Sports

   The Montauk Rugby Club is entering the playoffs with barely the number it needs, having lost — until further notice — about a dozen players, some of them veterans, in recent months.

   For five hours Saturday anyone with even the slightest interest in outdoor pursuits could avail him or herself of a virtual cornucopia of experts ready and willing to share their knowledge of nature at the Sportsmen’s Expo on the Amagansett Fire Department’s grounds.

Friday, April 26

GIRLS LACROSSE, Hampton Bays at East Hampton, 4:30 p.m.

SOFTBALL, East Hampton at Bellport, 4:30 p.m.

BOYS TENNIS, East Hampton at Southampton, 4:30 p.m.

BASEBALL, Bayport-Blue Point at East Hampton, 4:30 p.m.

Saturday, April 27

TRACK,  East Hampton boys and girls at Westhampton Beach invitational, 9 a.m.

SOFTBALL, Harborfields at East Hampton, 11 a.m.

RUGBY,  Casino Night, benefit Montauk Rugby Club, Stephen Talkhouse, Amagansett, 7-10 p.m.

Monday, April 29

   With the exception of boys tennis, not many Ws have bloomed thus far this spring on the fields of East Hampton High School.

    In the week past, softball, which is having a down year, owing in part to a back problem that continues to nag the team’s all-state pitcher, Casey Waleko, lost three games, two of them by wide margins, and baseball, boys lacrosse, girls lacrosse, and tennis all lost contests.

   Four East Hampton High School coaches could be described as happy as of Tuesday morning, a group that included Ed Bahns, of baseball, Mike Vitulli, of boys lacrosse, Matt Maloney, of girls lacrosse, and Michelle Kennedy, of boys tennis, though the latter was as of Monday awaiting the outcome of a protest she’d filed with Section XI following Friday’s match at the Ross School.

   Saturday’s Katy’s Courage 5K road race in Sag Harbor, which inaugurated the running season here, was hugely well-attended with some estimates running as high as 1,200.

    According to Bob Beattie’s Island-Timing crew, there were 1,087 finishers, including the late Katy Stewart’s paternal grandfather, Walt, a member of the national wrestling Hall of Fame, whose handshake remains firm at 88.

Thursday, April 18

BOYS LACROSSE, Bellport at East Hampton, 3:30 p.m.

SOFTBALL, Kings Park at East Hampton, 4:30 p.m.

Friday, April 19

BOYS TENNIS, East Hampton at East Islip, nonleague, 4:15 p.m.

GIRLS LACROSSE, Harborfields at East Hampton, 4:30 p.m.

Saturday, April 20

BOYS TRACK, East Hampton at Westhampton Beach invitational, 9 a.m.

GIRLS TRACK, East Hampton at Connetquot invitational, 9 a.m.

SPORTSMEN’S EXPO, Amagansett Firehouse, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., rain or shine.

Monday, April 22

   Anchored by female chuggers, Team Hopper, Tira Na Og, and the Shamrocks finished first, second, and third among 25 spirited teams that contested a relay race at the Montauk Brewing Company on March 30.

    Caroline Cashin, one of the organizers, who is a personal trainer and a frequent winner in endurance races here, said that the response to the unadvertised event had been a bit overwhelming.

    The Concept 2 rowing, biking, and running legs began and ended with chuggers chugging a pint of the Brewing Company’s Celtic Red ale, which was said to be tasty.

    Ryan Borowsky, of Sag Harbor and the Montauk Rugby Club, was the big Slimpossible winner, or loser, of 50 pounds in a recent Sag Harbor Gym fitness contest.

    Of the 40 initial participants, 28 finished, what with weather-related accidents and the like, and their successes and awards were celebrated at La Superica restaurant in Sag Harbor last Thursday night. Trainers had a competition of their own, based on their team’s transformation, and Kevin Norman was the elated winner among them, according to Tahlia Miller, another trainer.

   In making a circuit of East Hampton High School’s fields Monday afternoon, this writer found Michelle Kennedy, the boys tennis coach, and the track coaches Shani Cuesta and Chris Reich in good moods, as was Will Collins, who assists Ed Bahns with the baseball team. But in Collins’s case, he was trying to keep hope alive, given the fact that the team remained winless as of Monday.

   Michelle Kennedy, who coaches East Hampton High School’s boys tennis team, played off a half-dozen of her charges Monday with an eye toward rearranging the lineup.

    If things worked out the way she thought they might, Collin Kavanagh and Dan Okin, who have been playing first doubles, would take over the top two singles positions, at least in some of the matches, and Reese Donaldson and Matt Silich would move up from second to first doubles.

Thursday, April 11

SOFTBALL, East Hampton at Elwood-John Glenn, 4:30 p.m.

Friday, April 12

GIRLS LACROSSE, Eastport-South Manor at East Hampton, 4:30 p.m.

BOYS TENNIS, East Hampton at East Islip, nonleague, 4 p.m.

BASEBALL, East Hampton at Amityville, 4:30 p.m.

Saturday, April 13

RUNNING, Katy’s Courage 5K, West Water Street, Sag Harbor, 8:30 a.m., registration from 7:15 to 8:15.

BOYS LACROSSE, Center Moriches at East Hampton, 10 a.m.

Monday, April 15

April 7, 1988

    Shawn Turner set a new East Hampton High School high jump record of 6 feet 3 inches, and surprisingly good performances were recorded by hitherto-untried competitors in East Hampton-Pierson’s league season-opener here Tuesday with Mercy High School of Riverhead. East Hampton won the meet 106-19.

April 14, 1988

    Another honor came Kenny Wood’s way on Sunday as Newsday named him to its 10-player all-Long Island boys basketball team.

   Greg Drossel, a naturalist who last fall began giving a popular archery course at the Ross School, and who is soon to give the same course to adults as part of Ross’s continuing education program, said the other day that his love for the sport grew hand in hand with his love of the outdoors.

    “I grew up in the Stony Brook-Port Jefferson area and as a kid I roamed the woods with an uncle of mine who was five years older. After a rainstorm we’d find white quartz arrowheads from an old Native American settlement. Guess what we did with them?”

    “Shoot them?”

   One of the warmest days yet this year brought nine sailors to a seven-race regatta on Saturday afternoon at Sag Harbor’s Breakwater Yacht Club. Postponed from HarborFrost weekend in February because of the bay’s transformation to a sea of ice in a blizzard, the weather on this day was just right, according to Marty Knab of Sag Harbor, who served on the race committee.

   “One step at a time” is how Brigid Collins and Jim Stewart plan to create a bereavement center for children on the East End. They took a giant leap in that direction in October, when they secured not-for-profit status for Katy’s Courage Fund, named for their daughter, who died of hepatoblastoma, a rare form of liver cancer. The third Annual Katy’s Courage 5K race, which celebrates Katy and furthers her family’s progress toward their goal, will take place in Sag Harbor on April 13.

Thursday, April 4

GIRLS TRACK, East Hampton at Sayville, 4:30 p.m.

BOYS LACROSSE, Kings Park at East Hampton, 4:30 p.m.

BOYS TRACK, Sayville at East Hampton, 4:30 p.m.

Friday, April 5

BASEBALL, East Hampton at Mount Sinai, 4:30 p.m.

GIRLS LACROSSE, Sayville at East Hampton, 4:30 p.m.

BOYS TENNIS, Southampton at East Hampton, 4:30 p.m.

Saturday, April 6

SOFTBALL, Bayport-Blue Point at East Hampton, nonleague, 11 a.m.

Monday, April 8

SOFTBALL, East Hampton at Westhampton Beach, 4:30 p.m.

   A good big team, the Green Devils, was matched against a good small one, the Kings, in the 11-and-up roller hockey championship game at the Sportime Arena in Amagansett Sunday.

    And, in the end, though it took 44 minutes of regulation and 2:40 of overtime to do it, the Devils, thanks to Matt Kreymborg’s fourth goal of the day, prevailed 7-6.

   The East Hampton High School teams that played Monday, which is to say boys lacrosse, girls lacrosse, softball, and baseball, lost, though the season is young and the teams are young.

    The week’s sole good news lay in the boys track team’s 76-64 league-opener loss at Miller Place. Chris Reich, the head coach, said in an e-mail account that “it was the closest we’ve come to beating Miller Place in three years. We have a great chance of winning a lot of meets this season.”

   Jacob Siwicki of Sagaponack, who in his high school career played for top football programs in suburban Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C., before taking a postgraduate year at the Northfield Mount Hermon preparatory school in Gill, Mass., learned recently that he has been accepted at Dartmouth University, where he is expected to make an immediate impact.

Saturday, March 30

BOYS LACROSSE, Riverhead at East Hampton, nonleague, 11 a.m.

Tuesday, April 2

BASEBALL, East Hampton at Bayport-Blue Point, 4:30 p.m.

BOYS LACROSSE, East Hampton at Mattituck-Greenport-Southold, 4:30 p.m.

Wednesday, April 3

SOFTBALL, Mount Sinai at East Hampton, 4:30 p.m.

BASEBALL, Shoreham-Wading River at East Hampton, 4:30 p.m.

BOYS TENNIS, East Hampton at Westhampton Beach, 4:30 p.m.

GIRLS LACROSSE, East Hampton at Rocky Point, 4:30 p.m.

Thursday, April 4

March 3, 1988

    There’ll be no trip to the state playoffs for Bridgehampton High School’s Killer Bees this year. The Bees, who last lost a county Class D championship game in 1983, were defeated in the D contest Saturday by Eastport, 60-46.

    . . . “We’re young,” said the Bees’ coach, John Niles. “We’ll be a very good team in two years — that is, if we keep the school,” he added, referring to the petition for a referendum to transport Bridgehampton’s upper grades either to Southampton or East Hampton.

   On his return from selling pretzels in Montauk Sunday as part of a fund-raiser to help underwrite the East Hampton High School softball team’s trip next week to Disney World in Orlando, Fla., Lou Reale said this season will be a challenge.

   March is when winter concludes and spring begins; the month when baseball is back and football is gone. Pro basketball and hockey are moving toward the playoffs, but are not quite there yet. So, in essence, March is the waiting period for sports — with the exception of one oh-so-important thing: March Madness.

    It’s the culmination of every college basketball season, when 68 teams are chosen by a committee because of their impressive records or because they’ve won their conference tournaments, which gives them an automatic bid into the “Big Dance.”

   The rain predicted for Saturday — snow, as it turned out — didn’t arrive until the afternoon, which allowed East Hampton High School’s baseball team to scrimmage Mattituck here.

    The initial outing gave Ed Bahns and Will Collins — and their volunteer assistant, Kevin Brophy — a chance to give their 17-player roster a look in a game situation, and afterward there was agreement that while there was much to work on, if the young team continued to work hard and made steady improvement, that would be fine.

   There was no paddle in Brazil, Fabio Minozi, who directs East Hampton Indoor Tennis’s platform tennis program, said during a conversation Sunday morning in the warm-up hut that lies between E.H.I.T.’s two raised wire-enclosed courts.

    “It’s too hot,” the Sao Paulo native and former A.T.P. tour player said by way of explanation. “Paddle’s a winter game, even though they’re trying to come up with a less bouncy ball to play with in hot weather.”

Thursday, March 21

BASEBALL, Southampton at East Hampton, scrimmage, 4 p.m.        

GIRLS TRACK, Miller Place at East Hampton, 4:30 p.m.

BOYS TRACK, East Hampton at Miller Place, 4:30 p.m.

Friday, March 22

BOYS TENNIS, William Floyd at East Hampton, 4:30 p.m.

SOFTBALL, East Hampton at Hampton Bays, scrimmage, 4 p.m.

BASEBALL, East Hampton at Mattituck, scrimmage, 4 p.m.

BOYS LACROSSE, East Hampton at North Babylon, nonleague, 4:30 p.m.

GIRLS LACROSSE, East Hampton at Comsewogue, nonleague, 6:30 p.m.

   Rich Schneider, who’s been the spokesman of the East Hampton Town men’s slow-pitch softball league for quite a while, phoned the other day to say that the league, which has been in existence since the late 1960s, might have to fold if some more teams — there are only four at the moment — did not come forward.

    In past years the town league, which replaced a fast-pitch one whose last champion was Schenck Fuels, has had as many as 14 teams in two divisions, but that was a while ago.

   Joe Vas, the East Hampton School District’s athletic director, was sanguine regarding spring during a preseason talk at his office Monday.

    “Sunny days from here on in,” he said. “It’s supposed to be in the 40s all this week. Let’s hope we’ve seen the last of the storms.”

    There was still snow on East Hampton’s turf field when the boys and girls lacrosse teams practiced there Saturday morning, and when Rich King and Don McGovern conducted a soccer clinic there for kindergartners through eighth graders on Sunday.

   Bridgehampton High School’s boys basketball team, which had only one senior starter and a thin bench, took its coaches and fans on a playoff joy ride that hit the wall in the last half-second of the Class D regional final Friday in the form of a desperation 3-point shot from the top of the key that knifed through the nets and put a dagger in the hard-playing Killer Bees’ hearts.