Sports

Local Sports History

Dan White, who is in his second year coaching the East Hampton High School boys basketball team, said following Saturday’s multiteam scrimmage at Mattituck, a scrimmage that also included Riverhead and Greenport, that he was “optimistic” when it came to the coming season.

The weather was good on Thanksgiving Day, warmer apparently than was expected, so the turnout at the East Hampton Town Recreation Department and John Keeshan Realty’s three and six-mile Turkey Trots in Montauk was bountiful.

Frank Ackley, the East’s top-ranked 65-year-old United States Tennis Association singles player in 2015, said during a recent conversation at his house in Springs that he hadn’t played singles at the national level in a while, “ever since I broke my leg in a freaky accident on the grass courts at The Bridge.”

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Local Sports History

A 35-yard rocketed knee-high shot by Luis Barrera early in the second half of Sunday’s Suffolk Men’s Soccer League showdown between Barrera’s team, Hampton United, and Charruas 1950, a perennial rival from Central Islip, put the locals atop the league’s 10-team first division once again with two more games left in the fall half of the season.

Two of the captains of East Hampton High School’s league-champion girls swimming team, Madison Jones and Lucy Emptage, were the focus of attention at the high school on Nov. 14.

When Aziza El, the 5-foot-9-inch middle hitter, went down with a rolled ankle near the end of Friday’s girls volleyball practice session at Pierson High School, Donna Fischer, Pierson-Bridgehampton’s coach, rolled her eyes, as if to say, “Oh no.”

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Local Sports History

In recent postseason action, the East Hampton High School boys cross-country team, the county Class B champion, followed form by placing ninth last weekend at the state meet.

The Montauk Rugby Club, with an impressive 60-29 rout of the Suffolk R.C. at East Hampton’s Herrick Park Saturday, finished the Empire Geographical Union’s fall Division III season at 3-5, though had the team been at full strength throughout the campaign, Rich Brierley, the Sharks’ coach, agreed that it could have gone undefeated.

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The fall indoor season wound up at the Sportime Arena in Amagansett Saturday night with victories by Liga Sayausi in the open men’s final, by La Tri in the over-38 men’s final, and by A.D.N. in the open women’s championship game.

The Dock Race, revived these past few years by George Watson’s son, Chris, a fitting warm-up for the Thanksgiving Day Turkey Trot, drew a large multigenerational crowd of runners, cyclists, skateboarders, baby strollers, walkers, and dogs to the starting line at the Montauk Post Office Sunday morning.

For the second time in the past three years East Hampton High’s boys cross-country team won a county championship at Sunken Meadow State Park, besting Class B’s field of eight teams on Friday.

East Hampton High School’s girls volleyball team, which proved compelling this season what with the strong all-around play of Mikela Junemann (especially at the net), the setting of Elle Johnson, and the grit of its defenders, Molly Mamay and — until she got hurt — Zoe Leach chief among them, lost a quarterfinal county playoff match in five here on Halloween after dropping the first two sets.

The Montauk rugby team continued to prove it can win at home (though rarely away) by defeating Rockaway, a team that had bested the Sharks earlier in the season, by a score of 25-15 here at Herrick Park on Saturday.

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When Maureen Bluedorn, whose love of horses is evidenced in the fact that she bought a horse before she bought a house here, first spoke with Wick Hotchkiss some half-dozen years ago about setting up a not-for-profit foundation to provide local youngsters with scholarships so they could ride at Stony Hill Stables, she wasn’t sure the idea would fly.

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The perennially strong Maidstone Market men’s soccer team, which has won back-to-back titles in the 7-on-7 league, whose games are played at East Hampton’s Herrick Park, trailed Hampton F.C.-Bill Miller, Bateman Painting, and F.C. Tuxpan in the standings this week, though that’s not unusual: Whether it winds up the regular season in first or fourth place, the Market always shows up in force for the playoffs.

The East Hampton High School boys cross-country team was a winner in the division meet’s championship race contested by 20 teams at Sunken Meadow State Park.

Ari Weller, the founder of Philosofit, the fitness studio across the street from the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter, gave a movement and stretching class at one of his client’s houses this past summer, in which, as it turned out, one of the participants was Dr. Mehmet Oz of television fame, who, until he encountered Weller, had thought there was nothing to be done about his chronic knee pain.

Hampton United, the over-30 men’s team that plays in the Suffolk Men’s Soccer League, ascended to first place in the Division I standings Sunday by virtue of a 6-2 win over previously undefeated Sporting America at Hampton Bays High School, H.U.’s home field.

The Montauk Rugby team, after having virtually vanished from sight this fall, reappeared in all its glory at the Hank Zebrowski field in Montauk Saturday afternoon, taking it to a team, Brooklyn, that had won overwhelmingly in the sides’ first meeting, at Prospect Park, on Sept. 23.

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Churning the water at the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter’s pool, East Hampton High School’s girls swimming team left Harborfields in its wake on Oct. 18 to win the League III championship at 5-0.