Sports

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

On paper, East Hampton’s field hockey game here on Oct. 4 against Comsewogue seemed likely to wind up in favor of the Bonackers, but they had a fight on their hands.

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.