s 37-plus division, emerging as the trophy winners.

The Pierson Whalers and Bridgehampton’s Killer Bees met in the Suffolk County tournament’s C-D game Saturday at Sachem East High School in Farmingville, with Pierson, as expected, winning by a wide margin.

John Romero’s Maidstone Market men’s soccer team has been a perennial champion outdoors, but it’s taken a while for his futsal squad, the East Hampton Futbol Club, to master the indoor version.

All eight of the swimmers Craig Brierley took with him to the county championship meet at Stony Brook University over the weekend swam personal-best times.

Kieran Hildreth of Montauk and Burke, Vt., won the Vermont State Tri-Council u-14 giant slalom alpine ski race held at Burke Mountain on Jan. 31, defeating 77 competitors.

Lucky for us, if the ponds remain unfrozen, kingfishers are fairly common around the East End during the winter months.

The Pierson and Bridgehampton High School boys basketball teams won county classification titles Wednesday at Westhampton Beach High School, the Whalers over Greenport and the Bees over Smithtown Christian.

The Pierson (Sag Harbor) Whalers, top seeded in Class C, defeated Southold 67-41 Saturday afternoon, and are now looking forward to another go at Southampton in the county B-C-D game on March 1.

The East Hampton High School boys swimming team placed well in the League II meet last week, the wrestling team tallied 30 points in a League V meet, while the girls track team struggled at the small schools indoor championships.

It’s gull season on the East End.

The Pierson (Sag Harbor) Whalers are headed for the county Class C playoffs, and Bridgehampton’s Killer Bees will play in the county Class D final.

In the past half-dozen years it has been a rarity to witness an East Hampton High School wrestling team win at home, but it happened last Thursday.