Sports

   The East Hampton High School baseball team made the playoffs last year — for the first time since 2007 — and, despite the removal of one of its key pitchers, Maykell Guzman, to the Dominican Republic, the senior-heavy team can be expected to make them again this spring.

    Ed Bahns, the head coach, and his assistant, Will Collins, are counting on their “core six,” all senior returnees, to lead the way.

   As Matt Maloney had predicted, the East Hampton High School girls lacrosse team was well tuned for its league opener at Center Moriches Friday.

   In high school tennis matches here Monday, Half Hollow Hills East, the defending county champion, bageled Ross 7-0 and Southampton edged East Hampton 4-3.

Ross’s coach, Vinicius Carmo, who saw the rout coming, lamented the fact that his Ross Tennis Academy students were not allowed by Section XI to play in league matches. “With them,” said Carmo, “we would have won.”

   In a nonleague match played at Ross Saturday, Northport prevailed 4-3.

   Lou Reale, East Hampton High’s softball coach, spent much of Saturday morning’s practice schooling his three new infielders in cutoff plays and the like.

    The Ross School’s boys tennis team, which has only one senior, Felipe Reis, its number-one, is set, nevertheless, to challenge Westhampton Beach for the league championship. Ross and Westhampton are to play their first match tomorrow.

    While the coach, Vinicius Carmo, expects the Cosmos to make the playoffs, he’s not sure how deep this year’s team, which includes two seventh graders who play singles and three freshmen, will go. Ross was the county runner-up to Half Hollow Hills East the past two years.

Thursday, March 29

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

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

GIRLS LACROSSE, East Hampton at Hauppauge, 5:30 p.m.

Friday, March 30

BOYS TENNIS, Westhampton at Ross and Shoreham-Wading River at East Hampton, 4:30 p.m.

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

BASEBALL, East Hampton at Shoreham-Wading River and Pierson at Smithtown Christian, 4:30 p.m.

SOFTBALL, McGann-Mercy at Pierson, 4:30 p.m.

Saturday, March 31

   East Hampton High’s boys and girls track teams, each about 40 strong, began the season with a scrimmage here Friday with their Southampton peers.

    Joe Vas, East Hampton’s athletic director, saw to it, even though it was a scrimmage, that judges were provided.

    The East Hampton High School girls lacrosse team, judging by its scrimmage here with William Floyd on March 14, looks as if it may well become the first in Bonac’s 12-year-old program to make the playoffs.

    Matt Maloney’s team, which plays in a power-rated division, just missed them last year although finishing with a program-best 9-7 record.

    Young swimmers on the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter’s Hurricanes team set four state records at the Y state meet at Erie Community College in Buffalo this past weekend.

    Georgie Bogetti, a 12-year-old seventh grader who is expected to move up to East Hampton High School’s girls team this fall, set three of them, two in the 11-to-12-year-old 200-yard freestyle — breaking her own record, set in Friday’s preliminaries, in the finals the next day — and in the girls 11-12 200 individual medley.

Thursday, March 22

SOFTBALL, East Hampton at Riverhead, scrimmage, and Pierson at Miller Place, nonleague, 4 p.m.

Friday, March 23

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

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

BASEBALL, East Hampton at Hampton Bays, scrimmage, 4 p.m., and Pierson at McGann-Mercy, Riverhead, 4:30.

GIRLS LACROSSE, East Hampton at Center Moriches, 6 p.m.

Saturday, March 24

GIRLS LACROSSE, multi-team scrimmage, East Hampton High School, 9 a.m.

    When spring practice first began at the beginning of this month, Lou Reale’s response on being asked how East Hampton High School’s softball team looked was to roll his eyes.

    He’s not rolling them anymore.

    East Hampton Bowl was packed Sunday morning with the parents, teachers, and friends of 60 young bowlers with disabilities who, in high spirits and urged on by the applause of their elders and peers, participated in a tournament that capped two months of practice.

   The Killer Bees of Bridgehampton had, according to Carl Johnson’s assistant, Joe Zucker, a pretty good chance to win Saturday’s state Class D Southeast regional playoff game against Livingston Manor.

    The Bees, who wound up losing 69-53, took a 2-point lead into the halftime break, and were confident, “but our lack of experience and failure to get back on defense a few times in the second half turned the tide,” said Zucker.

   The news sports-wise, as of earlier this week at any rate, is that East Hampton High School’s spring teams have not been hampered by the ordinarily hostile weather of early March.

    “The weather’s been incredible, but I don’t want to jinx it,” Joe Vas, East Hampton’s athletic director, said during a preseason conversation on March 7.

    Numbers-wise things look good, except for junior varsity softball, which couldn’t field the requisite 11 for a team. Jayvee girls lacrosse’s numbers are thin, though, with 15 or so players as of Monday, sufficient.

   Mark Crandall, who’s hopeful that the Hoops 4 Hope program he’s overseen in Zimbabwe and South Africa for the past 18 years will continue to grow, is nevertheless mindful that, despite the organization’s fine reputation, fund-raising has been a continuous struggle, he said during a conversation at The Star before flying to Africa the other day.

Thursday, March 15

SOFTBALL, East Hampton at Center Moriches, scrimmage, 4 p.m.

Friday, March 16

GIRLS TRACK, Southampton at East Hampton, scrimmage, 3:30 p.m.

SOFTBALL, Newfield vs. Pierson, Mashashimuet Park, Sag Harbor, scrimmage, 4:30 p.m.

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

Saturday, March 17

BOYS LACROSSE, East Hampton at multi-team scrimmage, Eastport-South Manor High School, 8 a.m.

BASEBALL, East Hampton at Mattituck, scrimmage, and Pierson at Southampton, scrimmage, 10 a.m.

   Basketball is arguably the most exciting game inasmuch as the presumptive victors can become the vanquished in the blink of an eye.

    Such was the case Saturday at Oswego State’s Max Ziel gymnasium as a line-drive N.B.A.-length 3-pointer by Eastern Connecticut’s Brian Salzillo with 2.5 seconds left in the second overtime period stuck a dagger into Hayden Ward and his Laker teammates’ hearts.

    The boys swimming season just past, the first winning one in the East Hampton High School program’s three years under Jeff Thompson, began with a bang — an opening day turnout that doubled that of the previous year — and ended with one — three career-best and four season-best performances in the county meet — the intense, quiet-spoken coach said this week.

Friday, March 9

GIRLS BASKETBALL, Smithtown Christian eighth-grade team at East Hampton Middle School, 4:30 p.m.

Saturday, March 10

BOYS BASKETBALL, New York State regional finals, Class C bracket, Pierson-East Rockaway winner vs. Pine Plains-Tuckahoe winner, 2:45 p.m.; Class D bracket, Bridgehampton vs. Section I/IX winner, 4:30 p.m.

Sunday, March 11

    Asked during a conversation in between county classification contests last Thursday how his team, the Pierson High School Whalers, got to be so good, Dan White, who’s in his second season coaching boys basketball in Sag Harbor, said, “The big thing is that the kids are playing year round.”

    Last year’s senior-heavy team, whose players didn’t play the year round, went 5-9 in league competition, but this winter White reaped a bonanza as Jon Tortorella’s 12-2 junior varsity moved up.

    Diane O’Donnell, who coaches East Hampton High School’s girls cross-country team, said during recent physical evaluations of Springs’s I-Tri girls at the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter that she thought they were “ready to take the next step . . . you can see a difference in these girls, they have more of a spark.”

   A Winter Luau to benefit the Hampton Lifeguard Association is to be held next Thursday from 7 to 11 p.m. at East by Northeast restaurant in Montauk. John Ryan Sr. of East Hampton and Mary Lownes of Amagansett are handling reservations.

Tickets bought in advance cost $75 per couple and $40 per person. They will cost $85 and $45 at the door.

   The Bees may be back, but the Whalers are too, and so it was that in the county C-D boys basketball game at Farmingdale State on Feb. 22, Sag Harbor’s players took the measure of their Bridgehampton counterparts by a score of 57-41.

    While the young East Hampton High School boys swim team, which is combined with Pierson and Bridgehampton, didn’t qualify anyone for the states at the recent Suffolk County meet, the Bonackers, who finished third in League III, behind Hauppauge and Harborfields this season — their highest finish in the program’s three years — acquitted themselves well.

    Thomas Brierley, in placing fifth in the 100-yard backstroke in 56.74 seconds, a career best, missed the state cut by a second.

Thursday, March 1

GIRLS BASKETBALL, Center Moriches eighth grade team at East Hampton Middle School, 4:30 p.m.

Friday, March 2

BOYS VOLLEYBALL, East Hampton Middle School vs. Montauk, Montauk Playhouse, 4 p.m.

Saturday, March 3

WRESTLING, Port Jefferson at East Hampton Middle School, 10 a.m.

Sunday, March 4

STRETCHING, for men, with Carolyn Giacalone, Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter, 10:30 a.m.-noon.

Monday, March 5

SPRING SPORTS, practices begin, 3 p.m.

Tuesday, March 6

   Hayden Ward, who played on back-to-back East Hampton High School state Final Four basketball teams in 2008 and ’09, has kicked it up a notch at Oswego State, which with his considerable help went 21-0 in conference play before sweeping through tournament games this past week with New Paltz, Brockport, and Cortland to become the State University of New York Athletic Conference champion.

    Thirty-one years ago, Dick Baker, who before he began selling real estate had been a physical education teacher at the Amagansett School for 15 years, inaugurated weekly badminton nights there from the fall through spring.

    During a conversation at The Star the other day, the group’s founder, who is back to playing after having got a new hip on Nov. 21, said, “We’ve got a good group now, from 16 to 18.”

   East Hampton High’s underclassmen got a taste of the playoffs at Shoreham-Wading River Saturday night, and, as a result, Bill McKee, the boys’ coach, said after the 51-40 loss that he hoped they’d play in the interim and come back ready to go further in the postseason next winter.

    “Our goal was to try to do something in the playoffs this year, but, in the end, we were happy to get there,” said McKee, who graduates two seniors — Cameron Yusko, a 3-point shooter, and Patrick McGuirk, who, at 6 feet 2 inches was the team’s tallest player.

    The week past was a stellar one for Cameron Yusko, a senior captain of East Hampton High’s boys basketball team. During it, he was named, by virtue of his 98.5 unweighted average, as East Hampton’s valedictorian and received Channel 12’s scholar-athlete-of-the-month award.

    He was only the fourth Bonacker to be so honored since Robin Streck first won the award in the fall of 1990.

   East Hampton High’s varsity football and girls lacrosse teams are to move down a division in the next school year, each having cut ties, at least temporarily, with Pierson High School in Sag Harbor. In addition, next fall’s boys volleyball team will be combined with Bridgehampton.

    “We’re still an ‘A’ school,” said East Hampton’s athletic director, Joe Vas, “though, instead of being the smallest A school in Conference III, we’ll be a good-sized one in Conference IV.”