Sports

I’ve lived here for 20 years under the Great American Robin Flyway and I had no idea, but recently started noticing them gathering en masse, as many as 5,400 of them, like black stars shooting against a white sky. Where were they headed?

High school sports made a stuttery recovery in the past year of Covid. The good news was that there were at the high school level two fall seasons in 2021, in which 11 mostly-playoff-caliber East Hampton High teams contended.

The first day of the new year was drizzly and drab, and, to some, depressing, though you wouldn’t have known it had you been at East Hampton Village’s Main Beach or at the Beach Lane road end in Wainscott for the New Year’s Day plunges that afternoon.

Asked this week if the New Year’s Day plunges were on, Colin Mather, who began the annual ritual in Wainscott in 1999, and John Ryan Jr., the Hampton Lifeguards’ chief, who followed suit soon after first in Amagansett and later in East Hampton, said they were indeed.

The swimmers’ win evened their league record at 2-2, while the basketball team’s was its second in a row since Luke Reese, its star junior shooting guard, suffered a knee injury during a Dec. 9 game.

All four of the East Hampton Soccer Club’s youth travel teams, one of which is an under-12 girls team coached by Luis Barrera, recently won the Long Island Junior Soccer League divisions in which they played, all of them going undefeated.

During the 101st Audubon Montauk Christmas Bird Count, 125 species were spotted, the rarest a western kingbird found by Mike McBrien just off Fernwood Drive. The birds are great, but so are the people, some of whom have returned to take part in the count for 50-plus years.

The wrestling match that was held here Friday between East Hampton and Eastport-South Manor High Schools began early, as the Sharks had no junior varsity competitors, and ended early, as seven of the 11 matches wrestled ended in first-period pins, owing in large part to cross-wrist tilts.

Chase Lieder, Chloe Coleman, and Tucker Coleman, Montauk surfers who attend East Hampton High School, are faring well in national surf competitions, fueling professional ambitions.

If you are lucky enough to encounter one of these visitors from the north, the number-one rule is to simply keep your distance.

The East Hampton High School boys swimming team knew that West Islip would be hard to beat in a meet that was held at the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter on Dec. 15, , according to its coach, Craig Brierley, and indeed the visitors, whose depth proved to be a deciding factor, were.

Dan White, the coach of East Hampton High’s boys basketball team, was in high spirits Sunday morning in reporting the team’s nonleague win the day before at East Islip. For the first time, the Bonackers were playing well in the absence of Luke Reese, their stellar junior guard, who has been knocked out of the season with a knee injury.