Sports

   There almost wasn’t a boys basketball game at Sag Harbor Friday night because the already-slim ranks of Bridgehampton’s Killer Bees had been pared even further by two academic ineligibilities, which had prompted the Bees’ coach, Carl Johnson, earlier in the week to forfeit a contest to Bridgehampton’s chief Class D rival, Shelter Island.

   The East Hampton High School boys swimming team knocked Hauppauge out of a first-place tie with Sayville-Bayport by defeating the Eagles 95-75 at the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter on Jan. 9, thus improving to 2-1 in league competition and dropping Hauppauge (3-1) into a second-place tie with Harborfields.

    The meet was swum before a full house. “Going into the last event, the 400-yard freestyle relay,” said East Hampton’s coach, Craig Brierley, “the top of the roof was coming off. The meet was decided by then, but the crowd didn’t know it.”

   East Hampton High School’s basketball teams were to have played big games with their Bayport-Blue Point peers Tuesday.

    Meanwile, in recent action, the boys, on Jan. 8, parlayed an energetic second half into a 53-47 win over Elwood-John Glenn before losing 73-57 on Friday at Amityville, the odds-on favorite to win the league championship. That same night, the girls, following lopsided losses to Shoreham-Wading River and John Glenn, rebounded behind Jackie Messemer’s breakout 21-point performance to defeat their Amityville peers 49-36.

   Twenty-four members of the Y.M.C.A.’s youth swim team, the Hurricanes, coached by Tom Cohill, competed this past weekend in a large regional meet at the University of Maryland.

   Doug and Kathryn de Groot, who own the Buckskill Tennis Club here, which is turned over to skating in the winter, are making a big push for the young set.

    “We’re putting an emphasis on kids with our after-school and weekend junior hockey, figure skating, and regular skating offerings,” Kathryn de Groot said Saturday morning as 20-plus youngsters, under Tim Luzadre’s direction, were doing hockey drills and scrimmaging on Buckskill’s rink, which overlies about six Har-Tru tennis courts.

Coach on Goalie

    Brad McCarty, coach of the national champion Messiah College men’s soccer team, whose goalie is Brandon West, a former Bonac star, had this to say by way of e-mail: “One of the things that separates Brandon from everyone else is his work ethic, on and off the field.”

Thursday, January 17

BOWLING, Southampton vs. East Hampton, East Hampton Bowl, 3:30 p.m.

BOYS SWIMMING, Harborfields vs. East Hampton, Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter, 4:30 p.m.

BOYS BASKETBALL, Mount Sinai at East Hampton, 6:15 p.m.

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

Friday, January 18

WRESTLING, East Hampton at Westhampton Beach, 6 p.m.

Saturday, January 19

WRESTLING, East Hampton at Mattituck tournament, 8 a.m.

January 7, 1988

    Kenny Wood, East Hampton’s 6-foot-4 1/2-inch junior center, who has averaged 31.3 points per game since the season began, and 35.0 in the past five games, during which he has been virtually unstoppable, tied the school’s single-game scoring record, set by Bill Myrick in 1968, as he tallied 40 points in Saturday’s game with Alexander Hamilton, which was played as part of a doubleheader at Manhasset High School. Even so, East Hampton wound up losing in the final seconds, 65-62.

January 14, 1988

   Agony and ecstasy met together at the Shoreham-East Hampton girls high school basketball game here last Thursday.

    A good-sized crowd had turned out to see Kaelyn Ward, who had already established herself as the highest-scoring female player in Bonac hoop history, score her 1,000th point. And, of course, the fans hoped too that their team would defeat Shoreham-Wading River.

    “Only Kaelyn should have been nervous — not all of them,” East Hampton’s coach, Howard Wood, said in the wake of the disappointing 64-35 loss.

   Though the East Hampton High School boys basketball team was missing two key players — Juan Cuevas, who starts, and Rolando Garces, the valuable sixth man — Bill McKee, the Bonackers’ coach, said during a conversation the day following a disappointing 56-55 loss at Shoreham-Wading River that “we just didn’t, for whatever reason, play well — we didn’t lose because Juan and Rolando weren’t there.”

    The East Hampton High School boys swimming team evened its league record with a 99-85 win at Huntington this past week.

    While Huntington had a state-record-holding swimmer, Gunther Cassel, in its lineup, and had divers to boot, East Hampton’s depth turned the tide.

   Just a few East Hamptoners have played on collegiate national championship teams over the years; Brandon West is the latest.

    West and his Messiah College teammates of Mechanicsburg, Pa., went 23-0-2 this past season on their way to winning Division III’s men’s soccer championship. It was the eighth national title for the Falcons in the past 11 years.

   The honors keep coming in for Ed Petrie, New York State’s winningest public high school boys basketball coach, though the latest, in the form of his induction into his high school’s Hall of Fame, was a long time in coming.

Don’t Ask

    Neither Steve Tseperkas nor his assistant, Louis Russo, was inclined to talk during Monday’s practice about Bonac’s recent 49-30 wrestling loss at Mount Sinai.

    “We didn’t win one match,” said Tseperkas. “All our points resulted from forfeits.”

    Adding injury to insult, Lucas Escobar, arguably the team’s best wrestler, who has been competing this season at 120 pounds, suffered a broken clavicle and a separated shoulder during his 7-5 loss.

Thursday, January 10

BOWLING, East Hampton vs. Rocky Point, Port Jefferson Bowl, 4:30 p.m.

Friday, January 11

WRESTLING, East Hampton at Elwood-John Glenn, 4 p.m.

BOYS BASKETBALL, East Hampton at Amityville, 4:30 p.m.

Saturday, January 12

WRESTLING, East Hampton at Comsewogue tournament, 7:30 a.m.

WINTER TRACK, East Hampton girls at Jim Howard meet, Suffolk Community College-Brentwood, 10 a.m.

Tuesday, January 15

GIRLS BASKETBALL, East Hampton at Bayport-Blue Point, 4 p.m.

   East Hampton High’s winter track teams, while rather low in numbers, have some goers, mostly young, who have kept it interesting for their coaches, Chris Reich in the boys’ case and Shani Cuesta in the case of the girls.

    As 2012 began, Dr. Paul Weinhold, a sports psychologist, said that “The best are confident — in any sport. They’re not adding an enormous amount of pressure on themselves because they’ve already incorporated into themselves the knowledge that they will not always be perfect. It makes no difference whether you’re an athlete or a surgeon or a musician. . . . They want to be focused, confident, to quiet the mind.”

Thursday, January 3

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

GIRLS BASKETBALL, Shoreham-Wading River at East Hampton, 6:15 p.m.

Friday, January 4

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

Sunday, January 6

WINTER TRACK, East Hampton girls at crossover meet, Suffolk Community College-Brentwood, 2:30 p.m.

Monday, January 7

WINTER TRACK, East Hampton boys at crossover meet, Suffolk Community College-Brentwood, 5 p.m.

Tuesday, January 8

December 10, 1987

    Ground will be broken Monday in Hampton Bays for a 60,000-square-foot building that will house an ice hockey and figure skating rink, the first such on the East End.

    To be known as the Southampton Civic Center, the building, which, besides an Olympic-sized 90-by-200-foot rink, is to include training and Nautilus rooms, locker rooms, a pro shop, and public meeting rooms, is being put up by Gerry Hart, a former New York Islander, and Ed Broidy, partners in a land developing and building business on Southampton’s North Highway.

   The East Hampton High School boys basketball team lost its first game of the season Friday as the Dalton School, sporting a formidable point guard and a 6-foot-5-inch center, prevailed over the Bonackers 64-54 in the first round of the Southampton Recreation Center’s Holiday Classic tournament.

    Bill McKee’s team, which had gone into the tourney with a 6-0 record, played hard, but Dalton’s energetic man-for-man defense made the Bonackers work hard for their shots.

   It took about 10 minutes for East Hampton High School’s boys basketball team to warm up in a league game played here on Dec. 19 with Miller Place.

    A steal by Rolando Garces early in the second quarter that Thomas Nelson followed with a fast-break layup, and a subsequent coast-to-coast drive by Garces, following a steal by Nelson, got the blood flowing, and from that point on the Bonackers, who improved to 6-0 as a result of the 60-39 win, were in the driver’s seat.

   Pat Hand, who coaches East Hampton High School’s bowling team, confessed after Dec. 18’s big win here over Eastport-South Manor, the defending league champion, that she had been pleasantly surprised.

    The Sharks, after all, had been racking up some 1,000-plus-point games, while East Hampton’s best game as of that day had been a 934.

    The visitors, dressed in dark blue jerseys and khaki cargo shorts, exuded confidence on their arrival at East Hampton Bowl. And they started off strong, sweeping the alleys clean of pins in the early going of the first game.

Thursday, December 27

WRESTLING, East Hampton at Half Hollow Hills East tournament, also Friday, 9 a.m.

GIRLS BASKETBALL, Pierson-Bridgehampton at Hampton Bays tournament, 11 a.m.

BOYS BASKETBALL, Bridgehampton at Mattituck, 3 p.m.

Saturday, December 29

BOYS BASKETBALL, Pierson at Rocky Point, noon.

Tuesday, January 1

   The East Hampton High School boys swimming team and the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton

RECenter Hurricanes enjoyed productive outings in pools this past week.

    While the boys, coached by Craig Brierley, lost 102-79 at Sayville, “we put up some good times,” said the coach, who added that “we’re not in our racing phase yet — we’re concentrating on building up our endurance. The other coach said afterward that he was ‘a little nervous,’ that he didn’t expect us to be so strong.”

   The East Hampton High School bowling team was said to be “on fire” in a recent published report, and Pat Hand, the team’s coach, acknowledged during a conversation this past week that that was so.

    Going into Tuesday’s match here with Eastport-South Manor, a team that has had some 1,000-point-plus games, East Hampton was 4-0.

   Five female athletes from East Hampton were in the news this past week.

   Maddie Minetree, a freshman at Rollins College in Florida, and her three 800-meter relay teammates broke the school record by 13 seconds at a regional meet in Fort Lauderdale over the weekend, qualifying for the National Collegiate Athletic Association meet that is to be held in Birmingham, Ala., in March. It’s the first time that a Rollins relay team has done so.

   Things have been going swimmingly for the East Hampton High School boys and girls basketball teams thus far.

    The boys, 5-0 over all as of Tuesday, had a big win at Mount Sinai Friday, besting the Mustangs, who have a 6-foot-8-inch Division 1-bound center, 65-63.

Thursday, December 20

BOYS SWIMMING, East Hampton at Sachem East, nonleague, 4:30 p.m.

GIRLS BASKETBALL, Pierson-Bridgehampton at Port Jefferson, 4:30 p.m.

Friday, December 21

BOYS BASKETBALL, holiday tournament, East Hampton vs. Dalton, 6 p.m., and Southampton vs. Bridgehampton, 8, Southampton High School.

Saturday, December 22

BOYS BASKETBALL, holiday tournament, consolation game, 9 a.m., championship game, 11, Southampton High School.

   East Hampton High School’s young wrestling team bore testimony to its schooling as it won three matches Saturday before losing to Centereach in the Doc Fallot Memorial Duals tournament at Hampton Bays.

    On the way to the final, the Bonackers, who had three freshmen in the lineup — Axel Alanis, at 170 pounds, Robert Padilla, at 126, and Malachy Mitchnick, at 138 — defeated West Babylon’s B team 59-18, Sayville’s B team 52-24, and Long Island Lutheran 66-15 before losing to a strong Centereach team that had come out of the A Pool (East Hampton was in the B Pool).

   This past fall was a breakout season for the East Hampton High School boys and girls cross-country teams.

    Kevin Barry, the boys coach, recently said that although he had the youngest team in the county, it was the best squad he’d had in five years, and, in time, might well prove to be the best he’s had in a decade.

    “We won county championships in 2001 and ’02, with Chris Reich [who now coaches the boys winter and spring teams] and Joe Sullivan and the Ahearn twins. . . . That was a long time ago, but these kids seem to want it.”