Sports

   Play has begun in a 4-on-4 beach volleyball league contested by 11 teams on the beach at Gurney’s Inn in Montauk every Thursday evening, Kathy McGeehan, the longtime coach of East Hampton High School’s girls volleyball team, announced this week.

    McGeehan, sidelined at the moment because of meniscus surgery, is the league’s director. Gurney’s, Smart Water, and the Diplomatico Rum Company are the sponsors. There are teams from East Hampton, Montauk, and Shelter Island, and the players range in age from 15 to 50, she said, adding that the competition is keen.

July 2, 1987

    Costa Rica became on June 24 the East End Men’s Night Soccer League spring season playoff champion by virtue of a shot by Carlos Vargas late in the second half that found the upper right corner of the Springs-Village Shoe Store goal.

    Dahlia Aman, who recently swept through the Empire State Games senior division in tennis without losing a game, qualifying for next summer’s national tournament in Cleveland, played volleyball when growing up in the Philippines and didn’t begin playing tennis until she moved to the United States in 1973.

    “I wish I had learned when I was younger,” said the 5-foot-1-inch dynamo, with a laugh. “I would have been traveling.”

    It’s been a while, a long while in fact, since the Maidstone Market has faced a serious competitor in the Wednesday evening 7-on-7 men’s soccer league, whose games are played at East Hampton’s Herrick Park.

    The 9-10-year-old East Hampton traveling all-star baseball team’s playoff run came to an end with a 10-6 loss at Patchogue Saturday morning. Thus the Bonackers finished the District 36 Little League tournament with a 3-2 record.

    Following Friday’s 13-0 mercy-rule shutout of Sag Harbor at the Pantigo Fields here, Tim Garneau and Adam Wilson, one of Garneau’s assistants, told the boys that three more wins stood between them and the district title.

Weekend Events

    There will be two sporting events of note here this weekend — Swim Across America’s long-distance Hamptons Swim races in Gardiner’s Bay, a fund-raiser for cancer research, which are to be held, from 6 to 10 a.m., at Fresh Pond Beach in Amagansett, and the Firecracker 8K road race, whose start-finish line is across the street from Lake Agawam Park in Southampton, at 8:30 a.m. Sunday.

    The Stony Hill Stables Foundation’s fund-raiser Saturday exceeded its $20,000 goal, Maureen Bluedorn was happy to report Tuesday morning before children’s pony and horse camps began.

    Thus the foundation is on its way toward awarding eight riding scholarships — apparently a “first” here — to promising applicants with a desire to improve their skills.

Saturday, July 7

SWIM ACROSS AMERICA, half-mile, one-mile, and 5K races in Gardiner’s Bay, Fresh Pond Beach, Amagansett, 6-10 a.m.

Sunday, July 8

RUNNING, Firecracker 8K, Lake Agawam Park, Southampton, 8:30 a.m.

June 11, 1987

    Duane Bock, a senior who has played five years on East Hampton High School’s varsity golf team, finished fifth in the New York State high school golf championships held Sunday and Monday at Cornell University.

    It was the first time that an East Hampton student had placed in the state tournament, which this year was won by the Suffolk team. One of Duane’s older brothers, Darrell, played in the state tournament in 1983, as a junior, finishing 25th, and E.J. Pospisil went as an alternate in 1977 and ’78.

    While East Hampton’s 11-to-12-year-old traveling all-star team lost two games last week, resulting in its elimination from the District 36 Little League tournament, the 9-10s won both of their initial outings and were to have played a third game yesterday.

    Christian Johnson, an impressive fourth-grader, started for the young Bonackers in Monday’s game against Mastic at the Pantigo fields, and while the visitors touched him for two runs in the top of the first inning, it was pretty much all Bonac after that as Tim Garneau’s crew cruised to a 13-6 win.

    Since the Cashins, Ed and his Irish-born wife, Caroline, seem to be on the move most of the time, you better be prepared for a mini cardiovascular workout of your own should you want to interview them.

    The Exceed Fitness studio that they have overseen since Memorial Day on Plank Road off Route 114 in East Hampton is a hive of activity every day of the week. Simply to observe is to get your blood flowing and your heart pumping more efficiently.

Thursday, June 28

LACROSSE, open play at East Hampton High School begins, 6-8 p.m.

Friday, June 29

LITTLE LEAGUE, District 36 tournament for 9-10-year-olds, site to be determined, 5:45 p.m.

Saturday, June 30

RIDING, cocktail party to benefit Stony Hill Stables Foundation with dressage exhibition and pony drill team performance, Stony Hill Stables, Town Lane, Amagansett, 6-8 p.m.

Monday, July 2

GIRLS SOCCER, summer workout, East Hampton High School, 6-7:30 p.m.

Wednesday, July 4

June 4, 1987

    The old men beat the young ones, and also the 90-degree heat in Saturday’s 5K Race Against Drug Abuse in Sag Harbor. Ted Haiman, 44, a part-time Amagansett resident who holds the masters record of 4 minutes and 22 seconds in the Fifth Avenue Mile, was the winner in 16:23.

    “I wanted to relax in a low-key race,” Haiman said afterward, “but then I saw Cliff Clark and Kevin Barry. . . . But, on the other hand, that legitimized the race for me.”

    There was agony and ecstasy to spare this past week as East Hampton’s Little League finalists — boys and girls — duked it out in best-of-three “world series.”

    Tim Garneau’s Indians came from behind to win the 9-10 boys series at the Pantigo Fields on June 11, thanks to a two-out, two-strike walk-off double hit to deep center field by Jackson Baris that treated the Indians to a 6-5 win over Greg Brown’s Orioles.

    The I-Tri program for sixth-through-eighth-grade girls in the Springs and Montauk Schools benefited to the tune of about $9,000 from a Turbo-Tri, a triathlon for adults new or relatively new to the sport that was contested Saturday over the same Maidstone Park course the I-Tri girls and others of their peers are to traverse on July 22.

    “We’re going to have to make the course harder,” Mary Ellen Adipietro, the Shelter Island 10K director, said with a laugh on Monday, two days after Simon Ndirangu topped a field of 1,066 finishers in 28 minutes and 37 seconds, setting a new course record. The 26-year-old Kenyan’s time this year was three seconds faster than Alene Reta’s winning time in 2010, when Reta, an Ethiopian, bested by one second his own 2007 record of 28:41.

Sailing Classes

    The first of the East Hampton Town Recreation Department’s summer series of two-week sailing sessions is to begin Monday at the south end of Lake Montauk. Preregistration at the Parks and Recreation Department, behind Town Hall, is required. The morning and afternoon sessions are limited to 15 students. The minimum age is 12. The fee is $200 per person.

Riding Scholarships

    Leslie Andrews, a former ESPN marketer who at the age of 30 forsook corporate boardrooms for the greener pastures of golf, and who later became a teaching pro and a corporate golf consultant, has, with Adrienne Wax, written a book, “Even Par: How Golf Helps Women Gain the Upper Hand in Business,” which says that working women are handicapping themselves by not taking up the sport.

    He believes it could be the beginning of a big payback. “Nature’s vengeance. For all the tweety birds I shot with my BB gun, and all the fish, and all the ducks. I’m probably going to be stomped to death by webbed feet.”

    What’s prompted Harvey Bennett’s concerns was a run-in with a deer early in the morning last Thursday near Dev­on in Amagansett.

    As the start drew near for the Breakwater Yacht Club of Sag Harbor’s final Wednesday night race for the May Cup, Lee Oldak was asked about the pressure. He was loading up his sailing vessel, named Purple Haze.

    “No pressure,” he said, “we’re just out to have fun.” After the race, the Purple Haze crew took the cup, with Jim Vos’s Scoot in second place, and Gossip, owned by Gregg Ames and Steven Kenny, in third.

   Jean Carlos Barrientos, an East Hampton High School junior who was one of the stars on the boys soccer team that won the school’s first-ever county championship last fall, was hailed for another reason at the athletic awards dinner on June 6.

    Four days before, Barrientos, who is a cabana boy at the Driftwood ocean resort just west of Hither Hills State Park, had saved a 34-year-old Brooklyn man, Nicola Devito, from drowning.

Brenneman Cited

    Tyler Brenneman, a son of Tim and Debbie Brenneman of East Hampton, and a midfielder on Notre Dame’s Final Four men’s lacrosse team, has been named as the recipient of a National Collegiate Athletic Association Elite 89 award given to sophomore-or-above athletes whose cumulative grade-point average tops their Final Four peers. Brenneman, an economics major who is to study in that field in England this summer, has a 3.782 g.p.a. He is the first Notre Dame men’s lacrosse player to be so honored.

10K, Turbo Tri Races

Friday, June 15

LITTLE LEAGUE, game three of Reds-Diamondbacks final series, if necessary, Pantigo fields, 5:30 p.m.

Saturday, June 16

LIFEGUARDING, ocean certification test, Indian Wells Beach, Amagansett, 9:30 a.m.-noon.

SHELTER ISLAND 10K, in front of Shelter Island High School, 5:30 p.m.

TURBO-TRI, 300-yard swim, 7-mile bike, and 1.5-mile run, fund-raiser for I-Tri program, Maidstone Park, Springs, 6 p.m.

    Ryan Siebert, a 20-year-old from Patchogue, who was third last year, won Saturday’s Robert Aaron memorial triathlon in Montauk in one hour, 52 minutes, and 46.5 seconds.

    The young winner, who competed in his first triathlon when he was 10, topped a field of 525 finishers, bettering last year’s time by about three minutes.

    Ashley West, who led the girls cross-country team for four years and the spring track team for five, and Cameron Yusko, a three-sport athlete who played on six straight league-champion golf teams and on one Long Island-championship team, were honored at East Hampton High School’s athletic awards dinner June 6 as recipients of the Paul Yuska award given to the senior class’s top athletes.

    Jitters played a hand in the Pierson (Sag Harbor) High School softball team’s 12-1 loss to Greenwich in a state Final Four semifinal in upstate Queensbury Saturday, though the facts remained that for the first time ever, the Whalers, whose coach is Melissa Edwards, had won Long Island and regional championships.

    It had all come down to this: Bottom of the seventh in a scoreless game, two outs, base runners at the corners, the count 1-2 on Pierson’s ace and number-two hitter, Colman Vila.

    And heeeere’s the pitch . . . a change curve into the dirt, Vila waves at it in vain, the umpire signals strike three . . . and Pierson wins the Long Island Class C championship 1-0!

   “I love it — I want one,” Aliza Corder said the other day after trying out in the Reutershan parking lot the ElliptiGO outdoor elliptical bike that the irrepressible Khanh Ngo is selling out of his Park Place sports store in the village.

   Kelly McKee, who coached the Ross School boys basketball team to a county Class D championship two years ago and who made the playoffs this past winter, was fired recently by Ross’s athletic director, Jaye Cohen.

    McKee, who launched Ross’s boys basketball program “13 or 14 years ago,” said Monday he was “shocked” to learn, by phone, that Cohen was letting him go, “especially considering that the day before he led me to believe I’d be coaching again, patted me on the back, and gave me the practice schedule for next season.”

   Merle McDonald-Aaron said Monday that the former 10-time winner of the Montauk triathlon, Eben Jones, who’s the top-ranked 50-to-54-year-old triathlete in the United States, would help celebrate Montauk’s 30th anniversary on Saturday.

    She had tried hard to get another of Jones’s contemporaries, Chuck Sperazza, a multi-winner at Montauk himself, to come back too, “but he’s living in California now and I haven’t been able to reach him, which is disappointing,” McDonald-Aaron said.