Sports

    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.

    The backs of the Sayville High School softball team’s coaches’ T-shirts say, “Leave No Doubt,” and, indeed, their charges left none in the county Class A championship series with East Hampton.

    “They beat us four out of five times — they were a better team than we were,” Lou Reale, East Hampton’s coach, said after the Golden Flashes shut out the Bonackers 4-0 in the third and deciding game of the best-of-three series at Sayville Friday.

    Going into the first game of the county Class A final series at Sayville on May 29, the top-seeded Golden Flashes had beaten the Bonackers both times the teams had met, 3-2 (in 10 innings) and 8-2.

    In the latter game, played here May 18 — the regular season’s finale, with a share of the league championship at stake — Casey Waleko, Bonac’s sophomore starter, was roughed up in the fifth, by the end of which the visitors led 7-0, while her opposite number, Merissa Selts, cruised, thanks largely to an effective drop that resulted in a lot of ground ball outs.

Saturday, June 9

MONTAUK TRIATHLON, one-mile lake swim, 22-mile bike, and 10K run, Star Island Causeway-West Lake Drive intersection, 7:30 a.m.

BASEBALL, New York State Class C Final Four, Johnson City High School, Binghamton, 10 a.m. and 4 p.m.

May 7, 1987

    Boys tennis continued last week as the only undefeated team among the six fielded by East Hampton High School in the spring. The Bonac squad topped Mercy, Stony Brook, and Smithtown West to run its record to 7-0.

    In a 6-1 win over Mercy on April 29, all three doubles teams — Luke Wornstaff and Clark Silva, Marc Kenny and Mauricio Castillo, and Tom Kalbacher and Chris Wellenborg — won their matches without the loss of a game. It was a “first” as far as East Hampton’s coach, John Goodman, could remember.

   The last time out against Islip, the East Hampton High School softball team made six errors in the final two innings, frittering away a 2-0 lead on the way to a 4-2 loss.

    This time, on Friday, it was the Buccaneers’ turn to play fumbleitis, and the Bonackers took full advantage, pulling out the county Class A semifinal 6-5 in the 10th inning.

    Kousaku Yokota, an international karate master who gave a weekend seminar recently at John Turnbull Sensei’s dojo in Southampton, began with judo at the age of 13, a martial art practiced by his father, in his hometown of Kobe, Japan.

    “I thought judo was it,” Yokota Sensei said during a conversation at Turnbull Sensei’s house in Bridgehampton the day the seminars were to begin. “But after I’d been practicing a couple of years, a new guy came to my class — a very short guy I could throw easily. But every time I threw him he would jump up like a grasshopper!”

   Twelve athletes, two teams, two coaches, and an honorary member make up the first class to be inducted into East Hampton High School’s Hall of Fame at the homecoming football game with Southampton on Sept. 22.

    The announcement was made May 23 by Jim Nicoletti, the president of East Hampton’s Hall of Fame committee, and Joe Vas, the school district’s athletic director, who suggested that such a committee be formed last summer.

   The Pierson and Southold High School baseball teams were to have played for the county Class C championship in the third game of a best-of-three series at Sag Harbor’s Mashashi­muet Park Tuesday.

    Presumably, Colman Vila, Pierson’s impressive undefeated left-hander, was penciled in as the Whalers’ starter that day by Pierson’s coach, Jon Tortorella.

    Pierson, which had lost only three games going into Tuesday’s finale, last won a county championship in 2009.

    Matt Maloney, who coaches East Hampton High’s girls lacrosse team, the first one in the program’s 12-year history here to make it to the playoffs, asked before the first-round game at Eastport-South Manor began Saturday morning that his charges be patient on offense and that they not spot the Sharks four or five goals in the early going.

    The ominous music from the movie “Jaws” was playing as the teams took the field, though Kathy McGeehan, Maloney’s soon-to-retire assistant, reminded the girls that the great white shark swallowed a depth charge in the end.

    There has been talk about whether this year’s Pierson (Sag Harbor) High School baseball team is the best that ever was, though the Whalers’ coach, Jon Tortorella, is more interested in what the next game will bring.

    That next game — the first in a best-of-three county Class C championship series with Southold — was to have been played at the Harbor’s Mashashimuet Park Monday afternoon, though despite the fact that the weather permitted — it was a gray day, though otherwise pleasant — Section XI, the governing body for high school sports in Suffolk, called it off.

   The benefits that therapeutic riding affords children with various disabilities were on display at Wolffer Estate in Sagaponack Friday evening, most easily discerned in the riders’ eyes as they performed maneuvers on horseback before a large group of spectators who looked on and applauded from a glassed-in room above the indoor ring.

   Lou Reale, East Hampton High School’s softball coach, said over the weekend that he was happy to have the third seed (behind Sayville and Islip) in the county Class A tournament. The Bonackers were to have begun it here yesterday with sixth-seeded Mount Sinai.

Thursday, May 24

BASEBALL, game two of county Class C final, Pierson at Southold, 4 p.m.

GIRLS TRACK, division championships, Bellport High School, 3 p.m.

Friday, May 25

SOFTBALL, county Class A tournament, semifinal games at sites of higher seeds, 4 p.m.

BASEBALL, game three of best-of-three county Class C final, if necessary, Southold vs. Pierson, Mashashimuet Park, Sag Harbor, 4 p.m.

Tuesday, May 29

SOFTBALL, game one of best-of-three county Class A final, site of higher seed, 4 p.m.

Thursday, May 31

   Kirk Edwards would like it to be known that the Montauk Racquet Club’s eight Har-Tru courts are open to the public seven days a week from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. through Oct. 31.

    As the result of Friday’s 1-0 loss in 10 innings here to Shoreham-Wading River, the East Hampton High School softball team’s record dropped to 12-4 in league play.

    It was the third straight loss for the Bonackers, a rarity; though, as opposed to the two previous defeats, by 4-1 here to Islip and by 2-1 at Rocky Point, this game was very well played on the part of Lou Reale’s charges.

   The East Hampton High School baseball team and its fans said farewell to 11 seniors Saturday, and they went out winners, defeating John Glenn 4-3.

    Thus the Bonackers finished the campaign at 9-11, though undoubtedly they and their coaches, Ed Bahns and Will Collins, would have preferred an 11-9 ending, which would have gotten them into the playoffs.

    East Hampton almost pulled it off, but a 13-11 loss to League VII’s co-champion Bayport-Blue Point in the finale of that penultimate three-game series proved fatal.

    A 15-12 win at Elwood-John Glenn last Thursday enabled the East Hampton High School girls lacrosse team to make the playoffs for the first time in the program’s 12-year history.

    The win, however, didn’t come easily. “We didn’t play our best, but we did play well down the stretch,” said the team’s head coach, Matt Maloney. “We scored three goals in the final five minutes and stopped them twice, which gave us the victory. Allison Charde, our goalie, had 12 big saves to prevent an upset.”

Day Care Races

    The East Hampton Day Care Learning Center will benefit from a 5K for those 10 and up, a mile race for 5-to-8-year-olds, and from a 400-meter race for 3-to-4-year-olds on Saturday at 9 a.m. Registration at the center, which is behind the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter, is to begin at 8.

Girls Track

Friday, May 18

BOYS TENNIS, county team tournament, Ross-Mattituck winner at Harborfields, 4 p.m.

Saturday, May 19

RUNNING, East Hampton Day Care Learning Center races, 5K, mile, and 400-meter dash, 2 Gingerbread Lane Extension, 9 a.m., registration from 8.

GIRLS LACROSSE, playoffs, first round, East Hampton at Eastport-South Manor, noon.

Monday, May 21

BOYS TRACK, division meet, Comsewogue High School, 3 p.m.

BASEBALL, county Class C championship series, Southold vs. Pierson, Mashashimuet Park, Sag Harbor, 4 p.m.

   Assuming the rain held off, the East Hampton High School softball team was to have played for a share of the League VI league championship here with Sayville Tuesday afternoon.

   Sayville lost 3-1 to Shoreham-Wading River and East Hampton defeated Miller Place 6-2 in games played Monday. The win improved East Hampton’s record to 13-4 and dropped Sayville’s to 14-3.

   Casey Waleko, the East Hampton High School softball team’s pitcher, had an almost-perfect (no hits, one walk) game going through the first six and two-thirds innings of a crossover game here with Islip on May 2 when, in coach Lou Reale’s words, “the wheels came off.”

    Though the Bonackers were to commit four errors in the final two frames on their way to a 4-2 loss — all of the visitors’ runs were unearned — Reale said he was to blame.

    Though it was faced with the daunting task of winning out in order to make the playoffs following a 6-0 loss to Bayport-Blue Point on April 30, the East Hampton High School baseball team gave it its best shot, winning game two of the three-game series with the league leaders before yielding grudgingly, 13-11, in the finale.

    Will Collins, who assists Ed Bahns in coaching the Bonackers, said the second game was played Friday at the Baseball Heaven facility given the fact that the fields at both schools were, because of the rain, unplayable.

    A hearing called at the behest of the Ross School’s boys tennis coach, Vinicius Carmo, who alleged that his Westhampton Beach counterpart had unfairly juggled his lineup in a match with the Cosmos, was held at Section XI’s offices in Smithtown Tuesday morning.

    Later in the afternoon, Carmo reported that the governing body for Suffolk high school sports had ruled in Ross’s favor.

Half-Marathon

    Jason Hancock, 38, a Southamptoner who teaches at the Amagansett School, won the Paddlers for Humanity off-road half-marathon in Montauk’s Hither Woods Sunday in 1 hour and 33 minutes. Sinead FitzGibbon, 41, won among the women in 1:43.34. Paul Hamilton and John Doyle were the relay winners in 1:48.50.

T-Ball