Sports

   Melissa Edwards, who coaches Pierson (Sag Harbor) High School’s softball team, thought when the season began that this would be a rebuilding year, but, lo, her overachievers proved her wrong, to her delight.

    The Whalers, whose anchors are Kasey Gilbride, the line-drive hitting shortstop, and Samma Duchemin, the pitcher, clinched the county Class C championship at home last Thursday by defeating their perennial rival, Port Jefferson, 6-3.

   “We’ve given out seven or eight scholarships now,” Maureen Bluedorn said, with a smile, the other day at the well-appointed Stony Hill Stables in Amagansett, as the most recent recipient, Georgia Bunce, 8, with her mother, Megan, looking on, prepared to saddle up for a lesson in the pony ring.

    Bluedorn was referring to the year-old Stony Hill Stables Foundation’s laudable effort to extend the joy and challenging demands of equestrian sport to more and more youngsters here.

Saturday, June 8

MONTAUK TRIATHLON, 1-mile swim, 22-mile bike, and 10K run, intersection of West Lake and Star Island Drives, 7:30 a.m.

SOFTBALL, state Class C semifinals, Morse Fields, Queensbury, 9 a.m.; final,  Adirondack Sports Complex, Queensbury, 2 p.m.

BASEBALL, state Class C semifinals, Broome Community College, Binghamton, 10 a.m. and 1 p.m.; championship game, 4.

SWIM ACROSS AMERICA, kick-off reception, Sag Harbor Yacht Club, 6-9 p.m.

Wednesday, June 12

   A rain delay on May 28 interrupted what proved to be the deciding game of the county Class C baseball series, at which time Pierson High School’s Whalers were sailing along on the crest of a 7-0 lead.

    Jon Tortorella, Pierson’s coach, would rather the game had continued that day, noting that soon after the postponement decision it stopped raining. But, in the end, it mattered little as the Whalers, who went 19-1 in the regular season, continued to dominate Port Jefferson on May 29, winning the championship 9-4.

   Shawn Roberts, who red-shirted this year at Georgia Tech so that he could have another year of eligibility, easily won the Bonac on Board to Wellness 5K from the Reutershan Parking Lot to East Hampton Village’s Main Beach on May 22 in 16 minutes and 45 seconds.

    “He was coasting,” said John Conner, when told that Roberts’s employer, Barbara Gubbins, had said he was “a 1:48 half-miler.”

    “If he had been going all out, I think he would have run it in 15-something, or less,” said Conner, who added that he had run as fast as the winner when he was 50.

   Shooting rounds of 76 and 75 at the Indian Island golf course last week, Ian Lynch, who is to attend Colgate University in the fall, became, according to his coach, Claude Beudert, the first Bonacker to qualify for three state championships in the sport.

    Lynch, whose first-day score ranked him 10th among the county’s individual competitors going into the tourney’s second day, finished fifth, thus qualifying him to play in the state tournament this weekend at Cornell University.

   Scorpion, which had stung Virgen del Milagro to win Sportime Arena’s indoor soccer (futsal) championship in early March, was, in turn, bested by the Bautista brothers’ team, now known as F.C., in the spring men’s open final, which was played at Sportime on May 18.

    In the men’s 38-plus title game, which also was hotly contested throughout, Liga Sayausi prevailed 8-7 in a penalty kick shootout that broke a 3-3 tie.

   Pierson High School’s baseball coach, Jon Tortorella, was hoping to get a playoff game in Saturday, but despite having covered the batting circle and the pitching mound with tarpaulins late Friday afternoon, the second game of the county Class C championship series was put off until Tuesday.

    Tortorella, of course, was hoping that his 19-1 Whalers would win Tuesday, thus obviating the need for a third game and advancing them to the Long Island game, which is to be played Monday in Nassau County.

    John Kernell, a Springs resident who can lay claim to being Montauk Downs’ most avid golfer and proselyte, reported following the United States Golf Association’s media day at the Sebonack Golf Club recently that the U.S. Women’s Open there at the end of June ought to be a big draw.

    “It’s a beautiful course, at an exclusive club that most people would never be able to go to otherwise, the tickets are very reasonable — $125 will get you in for the whole week, from Monday through Sunday — and the quality of golf will be first-class.”

   Chris Reich, who coaches East Hampton High School’s boys track team, reported Monday that his freshmen and sophomores had held their own in a countywide freshman-sophomore meet for all of Suffolk’s schools.

    Of chief interest was Erik Engstrom’s third-place finish in the 2,000-meter steeplechase, “in an incredible time of 6 minutes and 41 seconds, even though he fell after leaping the water jump. He’ll compete in the 3,000 steeple in the division meet this week.”

   Don Reese of East Hampton Youth Football has embarked on a campaign to breathe new life into a program that in recent years has experienced a decline in numbers.

    “It’s two things,” he said during a conversation Friday. “Parents’ fear of concussions is part of it, as is the fact we now have a very large Latino population in the early grades who grow up playing soccer and know very little about football.”

   Sag Harbor’s Havens Beach seemed a wonderful place for Main Beach Surf & Sport to start its paddleboard race season Saturday, for the race’s beneficiary, Kevin McAllister, the Peconic Baykeeper, had spurred that village’s board of trustees to underwrite an inventive project there that, if faithfully monitored, ought to clean Havens Beach up.

Golfers Win

    The East Hampton High School golf team on Monday at the Indian Island course in Riverhead won its fifth division title in a row as Ian Lynch led the way with a 76, earning the senior a spot in the tourney’s second day, along with his teammate, Matt Griffiths, a junior, who shot a 79.

    “It kind of takes the sting out of the fall season when we finished third, behind Southampton and Pierson,” said East Hampton’s coach, Claude Beudert.

Saturday, May 25

BASEBALL, county Class C tournament, Port Jefferson-Southold winner vs. Pierson, Mashashimuet Park, Sag Harbor, 11 a.m.

Tuesday, May 28

BASEBALL, county Class C tournament, game three of championship series, if needed, Mashashimuet Park, Sag Harbor, 4 p.m.

Wednesday, May 29

MEN’S SOCCER, 7-on-7 games, Maidstone Market vs. Bateman Painting, 6:30 p.m., Tortorella Pools vs. FC Tuxpan, 7:25, and Hampton FC-Bill Miller vs. The Hideaway, 8:20, Herrick Park, East Hampton.

May 5, 1988

    Going into yesterday’s game here with Greenport, the East Hampton High School baseball team continued to hold onto first place in League Eight, at 9-1, with Mercy keeping pace at 7-2.

    East Hampton won all three games it played last week, finishing a sweep of the Southold series with 13-5 and 17-3 victories, and stopping Greenport 10-3.

    Eric Pettersen, Scott Loper, and Pat Bistrian, each of whom drove in two runs, led the way in the 13-5 win at Southold on April 27. Kenny Wood was the winning pitcher.

May 12, 1988

   It was made official Monday: The East Hampton High School softball team, by virtue of its 11-9 loss at Sayville, was knocked out of playoff contention.

    Thus, it’s the first time in his 20-year tenure here that East Hampton’s mentor, Lou Reale — one of the winningest coaches in the state — will not be at Bonac’s helm in the postseason.

   The East Hampton High School girls and boys lacrosse teams ended their seasons with wins Saturday, the girls defeating Center Moriches 14-6 and the boys crushing McGann-Mercy 14-1.

    Neither team made the playoffs, though the girls, who won five of their last six games, came close.

   The Old Montauk Athletic Club’s new president, Sharon McCobb, said during a conversation the other day that her chief goal was “to get people to know what our organization is.”

    “I’m surprised that after more than a decade people still don’t know what OMAC does: We’re a small grassroots organization that helps through modest grants, of $500 to $1,000 or so, to promote a healthy athletic way of life here, especially among young people.”

Kids Day

    The Hampton Racquet Club at 172 Buckskill Road, whose executive director is John Graham, a popular children’s coach, is having a Kids Day from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday that, besides kids tennis clinics, will include potato sack races, egg races, field events, a scavenger hunt, face painting, a bouncy castle, and a family barbecue. The event is to benefit the East Hampton Day Care Learning Center and the Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons.

Thursday, May 16

BOYS TENNIS, county team tournament, second round,  William Floyd-Miller Place winner at Ross, and East Hampton-Huntington winner at Westhampton Beach, 4 p.m.

Friday, May 17

BOYS TENNIS, county team tournament, quarterfinal round matches, sites of higher seeds, 4 p.m.

Saturday, May 18

    The East Hampton High School boys track team, which had not had a win in three years, got two in its last meets of the season to finish at 2-4. Meanwhile, the girls, while they went winless this spring, acquitted themselves well in an 84-64 loss at Westhampton Beach on May 7.

    The next day, Bonac’s boys defeated their Westhampton counterparts here 78-63.

   The East Hampton High School boys track team, as its coach had predicted, won its first meet in three years at Elwood-John Glenn on April 30, by a score of 87-54.

    The Bonackers, coached by Chris Reich and Luis Morales, have been putting up points this season, but until the 30th hadn’t managed to win one.

    The noteworthy victory, said Reich, “felt great — it has been a long time coming. It really was a full team effort, and having done so well at the Westhampton invitational [on April 27] we were confident going into the meet at Glenn.”

   Two mothers of I-Tri girls have become so inspired by the changes they’ve seen in their adolescent daughters as the result of having joined the triathletic mentoring program now in its fourth year that they’ve decided to train together when they can for I-Tri’s chief fund-raiser, the ‘Turbo Tri’ for adults, that’s to be held at Maidstone Park in Springs on June 15.

   It’s all coming down to this: If the East Hampton High School softball team does not make the playoffs this season — which as of this week was a possibility — it will be the first time in Lou Reale’s 20-year coaching tenure here that that will have happened.

    “We’ve got to cut down on our mistakes,” the veteran mentor said in recounting last week’s 4-1 and 4-2 losses to Islip and Rocky Point Monday morning. “In both games it was the same thing — we’d give up unearned runs, battle back, but fall a little short.”

   The big news as far as East Hampton High School sports was concerned last week lay in the fact that the boys tennis team defeated the league-champion Ross School 4-3 here on May 1.

    Ross and Westhampton Beach finished with 10-2 records, though Ross defeated the Hurricanes both times they played. It was the fourth straight year that the private school has won the league championship.

Ruggers Lose

    The Montauk Rugby Club was ousted from the Northeast Division II regional tournament Saturday as the result of a 32-20 loss to the host side, Princeton, which the next day defeated Montclair, N.J., for the championship and the right to advance in postseason play.

    “They were a better team than we were,” Rich Brierley, the Sharks’ coach, said Tuesday. “Their backs were pretty good, and though our guys know how to tackle, our lack of defensive experience showed in some instances.”

Thursday, May 9

BOYS TENNIS, East Hampton at William Floyd, scrimmage, 3:30 p.m.

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

Friday, May 10

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

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

Saturday, May 11

TRACK, East Hampton boys and girls at Elwood-John Glenn invitational, 8:45 a.m.

T-BALL, first session, John M. Marshall Elementary School, 9-10:30 a.m., registration at site.

BOYS LACROSSE, East Hampton at McGann-Mercy, Riverhead, 10 a.m.

   When Diane Lamb, a master teacher from Lincoln, Neb., asked following a golf clinic she gave for a dozen South Fork physical education teachers at East Hampton High School last week which school wanted to be the first in Suffolk to avail its students of the national First Tee program, designed to teach kids golf and life lessons, John Foster’s hand shot up.

    Foster, who works with the Springs School’s athletic director, Mark McKee, and who has caddied at the Shinnecock Hills Golf Club in Southampton since he was 14, seemed the obvious choice in any event.

   Things went a bit better for East Hampton High School’s teams this past week.

    The softball team as of Monday was riding the crest of a three-game winning streak (all shutouts) during which Lou Reale’s crew outscored the opposition 38-0.

    Still, Reale was not ready to say his young team, whose record, he said, improved to 6-6 as the result of Saturday’s 9-0 win here over Harborfields, had turned the corner.

    “The defense today was ugly,” he told his players during Saturday’s postgame huddle.

   For the fourth year in a row, the Ross School has won a league boys tennis championship, though, as Richard Wingfield, Southampton’s coach, said before a match in the private school’s “bubble” Monday, referring to Ross’s Tennis Academy, whose students are prohibited from high school competition, “We’re really facing Ross’s jayvee.”

    The Cosmos, whose sole league loss as of Monday had come at the hands of William Floyd in its league opener, went into the match with the Mariners at 10-1 in league play and 10-2 over all.