Sports

National Qualifier

    Besides qualifying for the Y.M.C.A. national swim meet as a member of the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter Hurricanes’ 200 freestyle relay team, Maddie Minetree also qualified for the nationals in the 50-yard freestyle at the University of Maryland over the Jan. 13 to 15 weekend with a time of 25.38 seconds in the final, good for 14th place. She swam a personal-best 24.87 in a preliminary heat.

E.H.I.T. Leagues

   Pulling on a wetsuit and bounding into 43-degree water with a surfboard might not top your to-do list this winter. But for a group of local women, the hassle of layering up and contending with the cold is decidedly worth it.

Thursday, January 26

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

Friday, January 27

BOYS BASKETBALL, Bridgehampton at Pierson, Sag Harbor, and Greenport at Ross, 6:15 p.m.

GIRLS BASKETBALL, Elwood-John Glenn at East Hampton, 6:15 p.m.

Saturday, January 28

WRESTLING, East Hampton at Port Jefferson tournament, 9 a.m.

GIRLS BASKETBALL, Knox at Ross, nonleague, 4:30 p.m.

BOYS BASKETBALL Knox at Ross, nonleague, 6 p.m.

    “We got killed on the boards,” Bill McKee, who coaches East Hampton High School’s boys basketball team, said during Biddy hoop practice at the John M. Marshall Elementary School Saturday morning.

    McKee was referring to the previous night’s lopsided 70-49 loss at Amityville.

    Howard Wood, who coaches East Hampton’s girls team, said the same thing Monday morning after a two-hour practice session during which he emphasized the importance of “boxing out.”

Tim Garneau, the East Hampton Little League organization’s president, has announced that boys and girls 7 through 12 can register this month online through eteamz.com/ehll or at free hourlong clinics that are being held for registered East Hampton Little League players at the Sportime arena in Amagansett on Sunday and Jan. 29.

    “The brain, then, is a terrible thing. . . ?” this writer said after Dr. Paul Weinhold, a sports psychologist, sat down during a recent visit to The Star.

    “A terrible and a wonderful thing,” he said. “The mind plays an incredible role as to how you’re going to perform. There’s no level of athlete who’s exempt, whether you’re a professional or a weekend warrior.”

Thursday, January 19

BOWLING, East Hampton at Mount Sinai, 4 p.m.

GIRLS BASKETBALL, East Hampton at Mount Sinai, 4:30 p.m., and Southold at Pierson, 6:15.

WINTER TRACK, East Hampton at Zeitler relays, Suffolk Community College-Brentwood, 5 p.m.

Friday, January 20

WRESTLING, East Hampton at Eastport-South Manor, 4 p.m.

BOYS BASKETBALL, Mount Sinai at East Hampton, 6:15 p.m., Smithtown Christian at Ross, 6:15, Pierson at Southold, 6:15, and Bridgehampton at Stony Brook, 7:30.

   Bobby Vacca, who ought to know, said after the East Hampton High School boys basketball team’s extraordinary fourth-quarter resurgence here against Shoreham-Wading River on Jan. 10 that “the greatest comeback in high school basketball in Suffolk County that I’ve ever seen” had led to the remarkable 57-56 win.

    This writer, who has seen numberless boys basketball games in Suffolk over the past 30 years, wasn’t about to argue.

   While having been wrestled to the mat by its tough league opponents thus far this season, East Hampton High’s wrestling team can nevertheless point to some outstanding individual performances by Lucas Escobar, Sawyer Bushman, Mike Peralta, James Budd, and Jacob Hands, among others.

There was much to write home about when it came to East Hampton swimmers this past week.

    The varsity boys team just missed out on winning two meets. “Five more yards and Thomas [Brierley] would have won the 400-yard freestyle relay for us,” Jeff Thompson, the varsity coach, said after the Jan. 10 meet here with Harborfields.

    Tomorrow, Tom Cohill, the aquatics director of the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter, is to take 16 members of the Y’s youth swim team, the Hurricanes, to a meet at the University of Maryland that is expected to attract Y teams from Massachusetts to South Carolina.

    Because it is an Olympic year, with Olympic trial hopefuls among the older teenagers, the Winterfest invitational, as it is known, will be, said Cohill, and one of his assistants, Craig Brierley, “a fast meet.”

The East Hampton High School boys basketball team, which has in the past two years often suffered disappointing defeats in the waning minutes of games, prevailed 60-58 in overtime at Bayport-Blue Point last Thursday, a night in which Bayport-Blue Point’s girls defeated their Bonac counterparts here 47-35.

    East Hampton’s girls had their moments, but they came in the first quarter, and, as time wore on, the fact that Kaelyn Ward, the team’s star point guard, got into early foul trouble, was to hurt.

There were precious few bright spots during this fall’s football season, though the East Hampton High School Dance Company’s version of the can-can at the homecoming game certainly was one of them.

    Overseen by three coaches, Lea Bryant, Anita Finder, and Tracee Van Brunt, the high school company numbers about 30 and the middle school company, where Van Brunt and Andrea Hernandez are the instructors, more than 40.

“You know what pleasure was to Epicurus?” I called out to Mary in the middle of the Steelers-Broncos playoff game.        “What?” she said amid the din.

    “Peace of mind!” I shouted.

    Well, we had little peace of mind — and therefore, little pleasure — during that game, I tell you. There was God’s anointed, Tim Tebow, in Denver’s backfield, and on our side, a hobbled but valiant Ben from a city that had once been blackened at 8 a.m. by the smoke from its hellish blast furnaces.

    “Beat God! Beat God!” we began to chant.

Thursday, January 12

BOYS SWIMMING, North Babylon vs. East Hampton-Pierson-Bridgehampton, Y.M.C.A East Hampton RECenter, 4:30 p.m.

BOWLING, East Hampton at Westhampton Beach, 3:30 p.m.

Friday, January 13

TENNIS, East Hampton Indoor-Outdoor Club party, Palm restaurant, 6 p.m.

GIRLS BASKETBALL, Amityville at East Hampton, 6:15 p.m., and Ross at Stony Brook, 7.

BOYS BASKETBALL, Bridgehampton at Shelter Island, 5:45 p.m., Stony Brook at Ross, 6:15, and Pierson at Greenport, 6:45.

Saturday, January 14

By Jack Graves

    A balmy day drew a record crowd to the New Year’s Day plunge at East Hampton’s Main Beach, as many as 800, John Ryan Jr., one of the event’s overseers, said.

    Colin Mather, the founder of New Year’s Day plunges here, in 1999, said that in Wainscott, following his annual 1.6-mile run from his Seafood Shop to the Beach Lane road end there at 2 p.m., he found “several hundred people on the beach . . . 75 went in.”

Thursday, January 5

BOYS SWIMMING, East Hampton at Lindenhurst, nonleague, 4 p.m.

BOWLING, East Hampton at Southold, 4 p.m.

BOYS BASKETBALL, East Hampton at Bayport-Blue Point, and Pierson at Smithtown Christian, 4:30 p.m.

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

GIRLS BASKETBALL, Bayport-Blue Point at East Hampton, 6:15 p.m.

Friday, January 6

GIRLS BASKETBALL, Ross at Shelter Island, 4 p.m., and Smithtown Christian at Pierson, 6:15.

On New Year’s Day, there will be three polar bear plunges, beginning with one at Gurney’s Inn in Montauk at 11 a.m., followed by one at East Hampton’s Main Beach at 1, and at Beach Lane, Wainscott, at 2:30.

Sunday, January 1

POLAR BEAR PLUNGES, Gurney’s Inn, Montauk, 11 a.m.; Main Beach, East Hampton, 1 p.m., registration 10:30-12:30, and Beach Lane, Wainscott, 2:30 p.m.

Tuesday, January 3

GIRLS BASKETBALL, Pierson-Bridgehampton at Shelter Island, 5:45 p.m., and Stony Brook at East Hampton, nonleague, 6:15.

BOYS BASKETBALL, Shelter Island at Pierson, 6:15 p.m.

Wednesday, January 4

BOYS BASKETBALL, Smithtown Christian at Bridgehampton, 6 p.m.

    The East Hampton High School bowling team by virtue of its 23-10 win over Rocky Point at the Port Jefferson lanes Monday jumped from fourth to second place in league competition.

    “We were flat in the first game — we never bowl well at Port Jeff — but we buckled down and adjusted and came back to win the second and third games,” said Bonac’s coach, Pat Hand. “Besides those games, we got the team high game, and total wood too.”

     Chris Reich, who coaches East Hampton High’s boys winter track team, assisted by Luis Morales, said this week that “we have a roster of 18, which is not as many as I’d like, but they’re doing well — Deilyn Guzman, Trevor Shea, William Ellis, Adam Cebulski, Joe Olszewski, A.J. Bennett, and Henry Whitney in particular.”

    Cebulski has run the indoor mile in 5 minutes and 7 seconds. “Hopefully,” said Reich, “he’ll go under 5 in the meet after Christmas break.”

    A seasoned triathlete, mountain-biker, marathoner, and long-distance swimmer, Emi Berger, a vivacious 34-year-old veterinarian, said during a recent conversation at The Star that she didn’t think one could train for the 4,000-mile bicycle trip that she and Kevin Harrington had recently made across the United States.

    Just when it looked as if last year’s endgame swoons might become this winter’s pattern as well, the East Hampton High School boys basketball team proved in Saturday’s 64-56 win over the Dalton School that it can come back, and win.

    “We got off to a bad start,” said Bonac’s second-year coach, Bill McKee, on Monday. “We were trailing 15-2 near the end of the first quarter before pulling to 15-8. We were down by 5 at the half, and in the third quarter we played really well, outscoring them 23-10.”

    Exceeding their coach’s and their own expectations, just about everyone on East Hampton High School’s boys swimming team set the bar high insofar as personal performances went in the league opening meet here with Huntington Friday.

Thursday, December 22

BOYS BASKETBALL, Greenport at East Hampton, nonleague, 6:15 p.m.

GIRLS BASKETBALL, East Hampton at Bellport, nonleague, 6 p.m.

Friday, December 23

BOYS BASKETBALL, Pierson at Mattituck, nonleague, 6:15 p.m.

Tuesday, December 27

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

Wednesday, December 28

WRESTLING, East Hampton at Half Hollow Hills East tournament, 11 a.m.

GIRLS BASKETBALL, East Hampton at tournament, 11 a.m.

Thursday, December 29

    Bouncing back from a 47-28 season-opening nonleague loss to Mattituck-Greenport here on Dec. 14, East Hampton’s wrestling team won the Doc Fallot team tournament at Hampton Bays High School Saturday — the first time that East Hampton had done so since 1999, according to Steve Tseperkas’s assistant, Louis Russo.

    East Hampton High’s girls and boys basketball teams began playing this past week, and their nonleaguers with Pierson went well, the boys winning 40-31 here last Thursday and the girls winning 47-33, “or something like that,” according to Howard Wood, the head coach, at the Sag Harbor school on Dec. 6.

    Both teams run an up-tempo offense, though it appears, given this past week’s cursory look, that the girls may wind up having more success vis-a-vis their peers.

    The East Rockaway High School boys basketball team, intrigued by the idea of playing in a tiny gym much like the ones in its district’s elementary schools, traveled out to Bridgehampton Saturday for a nonleaguer in the Bee Hive.

    It was said to be the first time in 20 years that an UpIsland school had played a nonleague game at Bridgehampton.

    And the Rocks, as they are known, despite the new surroundings, seemed to feel right at home.

“I was desperate to keep playing — I was so passionate about the sport. I tried to get friends of mine out here interested, and I also went out to the bars at the Montauk docks and got a lot of fishermen to play. That’s how we came to be called the Montauk Rugby Club.”