December 2, 1993

Coming off a rare losing season, the East Hampton High School wrestling coach, Jim Stewart, expects this year to again be a “rebuilding” one, “though if we have everyone in the right weight classes, we could surprise.”

After five championships between 1985 and ’90, Stewart found himself with many young and inexperienced wrestlers last year. The result was a 2-7-4 season, the first losing season for a Bonac wrestling team in a long while.

. . . While a return to former glory may yet remain beyond East Hampton’s reach, Stewart expects to give everyone “a good match.”

The first quarter of Monday’s non-league East Hampton-Ward Melville girls basketball game here was definitely ho-hum, as Melville’s swarming press kept the scoring to a minimum.

But things changed — boy, did they change — in the second quarter. Ellamae Gurney, a smooth East Hampton forward who played with verve at both ends of the court, and Allison Tilley, East Hampton’s 5-foot-11-inch center, began to pour in the points. The 25-point spate, worthy of Bridgehampton’s Killer Bees, pretty much wrote finis to Ward Melville, and served notice that Tim Rood’s Bonackers are for real.

December 16, 1993

With the biggest turnout ever — 30 — and the potential to win the league for the first time, Jeff Yusko, East Hampton High School’s bowling coach, is definitely looking forward to the 1993-94 season.

He had some facts to back up the prognosis yesterday, after the Bonackers knocked off Westhampton Beach 7-4 in their season-opener Tuesday. The team — which includes Paul Wolfram, whose 289 game last year tied for best in the county — totaled 2,538 pins, “the highest total it has had in four years,” according to the coach. “And,” he predicted, “we’re going to get better. We are capable of 2,600.”

David MacGarva, East Hampton High School’s varsity football coach, announced at a dinner for the team Saturday night that Steve Redlus, an offensive and defensive tackle, Earle Hopson, a split end and defensive back, and Rob Balnis, a running back, will be the captains of the 1994 team.

MacGarva said Balnis, whom he described as the best high school runner he’d ever seen, ought to be among the county’s leading players next season. The team’s Wing-T formation will feature two halfbacks next fall — Balnis and Terrell Hopson of Bridgehampton. Earle Hopson, he said, will be used primarily as a receiver.

December 23, 1993

His first year as a professional golfer included a major disappointment, but that has not diminished Duane Bock’s dream of making the Professional Golfers Association tour.

The 24-year-old East Hamptoner, who was home this week for Christmas, will leave Wednesday for South Africa to play in that country’s seven-tournament tour in the next two months.

Were it not for one bad round in the second stage of qualifying recently, at Savannah, Ga., he’d be on the P.G.A. or Nike tours now in the United States.

The four-shot shortfall “was a major disappointment,” Bock said. “I was in 10th place after the first two rounds. I was right in there, but I played poorly the third day. I started thinking too much. I played the last nine 6-over, and that blew me out.”

. . . “My chipping and putting is probably the best part of my game, but I’ve been struggling with my long game recently. My drives average around 265 yards, which is fine, but they’re not always straight!”

Meanwhile, Bock is keeping in mind advice he got from Jerry Haas, a Nike tour player whose brother, Jay, plays on the P.G.A. tour. “ ‘Never evaluate yourself daily — year to year, not day to day.’ Golf’s a strange game: One day can be great, and the next day awful.”

He also recalled some thoughts on the game from Lee Janzen, this year’s U.S. Open winner, with whom Bock spent some time at the Maidstone Club in East Hampton three years ago. Janzen said the major difference between their games was that his bad shots were less bad than Bock’s, Bock said.

A huge crowd at East Hampton High School’s gym Thursday night was treated to one of those heart-stopping basketball contests that cannot adequately be described on paper.

After 32 minutes of in-your-face, top-this, gut-wrenching intensity, the Pierson Whalers had beaten down the Bridgehampton Killer Bees by, of course, a single point. The game, which Pierson won 71-70, was a likely prelude to the county Class D championship to be contested in February.

In the end, it was the most intense player on the court who saved the day for Pierson. John Schroeder, a fiery and driven senior, put on a fourth quarter show to be remembered, rallying his team from a 12-point deficit. His eyes glazed, his body driven by demons, Schroeder demanded and got the ball virtually every time down the floor in the frantic closing minutes. He scored 16 of his game-high 28 points in that final period.

Dan Farnham, who recently was named as the Old Montauk Athletic Club’s male athlete of the year, winces when you repeat to him Caroline Cashin’s declaration that he is the best mountain biker out here.

“A few guys I know have much better technical skills than I do,” he said during a recent conversation at his house in Montauk, “though I’m very good at climbing. . . . You can say I’m a good road biker with moderate mountain biking skills. . . .”

What he would like to say, the 59-year-old commercial fisherman said, is that anyone so inclined can become fit. 

“Sue and I were getting to the magic point — I was about 60 pounds heavier then — and we wanted to change our lifestyles. We were both in our early 40s and decided to give each other bicycles for Christmas. She got me a mountain bike; I got her a hybrid. A group of us, Mike Fallon, Kevin McGuire, Dave Aripotch, and Danny Boerem, the electrician, would ride in Hither Hills every Sunday morning at 8. We ride 13 miles in Mike Bahel’s Serpent’s Back duathlon, but there are probably 25 miles of trails if you add it all up.”

“I’ve done a lot of road riding too. The key is not to go through East Hampton, to stay on the back roads. I’ll go four to five hours sometimes, down the Napeague stretch early in the morning to Napeague Meadow Road and cut up through Amagansett, Springs, and Northwest to Sag Harbor, and then back, cutting across 27 to Further Lane. . . .”

“I don’t win these races, you know. 

. . . I’ve done half-marathons, and Turkey Trots, and triathlons . . . I just don’t win them.”

“Yes,” his wife said from the office, “you’ve won some. You won [Ed Cashin and David Lys’s] Tour of the Shore. . . .”

“Actually, Sue’s right. We kayaked across Napeague Harbor and then mountain-biked in the Walking Dunes and ran four miles. It was a local race, a lot of fun. They don’t do it anymore.”

When pressed, he acknowledged that he did usually finish near the top in endurance events, though not so much in triathlons. “I’m a really good biker and my run is good, but I’m a crummy swimmer,” he said with a smile. “For me, as I said, it’s really been about fitness. As soon as you leave Long Island there will always be somebody who’s going to kick your ass.”

Mountain bikes, of course, are made for mountains, and Farnham has gone to them — in South Africa, British Columbia, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, Pennsylvania. . . .

For stage races, such as the Cape Epic in Cape Town and its environs, which he and Caroline Cashin did in 2015, one had to train seriously, he said, in order to be up to the grueling challenge.

Cashin said the Cape Epic was the hardest thing she’d ever done aside from giving birth. 

“We averaged 60 miles and 7,000 feet of climbing per day — 500 miles in all,” Farnham said. “All off-road. I thought it would be a great way to see South Africa, but all I saw was the back of Caroline’s wheels. . . . You had to stay together, within two minutes of each other, and you had to be within the time cutoffs, otherwise you were DQ’d. Twenty percent of the entries don’t finish in that kind of event. There are a bunch of premier mountain bike races and the Cape Epic is one of them.”

Probably the toughest stage race he’d done, said the interviewee, was the TransRockies seven-day race in British Columbia, which he did with Marty Ross, who’s since moved to New Zealand, in 2011. “Sinead [FitzGibbon] and Dennis [Loebs] did it too. There were roots and rocks and up to 10,000 feet elevation, up above the tree line . . . in the sleet and the snow. Africa was grueling, never-ending, but it didn’t have the exciting trails that the TransRockies did.”

Asked if he’d fallen in that race, he said he may have, “but nothing broke. One thing: If you mountain-bike, you will fall. Everybody does, though I might fall more than others,” Farnham said with a laugh.

More recently, he competed in the 2018 world single-speed mountain bike championships with Ed Cashin, a good friend of his, in Bend, Ore. “I said Ed finished a minute ahead of me on that list I gave to OMAC, but we came in together. It took the timer, who was putting the times down on a sheet of plywood, a minute before he got to my name. . . . There were 650 people in that race. Ed and I finished around 100th. We got lost for 15 minutes. If you’re following the guy in front of you and he’s not paying attention, that’s what happens.” 

For years, Farnham, a native of Newfoundland who came out from Massapequa Park to fish in Montauk at the age of 18, would alternately longline for tilefish 100 miles or so offshore for 10 days and stay onshore for 10, a routine that worked out quite well, he and his wife agreed, when it came to parenting their three children.

Aside from the 72-foot Kimberly — named after the Farnhams’ elder daughter — which serves as Paddle 4 Humanity’s support boat each August on the popular Montauk-to-Block Island paddle, he owns — one of them with a partner — two draggers in New Bedford, Mass., that go for squid and whiting and scup. The Farnhams’ son, Daniel, works with him, Kimberly now lives in Oakland, Calif., and another daughter, Megan Marie, after whom one of the New Bedford draggers is named, lives in Chicago.

Farnham is on Paddlers 4 Humanity’s board of directors, work that he finds very satisfying, along with its founder, Fred Doss, Ed Cashin, Lars Svanberg, Emily Hammond, Harvey O’Brien, Heather Saskas, and Jeff Neubauer. 

“Our focus is on the well-being of children. We help fund mental health work, robotics, the I-Tri program, suicide prevention, food pantries, the high school’s Build-On projects . . . all kinds of stuff, including mobile dental care for children upstate. Just about all the money we raise — we raised $160,000 this year — comes from the Block Island paddle. . . . It used to be kayaks mixed in with a few prone paddleboards, but now most of them are stand-up paddleboards. It’s 13 to 14 miles as the crow flies, but by the end of the day, because of the tides, you will have gone 18 miles.”

He had, he said in reply to a question, stand-up paddleboarded to Block Island with friends, and paddled periodically around Lake Montauk, setting off from his front yard. “It takes an hour and 20 minutes.”

Back to OMAC’s citation, Farnham said, “When I look in the mirror I don’t see an athlete, but a normal person who goes out and does something. . . . But, yeah, it was nice to get the award.”

Thursday, January 3

BOYS BASKETBALL, East Hampton at Westhampton Beach, 4 p.m., and Pierson at Babylon, nonleague, 6.

BOWLING, East Hampton vs. Southold-Greenport, All Star Lanes, Riverhead, 4 p.m.

GIRLS BASKETBALL, East Hampton at Miller Place, 4:30 p.m.

Friday, January 4

BOYS SWIMMING, North Babylon vs. East Hampton, Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter, 5 p.m.

WRESTLING, East Islip at East Hampton, 6:15 p.m.

GIRLS BASKETBALL, Pierson at Babylon, 6:15 p.m.

BOYS BASKETBALL, Bridgehampton at Greenport, 6:45 p.m.

Saturday, January 5

WRESTLING, East Hampton at Cory Hubbard dual meet, Westhampton Beach High School, 9 a.m.

WINTER TRACK, East Hampton boys at crossover meet, Suffolk Community College-Brentwood, 9 a.m.

GIRLS BASKETBALL, Wyandanch at East Hampton, 11:30 a.m.

BOYS BASKETBALL, East Hampton at Mount Sinai, 11:30 a.m., and Southold at Pierson, Sag Harbor, 2 p.m.

Sunday, January 6

WINTER TRACK, East Hampton girls at Art Mitchell meet, Suffolk Community College-Brentwood, 9 a.m.

Monday, January 7

GIRLS BASKETBALL, Southampton at Pierson, Sag Harbor, 6:15 p.m.

Tuesday, January 8

BOWLING, Sachem vs. East Hampton, All Star Lanes, Riverhead, 4 p.m.

BOYS BASKETBALL, East Hampton at Wyandanch, 4:30 p.m., and Pierson at Bridgehampton, 6.

BOYS SWIMMING, East Hampton vs. Northport-Commack, Lindenhurst High School, 5 p.m.

GIRLS BASKETBALL, East Hampton at Shoreham-Wading River, 6:45 p.m.

Wednesday, January 9

GIRLS BASKETBALL, Pierson at Smithtown Christian, 4:30 p.m.

WRESTLING, East Hampton at Hauppauge, 6 p.m.

When, after defeating Hampton Bays 36-33 in a nonleague high school girls basketball game Friday, Krista Brooks’s players leaped up and down in euphoric glee, she didn’t quite understand. Newly returned to coaching, Brooks hadn’t been aware of the losing streak. 

Though she was clued in moments later, when told by way of parents that an East Hampton girls basketball team hadn’t won a game since Dec. 2, 2014. 

Kelly McKee, who coached the team in the 2016-17 and 2017-18 seasons, said during a telephone conversation Monday morning that the length of the alleged drought sounded about right to him. McKee, who was replaced by Brooks this season, took over from Howard Wood, the former pro, who mentored Kaelyn Ward, East Hampton’s last outstanding player, who now coaches at St. John the Baptist High School in West Islip.

This is Brooks’s second time around. She coached the team for a time at the turn of the last century, giving up the job in 2003 when her daughter, Paige Cordone, a starting sophomore now, was born.

During a recent lopsided loss here to Amityville, the Bonackers’ fifth straight in league play, it was evident that Brooks’s charges can move the ball well, though they were greatly challenged when it came to putting it into the basket.

A long-suffering fan’s mood began to lighten, however, when he saw recently that East Hampton had lost by 7 points, 32-25, at Southampton, news that was followed soon after by Saturday’s glad tidings.

“They’re finally coming into their own,” Brooks said during a telephone conversation over the weekend. “They’re playing like a team; they’re working hard. Our only goals this year have been to win more quarters, get more rebounds, and have fewer turnovers.”

And, lo, said Brooks, focusing on those things had led to the win at Hampton Bays. “We came out strong,” she said, “which we haven’t been doing, and had a strong second quarter. . . . Everybody but Connie Chan scored. She had rebounds and assists, though.”

Emma Silvera, a junior guard, finished with 11 points, Emily Brewer, a junior forward, had 9, Cordone, 8, and Alden Powers, Jessica Guallpa, Kailey Marmeno, and Eva Wojtusiak, all guards, had 2 each. Brooks was without the services of Katrina Osterberg, who suffered a concussion in the Amityville game. Everyone on the squad plays, she added, so that their teammates can get breathers.

There was no faulting her players’ willingness to work, nor their camaraderie, the coach said, and it was just the luck of the enrollment draw that East Hampton finds itself again in a league with such schools as Westhampton Beach, Shoreham-Wading River, Amityville, and Wyandanch (though the latter was also winless in league play as of earlier this week), all known for having strong programs. Girls soccer, which also has been struggling, played this fall with teams within its general ability range, “but that league was power-ranked,” said Brooks, who, while happy about the Hampton Bays win, knows the remainder of the League V season will continue to be very tough.

Brooks’s hope is that the program will continue to grow, and she was encouraged to hear a report that there were some good junior-high-age players seen last winter in the East Hampton Town Recreation Department’s Saturday sessions at the Amagansett School, which are overseen by Matt McHugh and Robyn Mott.

Moreover, Erin Mulrain, she said, had been doing a very good job with the jayvee, which has thus far wins over their Amityville and Southampton counterparts. 

The varsity’s roster, aside from the above-named, comprises Mailyn Guzman, a senior guard, Jennifer Ortiz, a junior guard, and Tia Weiss, a junior center. On the jayvee are Nora Conlon, Deliah Desmond, Tifany Gomez, Virginia Presinal, and Emma Stein, all ninth graders, Jackie Guichay, Ariana Islami, Lisbeth Leon, Stephanie Pallchisaca-Carpio, and Dayanna Tepan Luna, all sophomores, and Ashley Peters, a junior.

Not again! Yes, another 1-point game, the fourth in the seven games the East Hampton High School boys basketball team has played thus far this season. 

Despite Saturday’s 54-53 nonleague loss at East Islip, however, Dan White, East Hampton’s coach, said during a telephone conversation Sunday that he’d been rendered ecstatic by his short-handed team’s effort. 

Without the services of Turner Foster, Max Proctor, and Christian Johnson, all of them starters, White asked bench players, namely Nic Esquivel, Logan Gurney, Liam Leach, Frank Belluci, and Shane Musnicki, “who hasn’t started in three years,” to step up.

And, frankly, he said, East Hampton, which has won one of the aforementioned 1-point decisions, had been treated shabbily in the endgame by a referee, who ruled that Malachi Miller wasn’t behind the arc when, with three seconds left in regulation, he launched, in spite of being fouled, what appeared to be a game-tying 3-pointer. He would be glad to forward a video of that shot, the coach said.

Nevertheless, as aforesaid, he had been thrilled with the way his charges had played. 

Miller finished with 21 points, Gurney, with 12, Leach, with 6, Jeremy Vizcaino, with 6, Belluci, with 4, and Esquivel and Musnicki, with 2 each.

Musnicki in particular had done himself proud, coming down, as he did, with “about a dozen rebounds in the 25 minutes he played. 

“It’s interesting — everyone wants to win, but I was ecstatic with their effort,” White said of Musnicki and the other rise-to-the-occasion bench players. “East Islip is a tough, well-coached team. Hopefully, we can get on a run now.”

East Hampton’s boys swimming team, coached by Craig Brierley, has been on a run, having won in each of its first four outings, though the meat of League II’s swim meets is coming soon, Brierley said over the weekend.

Northport-Commack (Tuesday), Hauppauge (next Thursday), which won the league last year, and Sayville-Bayport (on Jan. 14) will be real tests, the coach said, “though we’ll have Hauppauge and Sayville in our pool, which [because there’ll be no diving] will keep it even.”

Most recently, East Hampton (again exhibitioning in some events so the score wouldn’t appear so lopsided) defeated Deer Park 89-62.

Among the winners were Ethan McCormac, in the 200 free, Ryan Duryea, in the 50 free, Aidan Forst, in the 100 butterfly, Edward Hoff, in the 100 free, and Joey Badilla, in the 100 breaststroke. All three relay teams won, though the 400 team (Ryan Duryea, Thor Botero, Nicky Badilla, and Jack Duryea) was exhibitioned.

Thus far, four Bonackers — Forst, Ethan McCormac, Tenzin Tamang, and Hoff — have qualified for the county meet, Forst and Tamang in the 100 fly, McCormac in the 50 and 200 free, and Hoff in the 50 free. McCormac has also qualified to compete in the state meet in the 50 and 200 freestyle races.

“We’re hoping to qualify a couple of relay teams for the state meet, and one or two more in the individual events, as well,” said Brierley.

Turning to winter track, Ava Engstrom, who her coach, Yani Cuesta says, “is kicking butt,” set another school mark in the 3,000-meter race at Suffolk Community College-Brentwood on Dec. 23, placing third in 10 minutes and 50.59 seconds.

Engstrom, who’s only a sophomore, had set her sights on the 1,500 when the indoor season began a few weeks ago, but is zeroing in on the 3,000 now. “She’s so much stronger than she was last year,” said Cuesta. “Her best 3,000 time last year was an 11:16. She wants to go to the New Balance nationals, but she’ll have to get down to a 10:42 to do that. . . . She’s very serious about running — just like her brother, Erik.”

Cuesta, who only had four girls come out for winter track last year, but has a dozen now, said that Lillie Minskoff, a junior jumper, sprinter, and middle-distance runner, was performing wonderfully as the team’s captain. 

Others on the team are Juliana Barahona, a sophomore shot-putter; Grace Brosnan, a freshman high jumper and hurdler; Julia Caldwell, a freshman sprinter and jumper; Anna Carman, a sophomore sprinter, jumper, and middle-distance runner; Marisol Chamale, a junior sprinter and jumper; Isabella Espinoza, a sophomore pole-vaulter; Megan Fowkes, a junior racewalker; Penelope Greene, a sophomore long-distance runner; Leah Hatch, a junior sprinter, middle-distance runner, and long jumper, and JiJi Kramer, a senior racewalker.

East Hampton High’s girls basketball team had a chance to win a second game this season — an unheard of feat in recent years — versus hitherto-winless Wyandanch here Saturday, but, in the end, it was not to be.

“Too many turnovers,” said Bonac’s coach, Krista Brooks, after the 40-35 loss. “Though, in the case of some of them, like lead passes on the break, you could see the intentions were good. Our defense was very good. . . . We’ve got to shoot more and turn the ball over less. It was the same thing at Miller Place,” which defeated East Hampton 46-30 last Thursday. “But we are becoming more solid as a team; we’re getting better.” 

Connie Chan made the first basket, putting the ball up from underneath, and then, following a turnover, Paige Cordone swished in a jumper. Following another Wyandanch turnover, and a miss by Kailey Marmeno, Chan’s putback made it 6-0. “Hold my heart!” one could imagine East Hampton’s parents saying.

Soon afterward, thanks to two 3-pointers chucked up by the visitors’ senior point guard, Jalea Ervin — shots that bracketed more than two minutes of frenzied but unfruitful play — it became clear that this would be no walkover.

Ervin’s second 3 evened the count at 6-6. A basket by Cordone, her sixth point of the first quarter, made with 13 seconds left in the opening period, pulled East Hampton even at 10-10.

And so it went. Two made free throws by Jessica Guallpa, one of a number of Bonac guards who can handle the ball well, brought the Bonackers to within 1 point of the Warriors, at 20-21, in the last half-minute of the first half, and, in the final ticks, East Hampton could well have taken a lead into the locker room had the leader of a fast break driven all the way to the basket rather than pull up.

Bonac fans dared to dream again when, in the opening minute of the third quarter, Cordone, following three Wyandanch misses, went coast-to-coast for 22-21, and Alden Powers, following a steal by Marmeno, converted on the break for 24-21. Ervin continued to loft the ball up from the perimeter — six times by one count — in the ensuing minutes, but to no effect as East Hampton defended well. 

By the same token, Bonac shooters were coming up empty too, from the field and the foul line. Then, in the final minute, East Hampton extended its lead to 30-22, thanks to baskets by Emma Silvera (two) and Cordone, by way of another coast-to-coaster.

That was as good as it was going to get, however, for in the fourth period the visitors, who pressed on every in-

bounds play, were to outscore the Bonackers 18-5.

With three and a half minutes left to play, it was 31-31. A basket by Chan, with the ball, which had rolled around and around, finally dropping in, made it 33-31, and a free throw by Silvera, who had come up empty on three previous attempts from the line, upped East Hampton’s lead to 34-31, leading one to wonder when Ervin, who had gone 2-for-22 from beyond the arc, would finally drain another one.

Indeed she did, and, as a result, with 1:27 left on the clock, it was 34-34. 

Unfortunately for East Hampton, Wyandanch’s senior point guard continued in the final moments to dominate play, tacking on 6 more points — four made from the foul line — before the final buzzer sounded, a span during which East Hampton, by contrast, missed a 3-point attempt and three shots from in close, and went 1-for-2 from the foul line.

Ervin finished with a game-high 23 points. “She was the team,” Brooks said afterward. Cordone had 11 points for East Hampton, followed by Silvera with 8, Chan with 7, Emily Brewer, Guallpa, Powers, and Tia Weiss each with 2, and Eva Wojtusiak with 1.

The good news, though, was that East Hampton’s jayvee won, defeating its counterparts 34-26. Nora Conlon led the way, said the jayvee’s coach, Erin 

Mulrain, with 12 points, and Deliah Desmond, she said, had 10 assists.

Thursday, January 10

BOWLING, East Hampton vs. Rocky Point, Port Jeff Bowl, 4:30 p.m.

WINTER TRACK, East Hampton girls at Zeitler Relays, Suffolk Community College-Brentwood, 5 p.m.

BOYS SWIMMING, Hauppauge vs. East Hampton, Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter, 5 p.m.

GIRLS BASKETBALL, Mount Sinai at East Hampton, 6:15 p.m.

BOYS BASKETBALL, Bridgehampton at Shelter Island, 5:45 p.m.; Smithtown Christian at Pierson, Sag Harbor, 6:15, and East Hampton at Amityville, 6:45.

Friday, January 11

GIRLS BASKETBALL, Greenport-Southold at Pierson, Sag Harbor, 6:15 p.m.

Saturday, January 12

WINTER TRACK, East Hampton boys and girls at Stanner Games, 168th Street Armory, New York City, 9 a.m.

GIRLS BASKETBALL, East Hampton at Bayport-Blue Point, 10 a.m.

BOYS BASKETBALL, East Hampton at Greenport, nonleague, 1 p.m.

Sunday, January 13

WINTER TRACK, East Hampton boys at freshman-sophomore meet, Suffolk Community College-Brentwood, 9 a.m.

Monday, January 14

BOWLING, East Hampton vs. Middle Country, AMF Centereach Lanes, 4:30 p.m.

BOYS SWIMMING, Sayville-Bayport vs. East Hampton, Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter, 5 p.m.

GIRLS BASKETBALL, Pierson at Mattituck, 5:45 p.m.

Tuesday, January 15

BOWLING, Riverhead vs. East Hampton, All Star Lanes, Riverhead, 4 p.m.

GIRLS BASKETBALL, East Hampton at Elwood-John Glenn, 5 p.m.

BOYS BASKETBALL, Bayport-Blue Point at East Hampton, 6:15 p.m.

Wednesday, January 16

BOYS SWIMMING, East Hampton at West Islip, 5 p.m.

GIRLS BASKETBALL, Hampton Bays at Pierson, Sag Harbor, 6:15 p.m.

BOYS BASKETBALL, Ross School at Bridgehampton, and Pierson at Greenport, 6:15 p.m.

Angelika Cruz was honored recently as the Old Montauk Athletic Club’s female athlete of the year for her top-notch triathlon finishes in 2018, an honor all the more notable for the fact that teaching, coaching, and parenting leave little time to train.

And yet Cruz, who teaches Spanish at the Montauk School, coaches the youngest group of the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter’s youth swim team, the Hurricanes — a team that includes her 10-year-old daughter, Daisy Pitches — did indeed do exceptionally well in the half-dozen East End endurance events she entered this past year, topping her age group each time and frequently finishing among the female division’s top 10 over all. 

She was especially happy, she said during a conversation over the weekend, to have won the Steve Tarpinian award (named after the late triathlon promoter and internationally known swimming coach), given to the top female swimmer in the Montauk Lighthouse Sprint triathlon.

Swimming, Cruz said, is her first love. “I think it’s the best sport ever. It’s about much more than medals. It teaches you time management, about setting goals and learning how to reach them, and it also teaches you how to handle disappointment — all valuable lessons in life.”

She began her swimming education, she said, when, at the age of 6, a coach who’d seen her taking lessons tapped her for the highly competitive summer league team in Pocantico Hills, in Westchester County.

Yanked out of her comfort zone, she was scared, and protested, not having any idea, she said, what to do. “What’s a team?” she said. 

“I was half-turned, arguing that I didn’t want to take my T-shirt off, when the race, one freestyle lap, started. My coach had to push me off the block.”

“I swam as fast as I could — it was a 25-yard pool, much shorter than the 50-meter Olympic-sized one we swam in, one of the few 50-meter pools then in the county. John D. Rockefeller had built it for his employees. . . . I was wiping my eyes — there was a debate about goggles then and I wasn’t wearing them — at the end of the race when I saw a woman staring at me. I was so shy then. She said, ‘What’s your name?’ I told her, but my name was not an easy one. Then she gave me a stick with a line on it. I didn’t know what it was for. Then my coach came over and told me I’d won! I was sold from that moment!” Cruz said with a bright smile. “I won a big ribbon, which I still have. I never looked back.”

At 6, then, she had begun to learn that “when you’re on the block, you’re on your own. It’s you and the clock and that’s it.” No excuses, no one else to blame or to complain about. Disappointed you were disqualified because in the butterfly you didn’t touch the wall with both hands? Don’t mope, you’ve learned from it. Get back up on the block.

At 14, Cruz switched from a White Plains Y team to the Badger Swim Club in Larchmont, “one of the oldest and most successful swim clubs in America,” according to its website. 

“There were a lot of college swimmers and Olympians. I felt so slow my first day there. . . .”

Lea Loveless Maurer, one of Cruz’s Badger Swim Club teammates, an Olympic gold medal winner at Barcelona in 1992, and the former coach of Stanford’s outstanding women’s team, told Hurricane clinic-takers here recently that her teenage summers spent swimming (with Cruz) for the Badgers were the best times of their lives.

On graduating from Brown University, where Cruz swam “anything from the 200 on up,” and where she majored in history, she forsook the pool for the outdoors, triathloning, with great success, in Southern California, and later, once she’d decided to become a teacher rather than a lawyer, scuba diving, mountain climbing, trail running, and hiking — and teaching English at the American School in Guayaquil — for six years in Ecuador, after which she returned to the U.S. for a master’s degree in education at N.Y.U.

“I was very happy I became a teacher . . . it can be frustrating, as any parent will tell you, but it’s a wonderful thing, the most important thing. . . . I teach Spanish to all ages at Montauk, and sometimes I’ll teach a computer class in the younger grades. It’s a tiny K-8 school that reminds me of the one I went to in Pocantico Hills. Like John D. Rockefeller, Carl Fisher built this one — both are in the Tudor style — for the employees of his who lived in Shepherd’s Neck.”

She would, Cruz said, in answer to a question, advise any English-speaking students here to plunge in when it comes to speaking Spanish. Persistence, and good humor regarding mistakes, would win the day.

And now to Daisy, who’s following in her mother’s footsteps. “I put her in the water at 6 months, and she loved it. She was so comfortable. . . . When she was 1, she kept her face in the water so long that I had to keep checking that she wasn’t growing gills! I was always nearby. Then she developed the strength in her neck so that she could pull up to get a breath. We sometimes were in the kids’ pool for four hours. She loved it. Friends would hold her so I could go swim. She’d watch, and do what I was doing in the kiddie pool. Most 2-year-olds will do a few strokes and then bring their head up — Daisy always breathed from the side.”

Daisy joined the Hurricanes at 7, and it is those younger ones, the 7-through-11-year-olds, primarily, whom Cruz, who used to help John McGeehan with the girls varsity team, coaches.

“I love my group [of about 23]. We practice four days a week for an hour and a half, September through March.” She had, she said, taken a number of them with her to the Red Devil and Montauk Playhouse ocean swims last summer.

In answer to a question, Cruz said that “the Hurricane parents,” in contrast to some she’d seen not long ago in Westchester, “are very supportive, very laid-back. It may have something to do with our being a little more isolated. No one feels they have to prove something or needs to put on a show. That kind of thing leads to burnout.”

She agreed that, because of the Hurricanes’ increasing successes, swimming has become East Hampton High School’s strongest sport. And the nice thing was, she said, that “anybody can do it, and for their whole lives.”

A friend of hers who had been a sprinter in college and who, following a long hiatus, had begun masters training at Chelsea Piers in Stamford, Conn., reported proudly that he had swum a hundred 100s, a Chelsea Piers tradition, this New Year’s Day. “He said he wouldn’t have been able to do that four or five years ago. It goes to show you, if you try to make the effort, it’s never too late. He’s 51, two years older than me.”

She, as a matter of fact, was another example. “Two women who were training for their first triathlons at the Y a few years ago asked me why I didn’t do them. I told them I didn’t have the time to train. They said, ‘Who cares? Do it for fun.’ And they were right. I did the swim leg in a relay that year in the Lighthouse Sprint, and came out of the water in first place . . . of all the women. I might have beaten the men too. And our relay won! We were ecstatic. My friends were right — who cares? Have fun.”

Thursday, December 20

BOYS BOWLING, Comsewogue vs. East Hampton, All Star Lanes, Riverhead, 4 p.m.

GIRLS BASKETBALL, Amityville at East Hampton, 6:15 p.m.

Friday, December 21

BOYS BASKETBALL, Bridgehampton vs. St. John the Baptist, Southampton High School, 5 p.m.; Sayville at East Hampton, 6:15 p.m.

Saturday, December 22

WINTER TRACK, East Hampton boys at crossover meet, Suffolk Community College-Brentwood, 2 p.m.

Sunday, December 23

WINTER TRACK, East Hampton girls at crossover meet, Suffolk Community College-Brentwood, 2:30 p.m.

The recent days have been eventful for East Hampton’s swimming program, with the boys varsity upping its record to 3-0 with wins over Lindenhurst and Central Islip, and with the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter’s youth swim team, the Hurricanes — who were treated to clinics by an Olympian Saturday — faring well at an 18-team metropolitan-area meet at Eisenhower Park in Nassau County.

Tom Cohill, the Hurricanes’ coach, whose assistants are Andrey Trigubovich, Craig Brierley, Angelika Cruz, Sean Crowley, Sean Knight, and Eugene DiPasquale, took 80 of his charges, ages 7 through 17, to the Metro Cross Island Y and Flushing Flyers Y holiday invitational meet at the Nassau Aquatics Center over the Dec. 8-9 weekend, with pleasing results, the most pleasing being the fact that the Hurricanes’ boys 200 freestyle relay team of Ryan Duryea, Aidan Forst, Ethan McCormac, and Owen McCormac qualified for the Y nationals that are to be held in Greensboro, N.C., in April.

“We’ve never had a boys relay team qualify for nationals before,” said the coach, adding that “we had a girls team” of Maddie Minetree, Skye Marigold, Maria Preiss, and Mikayla Mott “do it in 2008-09.”

As for the boys, who finished third in the event, “they were more than a second under the cutoff time, which was pretty significant.”

(As of the moment, Cohill will take two relay teams to the nationals, for Julia Brierley, Jane Brierley, Sophia Swanson, and Oona Foulser, all of them Hurricanes, swam a qualifying time as members of the high school’s girls varsity team this fall.)

Moreover, Cohill said, one of the youngest Hurricanes, Aidan Menu, who’s 7, and who swam in six events, “placed third in total points among all the 8-and-under boys.”

It was the Hurricanes’ sixth meet of the season, which has now reached the midway point. “We’ve got a very well-rounded team with a lot of solid swimmers,” said Cohill. “We’ll be in a very strong position come January, which is our busiest month. . . . We’re hoping to qualify a boys medley relay team for nationals and a girls freestyle relay team, as well as competitors in several individual events.” 

Among the Hurricanes’ other top point-getters at Eisenhower Park in the relays were the 13-to-14-year-old girls 200 medley team of Camryn Hatch, Jane Brierley, Summer Jones, and Emily Dyner; the 8-and-under girls 100 free team of Allison Farez, Zoe McDonald, Graysen Gregory, and Wesley Bull; the open boys 200 medley team of Joey Badilla, Ryan Duryea, Ethan McCormac, and Fernando Menjura; the open girls 200 free team of Bella Tarbet, Oona Foulser, Julia Brierley, and Sophia Swanson, and the open girls 200 medley team of Catalina Badilla, Julia Brierley, Swanson, and Foulser.

Aside from Aidan Menu, the Hurricanes’ top individual performers included Colin Harrison in the 100 butterfly; Lily Griffin in the 50 breaststroke; Ethan McCormac in the 50 and 100 freestyle races; Dylan Cashin in the 50 breaststroke; Wesley Bull in 50 free and 25 backstroke; Jasiu Gredysa in the 50 backstroke; Allison Farez in the 25 freestyle; Jane Brierley in the 200 breaststroke and 200 individual medley; Lucy Knight in the 25 backstroke; Zoe McDonald in the 50 breaststroke, and Nicholas Badilla in the 100 butterfly.

“Ryan Duryea had an amazing meet,” Cohill continued, “Sophia Swanson too. Julia Brierley and Ethan McCormac were solid, and so were Summer Jones and Kiara Bailey-Williams. . . . They were very good, very strong.”

The team is looking forward especially to the regional Winterfest meet at the University of Maryland over the Jan. 18-20 weekend — a Y.M.C.A. meet that draws teams from the New York metro region, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland.

The aforementioned Olympian, Lea Loveless Maurer, a friend of Angelika Cruz’s, who won a gold and a bronze medal in the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, Spain, oversaw two-hour clinics for the Hurricanes’ younger and older swimmers at East Hampton’s Y Saturday.

“She talked about being smooth in the water so you can go faster longer,” said Cohill. “She emphasized things that we have been teaching the kids, concerning form and technique, and the importance of focusing on doing things well, but it was great for them to hear it from an Olympian. The kids” — there were 30 in the 11-and-under clinic, and 15 in the 12-and-over group — “were very attentive. Having her come here now was good too, for the kids will have January, February, and March to work on what they learned from her, and, hopefully, we’ll see improvements.”

Maurer, who has been a college and prep school coach in her career, spoke to the older clinic-takers about being realistic when it comes to swimming in college. There was, she said, a level for everyone. 

In that regard, Cohill said several former Hurricanes, Isabella Swanson at the University of Miami, Marikate Ryan at Clemson, and Caroline Oakland at Syracuse, were happily engaged in club swimming at those Division 1 schools.