Sports-wise, the news in Bonac was pretty good this past week, with just about all of the high school teams, with the exception of girls swimming and girls soccer, recording victories.
For the first time ever, the girls cross-country team defeated Shoreham-Wading River, by a score of 26-30. A Shoreham runner finished first, but then, with Ava Engstrom, Bella Tarbet, and Dylan Cashin, East Hampton took second, third, and fourth, with Ryleigh O’Donnell (sixth) and Emma Hren (ninth) rounding out the scoring, according to East Hampton’s coach, Diane O’Donnell.
“They’re very motivated,” O’Donnell said of her charges. “Did we shock Shoreham? They’d graduated quite a few from last year’s team, but, yes, I think they were a little shocked.”
The girls were also to have raced Amityville that day, Sept. 17, “but they only had three girls,” O’Donnell said, “so that one was a forfeit.”
The boys that day defeated Amityville 18-43, but lost 20-34 to Sayville, whose team is ranked 14th in the state among the Class B schools.
Evan Masi, a promising Bonac sophomore, won the race, “even though he made a couple of wrong turns again,” said Kevin Barry, the boys coach, who added that his time of 15 minutes and 8 seconds on the 2.8-mile Sunken Meadow course was “one of our best. . . . He’s doing the times that Erik [Engstrom, a former county champion who’s running at the University of Massachusetts now] did when he was a sophomore.”
Amari Gordon, a sophomore who played soccer last year, was East Hampton’s second runner, and seventh over all, with Aidan Klarman, also a sophomore, not far behind.
“Our team is young,” said Barry, “but we’ve got a lot to build on. Three meets in eight days, with two of them at Sunken Meadow, made for a pretty rough start.”
Most of the boys and the entire girls team ran in the inaugural Amagansett Mile Saturday morning, a race along Bluff Road that spanned the Indian Wells and Atlantic Avenue beaches.
Jenn Fowkes, who organized it on behalf of the Old Montauk Athletic Club and the Amagansett Chamber of Commerce, said she had expected a turnout of around 30, but was pleasantly surprised by the fact that “it was double that.”
“Sixty-four registered,” she said, “and 58 finished. . . . I don’t know how it all came together. We’ve all been so busy. . . .”
Masi won the men’s race, in 5:11.85, with Gordon one tick behind, in 5:12.84. A 13-year-old, Brayan Rivera, was third, in 5:16.77, and Frank Bellucci, one of the cross-country team’s captains, was fourth, in 5:32.04. Colin Schaefer, another Bonac sophomore cross-country runner, was fifth, in 5:34.55.
Barry, who’s 57, ran it too, finishing 22nd, in 6:48.04.
Tarbet, Engstrom, and Ryleigh O’Donnell ran abreast toward the Atlantic Avenue finish line, with Tarbet getting the win, in 6:17.61, followed by Engstrom, in 6:17.65, and O’Donnell, in 6:17.71.
Hren was fourth, in 6:37.69, and Daisy Pitches, too young at the moment to run on the high school’s team, was fifth, in 6:46.82, a personal record for her.
Both cross-country teams, underwritten by money raised through the Montauk Mile last summer, are to compete in the Ocean State Invitational at Goddard Memorial State Park in East Greenwich, R.I., this weekend.
“It’s about 45 minutes from Groton. . . . We’ll take three ferries to get there,” said Barry, who added, when he saw a puzzled look on this writer’s face, “the Shelter Island ferries to begin with.”
Further on the running front, the 20th Shelter Island 5K Run/Walk, a benefit for the North Fork Breast Health Coalition, the Coalition for Women’s Breast Health at Stony Brook Southampton Hospital, and Lucia’s Angels, is to be held Saturday, Oct. 19, at 11 a.m. The race is based at Crescent Beach.
There were 500 at last year’s race, which Chris Koegel, 35, of Wantagh, won, in 17:42.9. Kal Lewis, Shelter Island High School’s stellar runner, who is to attend the University of Iowa next year, jogged, having been so ordered by his coach, Toby Green.
A recent story in Newsday said Lewis, coming off “the best summer” he’s ever had, was long over the bronchitis that had slowed him at times in his junior year.
Lewis’s chief goal, he told Newsday, is to qualify for the Foot Locker national cross-country championships that are to be held Dec. 14 in San Diego’s Balboa Park. The Northeast qualifier is to be run on Nov. 30 at Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. Another goal of his is to win a third state Class D title.
Lewis and his Shelter Island teammates are to be among the participants in a 2.5-mile cross-country invitational to be held at East Hampton High School next Thursday afternoon as part of homecoming.