2016 Hall of Fame Class Inducted at Impressive Ceremony

With a crowd of about 200 looking on appreciatively in East Hampton High School’s auditorium Saturday morning, the 1989 gymnastics team, the seven McKee brothers, Ed Bahns, Kathryn Mirras, Brynn Maguire, Sandy McFarland, and the late Eleanor Dickinson Baker and James P. McNally Jr. were inducted into the high school’s Hall of Fame.

Kathy Strandberg McGeehan’s conference and league-champion gymnastics team is the third from that year — the others being the state-champion boys basketball team and the state Final Four field hockey team — to have a plaque on the wall.

In addition, it was a back-to-back appearance on the stage for Mirras and Maguire, who had been inducted last year as well, as members of Lou Reale’s 2001 state Final Four softball team.

It was said that the late Eleanor Dickinson Baker, of the class of 1936, would have averaged 45 points per game had today’s basketball rules been in effect in 1934, a year in which her 7-0 team was the state sectional champion, defeating Lindenhurst.

Her son, Dick Baker, said his mother, born in 1918 at Third House in Montauk, led Montauk’s junior high team to three successive undefeated seasons before coming to the high school.

“Can you imagine what travel was like in the 1930s for Montauk athletes to get back and forth, or for their families to attend games?” Baker asked. “The stretch across Napeague wasn’t paved at the time — it was a cinder road.”

And many colleges at the time, he said, didn’t think women should play sports. 

As for girls basketball, “the court was split into halves with three guards in the defensive end, two forwards in the offensive end, and a center who could run the full court. Players were allowed one dribble, and there was no reaching in to take the ball away. That was considered aggressive play. All shots were worth 1 point, and coaches weren’t allowed to speak to their teams during timeouts — only at halftime!”

“When I was growing up we had a backboard and a netless basket hanging off the garage. . . . She would often shoot with us. She shot well and had good range. When I asked my dad why he didn’t join in, he said, ‘I wouldn’t want to be compared to your mother — it wouldn’t come out well for me.’ ”

In speaking about the late James McNally, of the class of 1949, his niece, Colleen, said he’d been an outstanding boxer and guard on the football team that Fran Kiernan said was the best he’d ever had.

His classmates, she said, had established a citizenship award in his name following his untimely death in a motor vehicle accident on July 1, 1949 — an award that is presented to this day.

All the McKee brothers — Dick, Matt, Kelly, Mark, Billy, Brian, and Joey — were honored that day, and their sister, Maureen Marciniak, would have been, too, said their presenter, Bob Budd, “except she didn’t play football for me.”

Combined, the McKees, it says on their plaque, totaled 17 years in varsity football, basketball, baseball, and wrestling competition here, collected 34 varsity letters, have 154 years of coaching experience in the above-named sports, and have volunteered 85 years collectively as T-ball, Biddy Basketball, and youth football coaches in East Hampton and Springs.

Budd said that the late Maureen McKee, when asked how she’d managed to rear such outstanding sons, had replied, “I gave them all the love I had, and when there was no more to give I found some more.”

Joey McKee is East Hampton’s football coach and its junior varsity boys basketball coach, Mark is the athletic director at the Springs School, Kelly McKee assists his younger brother with the football team and is to coach the girls basketball team this winter, Brian McKee coaches wrestling at the Trinity School in New York City, and Billy McKee recently resigned as the boys basketball coach following a successful run.

Concerning the latter, Budd said, “If Larry Brown ever does come to coach here, he’ll have a tough act to follow.” 

Dick McKee, who spoke for his brothers, said their parents told them that if they were ever to receive an award like this they should, first, mention their parents, and, second, not let Mark talk.

The occasion reminded him, said Dick McKee, of the dialogue between Kevin Costner’s character, Ray, and his father after Shoeless Joe Jackson and other departed major leaguers materialized to play a game on the baseball diamond that Ray had built in an Iowa cornfield, having been told, “Build it and they will come.”

“Is this heaven?” his father asked. No, said Ray, “It’s Iowa.” 

Dick McKee said he and his brothers were inclined to make the same connection: to think of heaven and East Hampton in the same breath.

Sandy McFarland Ward (’92), a native of Bridgehampton and a Syracuse University graduate who is an elementary school principal in Concord, N.C., could not make it, though she sent a video in which she spoke fondly of her time here and of the opportunities that sport-sharing had provided her in track and gymnastics. 

Running for East Hampton High, she was a county champion in the 100 and 200-meter dashes and the state runner-up in the 200 in 1991, her junior year, and was fourth in the state 200 in her senior year.

At Syracuse, which she attended on a full athletic scholarship, she competed in indoor and outdoor track. She was the Big East’s indoor 400 champion and still holds the outdoor 400 record there.

Brenda Pinckney, her aunt, accepted the plaque on McFarland Ward’s behalf.

Ed Bahns, a 1973 graduate who was a four-sport athlete at East Hampton (golf, football, basketball, and baseball) before going to Florida Southern on a full baseball scholarship, said it had been a great honor to represent the silver-medal-winning United States baseball team in the 1975 Pan Am Games in Mexico City. 

“Playing for your country, wearing the red, white, and blue, and walking into a stadium filled with 125,000 people . . . it’s beyond words,” the longtime East Hampton coach said.

Bahns won a national championship at Florida Southern, was the team’s most valuable player in his senior year, and was drafted by the Chicago White Sox, in whose organization he played for three years. In his career here he has coached a number of sports — baseball, girls tennis, boys and girls basketball, and bowling.

His family, he said, had always been there for him, a sentiment that he shared with his fellow inductees.

Erin Bock Abran, in speaking about Kathryn Mirras (2004) and Brynn Maguire (2002), said they were exceedingly reliable teammates whom you looked to when the chips were down. 

Mirras, who is now a dentist here, went to the University of Virginia on a full athletic scholarship to play softball. She was an all-state softball player in her senior year at East Hampton. At the 2004 athletic awards dinner, she won the Paul Yuska award, which is given to the senior class’s best female athlete, was named the M.V.P. of the girls soccer and girls basketball teams, and was a recipient of a Kendall Madison Foundation mentoring scholarship.

Maguire, who lettered in field hockey, winter track, and softball here, and who captained the field hockey and softball teams, was a two-time collegiate all-American in field hockey at the University of Mary Washington.

Donna Sennefelder, in speaking for the 1989 gymnastics team, said, her voice catching, that they very much missed one of their teammates, Mary Hadjipopov Sireci, who died in the past year. “We’ll always be with you,” she said. 

Mary Hadjipopov’s award was given to her daughter, Sarah, who was accompanied to the ceremony by her grandparents Henrika and John Conner.

That gymnastics team’s roster included, besides Sennefelder, Jennifer Fuchs, Shannon D’Andrea, Becky Brown, Robin Streck, Dawn Becker, Julie Siegel, Erin McGintee, Tara McGintee, Diane Cooper, Cintia Torres, Penelope Benith, Nicole Starr, Loretta Kom, Stephanie King, Jennifer Brown, Caroline Somers, Yani Cuesta, Cathy Fleetwood, Tara Provini, Namie Trowbridge, and, as aforesaid, Sandy McFarland.