Sports

   Annette MacNiven was heading toward a mountain bike triathlon in New Hampshire the other day with a light heart, for she knew she’d already won the regional championship in the 55-to-59-year-old age division, for the sixth or seventh year in a row.

    “The last 10 years I’ve been doing these off-road triathlons,” she said. “They’re going to be in the Olympics for the first time in 2016.”

   “You got a stop watch?” John Conner asked Bill Herzog at the starting line of the Miss Amelia’s Cottage 2-mile road race in Amagansett Sunday morning.

    When Herzog nodded, Conner said, “Can I use it?” Yes, he could, said Herzog, who was there to see how some of the young runners he coaches fared. “I hope it works,” he said to an observer. “I got it 25 years ago at Radio Shack.”

    This 2-mile race, about half of which is down Town Lane, is a favorite of kids, and of adults whose fast twitch fibers remain intact.

   It was incorrectly reported in the obituary of Andy Neidnig last week that he had set an over-70 record of 2 hours and 57 minutes at the New York Marathon. He did indeed set an over-70 record, in 1989, but his time was 3:32:28.

    The former world-class miler and marathoner, who died on Aug. 6 at the age of 93, won his age group at the New York Marathon three years running, between ’89 and ’91. The 3:45:42 he ran in ’90, while it was his “slowest ever,” still placed him in the top quarter of the 25,000 entrants.

Thursday, August 16

BEACH VOLLEYBALL, rounds one and two of playoffs, Gurney’s Inn, Montauk, 6 p.m.

WOMEN’S SLOW-PITCH, game three of best-of-three final series, if necessary, Terry King ball field, Abraham’s Path, Amagansett, 7 p.m.

Saturday, August 18

SWIMMING, East Hampton Volunteer Ocean Rescue Squad one-half, one, and three-mile swims, Fresh Pond beach, Amagansett, 7:30 a.m.

BASKETBALL, Amateur Athletic Union 16-and-under tournament, Montauk Playhouse Community Center, 240 Edgemere Street, also Sunday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.

    Bostwick’s (nee Cangiolosi’s) is eying its seventh straight East Hampton Town women’s slow-pitch softball league championship, though Groundworks Landscaping, a team that Kim Hren has gotten together, planted a 13-10 loss on the perennial champions in game one of a best-of-three final last Thursday.

    Members of the Springs Booster Club, who hope to raise $35,000 by the end of this month so that an estimated 40 to 45 Springs School seventh and eighth graders can continue to participate on East Hampton Middle School teams, met last Thursday with the East Hampton School District’s athletic director, Joe Vas, who encouraged them in their endeavor.

    The weekend of Aug. 18-19 will sport two popular events here — the Artists and Writers Softball Game at East Hampton’s Herrick Park on Saturday, the 18th, and Ellen’s Run the next morning in Southampton.

    It’s the 64th year for the Artists-Writers Game, according to its impresario, Leif Hope, and it’s the 17th year for Ellen’s Run, which has underwritten Southampton Hospital’s state-of-the-art breast cancer center, named after Julie Ratner’s late sister, Ellen P. Hermanson.

   Maidstone Market continued its undefeated string of championships in the 7-on-7 men’s soccer league here, defeating Tortorella Pools 3-1 in the playoff final on Aug. 1.

    Tortorella, the tournament’s fourth seed, had upset top-seeded 75 Main 2-1 in one of the semifinals while Maidstone, the dominant men’s soccer team locally in the past four years, had shut out Bateman Painting 2-0 in the other semi.

    Fifteen teams duked it out in the double-elimination Travis Field memorial softball tournament at the Terry King ball field in Amagansett over the weekend, and the Mighty Midgetts, Brian Midgett’s team, came out on top.

   The CfAR men’s slow-pitch softball team “mercied” the defending town league’s champion, Schenck Fuels, 21-6 on Aug. 1 at the Terry King ball field in Amagansett.

    Eight-run outbursts by the insurgents in the bottom of the fifth and sixth innings did the Fuelmen in, making a seventh inning unnecessary.

Thursday, August 9

WOMEN’S SLOW-PITCH, game one of best-of-three final, Groundworks-P.B.A. winner vs. Bostwick’s, Terry King ball field, Abraham’s Path, Amagansett, 7:15 p.m.

Saturday, August 11

MEN’S SOCCER, 7-on-7 tournament, Fiske Field, Shelter Island, 8 a.m.-noon.

PADDLEBOARDING, races to benefit the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, home of Lisa and Richard Perry, North Haven, 4 p.m., registration from 3.

SPINNING, B-East Roar, benefit Max Cure Foundation, Amagansett Square, 4-7 p.m.

    With the Giant Steps 5K having ended its run, the Old Montauk Athletic Club stepped into the breach with a race of its own at Fresh Pond, Amagansett, Sunday, though the turnout was light, perhaps given the fact that a number of others were running in a weekly Hamptons Marathon warm-up whose participants gather every Sunday morning at the Gubbins Running Ahead store in East Hampton Village.

   The team without a sponsor but with a logo, CfAR, sprayed sand in the defending champions’ faces in the first two games of the East Hampton Town men’s slow-pitch softball league’s best-of-five final.

   Maidstone Market, the Yankees of East Hampton men’s soccer, advanced to last night’s spring-summer 7-on-7 final by shutting out Bateman Painting 2-0 at Herrick Park on July 25.

    Tortorella Pools earned the other finalist’s spot by upsetting 75 Main, the top seed, 2-1.

    Bateman played the Market toe-to-toe in the first half, which ended scoreless. But it shot itself in the foot in the second frame as the result of a yellow card handed out by the referee, Alex Ramirez, to Juan Zuluaga for entering the game without his permission.

Artists-Writers

Thursday, August 2

BENEFIT SOFTBALL, Travis Field tournament begins, Terry King ball field, Abraham’s Path, Amagansett, 5:30 p.m.

BEACH VOLLEYBALL, games at Gurney’s Inn, Montauk, from 6 p.m.

Friday, August 3

BENEFIT SOFTBALL, Travis Field tournament, Terry King ball field, Abraham’s Path, Amagansett, 5:30 p.m.

Saturday, August 4

BENEFIT SOFTBALL, Travis Field tournament, Terry King ball field, Abraham’s Path, Amagansett, from 8 a.m.

   As “defiant” as he had been as a teenager, Kofi Sekyiamah said with a smile during a conversation at The Star the other day, the all-boys Presbyterian school in England his Ghanian parents had sent him to had, with its strict rules and regulations, “made me stay in line,” and that toeing of the line combined with his innate love of sport had given him “real direction.”

   Amos Ryan, who first came to East Hampton as a teenager at the invitation of a pen pal whose sailboat he’d tended on Union Island in the Grenadines, and who was to attain educational and professional goals that some here doubted he would, now faces a serious challenge indeed inasmuch as his and his wife Canela’s 14-year-old daughter, Manijeh, has been diagnosed with brain cancer.

   The I-Tri explosion was never more evident than at Sunday morning’s youth triathlon at Maidstone Park.

    Cheered on by a sizable crowd of parents, relatives, and coaches, including Theresa Roden, who several years ago founded the program, which has used triathlon training to transform teenage girls who would otherwise have been couch potatoes, about 80 young competitors, half from the Springs and Montauk Schools’ I-Tri groups, swam 300 yards in the bay, biked 7 miles through Maidstone Park’s environs in Springs, and finished with a mile-and-a-half run.

   Year-round South Fork residents know well what it means when an otherwise nondescript vehicle appears in their rearview mirrors with a flashing green or blue light on the dash. Other drivers, particularly those passing through just for a day or weekend, may have no idea that the signals say, “Get out of the way — and fast!”

   The scoreboard was working again and things were pretty much back to normal at the Terry King ball field in Amagansett Monday night as Schenck Fuels, the defending champion, whose hitters delivered four runs in the top of the seventh inning, ousted Round Swamp Farm from the playoffs and, by virtue of the 13-12 win, advanced to a best-of-five men’s final with CfAR that was to have begun last night.

Waterborne Events

    There will be two waterborne events supported by the East Hampton Volunteer Ocean Rescue Squad this weekend — ocean swims of one-half, one, and two miles in Montauk that are to benefit the Montauk Playhouse’s aquatics center on Saturday, and a stand-up paddleboard race benefiting the Retreat at Fresh Pond Landing on Sunday.

Friday, July 27

TRAVIS FIELD TOURNEY, “Bracket Bash,” American Legion Hall, Amagansett, 7:30-10:30 p.m.

Saturday, July 28

OCEAN SWIMS, benefit Montauk Playhouse aquatics center, Kirk Park beach, Atlantic Terrace, and Ditch Plain, from 7:30 a.m.

Sunday, July 29

PADDLEBOARDING, Main Beach Surf and Sport races to benefit the Retreat, Fresh Pond Landing, Gardiner’s Bay, Amagansett, 8 a.m.

RUNNING, Old Montauk Athletic Club 5K to benefit O.M.A.C.’s athletic grant program, Fresh Pond, Amagansett, 9 a.m., registration from 8.

    Air & Speed, whose roster includes Summer Foley, Kim Valverde, Jon Jamet, and Dan Weaver, took over first place last Thursday in the 10-team beach volleyball league at Gurney’s Inn with a 9-1 record.

    Organized beach volleyball has been a rarity here in the past 20 years, and the 4-on-4 games Kathy McGeehan has been overseeing at Gurney’s have proved popular indeed.

   Babylon Bike Shop co-workers Tom Eickelberg, 23, and Ryan Siebert, 21, who are also sponsored by PowerBar and Western Beef Racing, placed first and fourth in Sunday’s sprint triathlon that ended at the foot of the Montauk Lighthouse, where the exceedingly well-informed M.C., Terry Bisogno, greeted them.

    It was a repeat for Eickelberg, who won this race last year too.

    Taking up where Rusty Red Lacrosse left off, Zach Brenneman, the former two-time collegiate all-American midfielder who starred for the East Hampton High School team before going to Notre Dame, oversaw a well-attended camp for kids at East Hampton’s Stephen Hand’s Path fields this past week.

    The campers, who ranged in age from 6 to 12 years old, had fun while learning the game’s fundamentals.

    One of Brenneman’s assistants was his former Bonac coach, Ralph Naglieri, whose two sons, Jack, 9, and Danny, 8, were among the 77 attendees.

Thursday, July 19

LIFEGUARDING, Main Beach, East Hampton, invitational tournament, from 5:30 p.m.

BEACH VOLLEYBALL, games at Gurney’s Inn, Montauk, from 6 p.m.

WOMEN’S SLOW-PITCH, games at Terry King ball field, Abraham’s Path, Amagansett, from 7 p.m.

Friday, July 20

MEN’S SLOW-PITCH, playoffs, either game three of Schenck Fuels-Round Swamp Farm semifinal series or game one of best-of-five final with CfAR, 7:15 p.m., Terry King ball field, Abraham’s Path, Amagansett.

Saturday, July 21

    Sixteen of the best professional women squash players in the world — from Australia, England, Canada, and the United States — mixed deep lobs with whacks down the rail and nicks up front before appreciative audiences at the Elmaleh-Stanton courts at the Southampton Recreation Center this past weekend.

July 23, 1987

    Summer squash is about to make its debut on the East End, not only at farm stands, but also at the Omnihealth and Racquet Club in Southampton, which recently converted one of its four air-conditioned racquetball courts to accommodate the lively racket game.

    Richard Gold, the club’s director, said of the addition, “Frankly, our fourth racquetball court was underused, so we said, ‘Why not squash?’ ”

   Having just swum a mile in Gardiner’s Bay Saturday morning as part of a Swim Across America cancer-research fund-raising event, Arnie Paster, a 68-year-old Southamptoner who had raised more than $15,000 on his own, said to the scores of participants and volunteers assembled around him, “We’re all going to die. But we don’t have to die of cancer. What we’re doing today will have a great effect.”