Sports

    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.

    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