Sports

As if we didn't have enough to be concerned about these days, Mother Nature has been in a rather ornery mood of late. I'm not sure what's ticked her off, but her unpredictable exploits have left a mark in many parts of the world, including our area.

Add sailing to the short list of competitive outdoor sports, including golf and tennis, that have made comebacks in the wake of the coronavirus shutdown.

A month later than usual, the Breakwater Yacht Club's Wednesday evening Summer Series of large boat races got underway in Shelter Island Sound on June 3, windward-leeward practice runs that attracted four entrants - three J/70s and Caminos, Don Filippelli's 36-foot J/109 out of the Devon Yacht Club in Amagansett, a boat that has a North American championship to its credit.

I-Tri brings an online youth triathlon Saturday morning and a revived Turbo Tri for adults and children for July, while the Montauk Mile extends its virtual competition.

Rich Schneider announced this week that Frank (Sprig) Gardner, Dickinson Baker, Matt Rubenstein, Thomas McGintee, and the wrestling team of 1965-66 and the girls volleyball team of 2009 are this year’s East Hampton High School Hall of Fame inductees.

With the ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos serving as referee and announcer, the live-streamed match at the South Fork Country Club in Amagansett brought in more than twice what the pantries' fund-raisers normally reap in a year.

John Goodman, who has made a retirement hobby of trading vintage baseball cards, explains the mystery of the legendary Honus Wagner card, and a lot more.

The weekend past was the first in which tennis clubs have been open for play, having been moved up by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo from the fourth to the first phase in a planned step-by-step reopening of the state in the wake of a total shutdown prompted by the coronavirus pandemic two months ago.

No, she had not been sitting at home, Linda Silich said, when asked this week what she’d been doing during the coronavirus shutdown. The demands of her two businesses — a highly rated TRX-based fitness studio in East Hampton Village and Groundworks Landscaping in East Hampton, on the way to Amagansett — had been taking up much of her time.

“Most of our clientele is older and somewhat frail, and some of them have chosen not to come in,” but then one day “an 80-plus-year-old lady did. She said her balance training was more important to her than coronavirus worries . . . that if she fell and broke her leg things could be even worse.”

"It's been a very rough couple of months -- but at least now there's a sliver of light," said Claude Okin, who owns the Sportime club in Amagansett and numerous other tennis clubs in the metro area.

Fitness studios here have been offering online personal and group training sessions since the early days of the Covid-19 shutdown, and given the uncertainty of the coming months, they’re likely to continue doing so for the foreseeable future.   

This was the third winter that Heather Caputo, Spencer Schneider, Mike Bottini, and Jeremy Grosvenor have been swimming three or four times a week at various spots in the ocean and in the bay.

The state-owned Montauk Downs golf course, which had been open, closed, open, then closed again, reopened for play on Monday, having been so directed by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.

Bobby Hopson, the Bridgehampton High School basketball team's career scoring leader and a Wagner College standout, died on Tuesday. The cause was diabetes-related.

Nassau and Suffolk Counties’ Athletic Councils pulled the plug on high school springs sports, a “heartbreaking decision,” in the words of Section VIII’s executive director, Pat Pizzarelli, but one that was not surprising given the coronavirus pandemic.

The world’s top-ranked female triathlete, Katie Zaferes, an Olympic silver-medalist cyclist, Mari Holden, and Ally Friedman, a Ross School senior who in February was cited by the United States Tennis Association as its junior volunteer of the year, mentored Theresa Roden’s I-Tri girls on Saturday.

Private golf clubs, while still deemed nonessential, have been allowed to reopen to their members, the governor said, with restrictions.

Yani Cuesta, who coaches East Hampton High’s girls track team, said during a telephone conversation on Friday that she thought there would be no spring season, at least insofar as girls track was concerned.     

Golf is apparently the last game in town, and, according to the head pro at Montauk Downs, Mark Fretto, new rules have enabled the beautiful public course there to remain open for play during the coronavirus siege.

The way it was, sports fans, from a mountain climber’s close call to happier roller hockey days to good times with the Killer Bees.

All of a sudden, it seems everything is off-limits. With no high school sports for three weeks — and who knows for however long after that — I am at loose ends.

On Friday as Joe Vas, East Hampton’s athletic director, announced that Section XI, the governing body for public high school sports in Suffolk, had postponed all games and contests through April 3.

Eddy Quiroz, a native of Puebla, Mexico’s fourth-largest city, has been obsessed with sports from an early age. Soccer, golf, tennis, platform tennis, bowling, boxing, taekwondo, and rowing are among those at which he’s become adept.

Down in San Antonio, Matthew Griffiths is a National Sporting Clays Association Krieghoff all-American.

“We’re taking it day by day — things are changing every day,” said Claude Okin, the owner of Sportime in Amagansett. “Hopefully, if we’re smart, we can all get through this together.”

Gino Fava has for a while been a proponent of the underhand serve, the use of which often is viewed as an underhanded tactic by receivers.

“We can either win everything or we can bomb,” Kevin Bunce said of the Section XI Warriors the other day.

Kal Lewis, Shelter Island High School’s star long-distance runner, topped all public high school contestants in the state’s 1,600-meter indoor race at the Ocean Breeze Athletic Complex on Staten Island Saturday.

The weather was fine Monday as East Hampton High’s teams — boys and girls track, girls lacrosse, baseball, softball, and boys tennis — engaged in inaugural spring practices.

Boys tennis plays at Half Hollow Hills East Tuesday, and the girls lacrosse team is home Wednesday for a scrimmage.