Frank Ackley, who last was heard from a year ago, phoned the other day to say he and a doubles partner with whom he’d been playing for the first time had made it to the semifinals of the United States Tennis Association’s clay court championships recently in New Orleans.

“A lot of these guys, that’s all they do, travel from one tournament to another,” Ackley, who lives in Springs and will turn 70 on Feb. 12, said on his return. “They all played on the circuit when they were younger.”

Considering that he and his partner, Rollin Rhone, a Southern Californian, were unseeded in this tournament, one of four U.S.T.A. “majors,” the others being the national hard courts, national grass courts, and national indoors, they’d done exceedingly well, said Ackley, who was helped in getting ready for it at the East Hampton Tennis Club by Gary Clermont, the pro, and by Bob Kouffman and Vince Horcasitis.

The 32-draw tournament, played at “the oldest tennis club in the country,” drew what the tournament director said was a surprising number of top-notch teams, “the best of the best, the top five ranked singles players and the top five ranked doubles teams in the country. . . . If you don’t get your first serve in and you have a weak second serve, you’ll eat it every time.”

“We complement each other well,” he continued. “Rollin, I call him Double R, is laid back and I’m kind of fiery. We won our first match 6-1, 6-0, against guys from Pennsylvania and Florida. The guy from Florida won two rounds in the singles. We played guys from Louisiana and Toronto in the second round and beat them 6-2, 6-1. We beat the fourth-seeded team, a guy from Georgia, the other from Mississippi, in the quarters, 4-6, 6-3, 7-5. That three-hour match was played under the lights, we were the only ones on, and we played before a huge crowd. Judy [Soman, his partner] was there, friends from Florida. . . .”

“We finally got up 5-4 with Rollin serving. He went up 40-0, but we lost the next five points in a row. It was back and forth after that until we got a break and I held for 7-5.”

Ackley and Rhone’s semifinal opponents were the top seeds, Phil Landauer of Ohio and Tom Smith of Georgia, and they played like it, he said. “They beat us 6-3, 6-4 . . . they were a better team, they went on to win the tournament. Playing tournaments is all they do.”

Still, it had been a good showing, Ackley said, the best he’d done in one of the U.S.T.A.’s major tournaments, “with all the big boys. Doing what we did showed us that we can play with the top guys. . . . I really enjoy beating the seeded guys. They come on like peacocks and go back to the club like parakeets.”

He would have to add some speed to his kick serve, Ackley concluded. He’d been broken twice and his partner three times in the semifinal match. And he would “have to work on [his] conditioning for sure. . . . I’m not used to playing that much.”

Asked what he’d been doing recently when it came to conditioning, he replied, “I’ve been getting up from the couch and walking to the fridge.”

It’s not the first time Ackley’s said that in addition to tennis he should work out more. After reaching the quarterfinals at the national clay courts last year, with another partner, he said he would try to get himself into fighting shape over the winter, most of which he and Soman spend in Melbourne, Fla.

“If you’re not in shape,” he said at the time, “you begin sucking air after the first couple of games and your game drops — you start going for winners, hitting riskier shots, and that’s not my style.”

Vinny Alversa, who has been a physical education teacher and boys soccer and baseball coach at the Springs School during the past 20 years, was the chief honoree at that school’s first-ever homecoming last Thursday, in a gym packed with about 300 students.

Whitney Reidlinger, the school’s athletic director, whose idea the homecoming pep rally was, the school’s former A.D., Mark McKee, a former phys ed teacher, John Foster, Andrew Rodriguez, East Hampton High’s junior varsity baseball coach, and Ray Wojtusiak, a Springs teacher who hopes Alversa will still be East Hampton High’s varsity baseball coach when his son, Elias, arrives at the high school six years from now, all had good things to say about their — in McKee’s and Foster’s case, former — colleague.

“Fair,” “honest,” “hard-working,” and “funny” were words that came to her mind when thinking of him, said Reidlinger. “As a coach,” she said, “Vinny demands respect from his athletes and gives them the respect they deserve in turn. He is patient and kind, and takes the time to really get to know each one of his players and what makes them tick.”

She added, “Coach Foster wishes Vinny 20 more.” It had been an honor to coach side by side with Alversa over the years, Foster told Reidlinger. 

“What I admire the most about you, Vinny,” Foster said, by way of Reidlinger, “is that you always stand up for what is right and your unbelievable work ethic. Not only are you a great coach, you are a kind and thoughtful person — a superstar.”

Rodriguez told Reidlinger that “Coach Alversa has had a strong impact on my life. He started coaching me when I was 11 years old, teaching me the fundamentals of baseball and how to love the game. Having Vinny as a role model led me into coaching. I now coach two high school sports, luckily one of them being baseball with Vinny!”

“I coached against Vinny when I was at the middle school,” Wojtusiak said during a telephone conversation over the weekend, “and could tell from the get-go that he was a great guy and a great role model as a coach. . . . He’s a great dad, a sharp baseball guy, and a pretty good soccer coach too.”

“I had him as a student from the sixth grade on, after he moved to Springs from Montauk,” McKee said Monday. “After he’d gone through the high school and college, I used to talk with him as he was coaching Babe Ruth baseball and concluded that he was very special as a coach, and that I had to get him into the school, where he’s been coaching ever since. . . . He and Henry [Meyer] are working tirelessly with these young kids to rebuild East Hampton’s baseball program. He’s just outstanding.”

Speaking of which, the under-14 baseball team that he and Meyer coach, and the under-11 team, Alversa said, in answer to a question, had recently finished at the top of the Brookhaven fall leagues.

Reidlinger said that the turnout for fall sports at Springs has been the largest in the school’s history, “with 98 kids playing [boys soccer, girls soccer, girls tennis, and field hockey] and two of our kids [Alyssa Brabant, an eighth grader, and James Bradley, a seventh grader] up on high school varsity teams.” In Brabant’s case it’s girls swimming; in Bradley’s, it’s golf. 

Sixty-four percent of the school’s seventh and eighth graders were playing sports, Reidlinger said.

“All three teams that played that day, boys soccer, girls soccer [coached by John King], and girls tennis [coached by Alex de Havenon] won,” said the A.D. “Vinny’s team beat Pierson 8-2 to remain undefeated, girls soccer shut out Southold 1-0, and girls tennis defeated Hampton Bays 6-1. We’re combined with Montauk in girls tennis and girls soccer.”

Friday’s under-the-lights junior varsity football game at Southampton High School provided all the excitement that has attended East Hampton-Southampton matchups since the early 1920s.

In the end, the Bonackers lost 41-40, but only after Kevin Bunce, who had run with intensity all evening, was stopped just short of the goal line on an extra-point play in the final minute by Southampton’s Justin Jayne. A 56-yard Topher Cullen-to-Christian Johnson touchdown pass play had prompted East Hampton’s coach, Joe McKee, to go for the win.

“You played a fabulous, fabulous game,” McKee told his disappointed charges, some of whom were tearing up, afterward. “That it hurts means you care. You have every reason to be proud, no reason to hang your heads.”

“You’ll come back even stronger,” added Lorenzo Rodriguez, who was McKee’s offensive coordinator and line coach this fall.

The Bonackers — well aware, McKee was to say during a conversation Monday, of the rivalry, one of Suffolk’s oldest — came out on fire. Starting from their 35, as is the custom in no-kickoff junior varsity games, it took them six plays to burst into the home team’s end zone, as the result of a 20-yard pass reception by John Berti. Alfredo Chavez tacked on the point-after kick for 7-0.

After forcing a Southampton punt, East Hampton, starting at its 40, scored again when Cullen drilled a pass up the middle that Santi Maya leapt for and hauled in on his way to a 38-yard TD. Chavez’s kick hit the right post, but no matter, it was 13-0 East Hampton.

Again, Bonac’s defense forced a punt, on fourth-and-long from the Mariner 45, and again East Hampton scored, this time as the result of an 81-yard catch and run by Maya, to which Chavez added another point for a stunning 20-0 lead. 

“The quarterback has a 100-yard game and it’s the first quarter still,” one of the chain-handlers was heard to say.

Southampton finally got on the scoreboard when, near the end of the first quarter, Richard Barranco, a Pierson High student, ran the ball in on first-and-goal from East Hampton’s five-yard line — a score that followed a long pass batted down by Mike Moret, into the hands, unfortunately, of a Southampton player. Barranco’s fellow Sag Harborite Hudson Brindle made good on the point-after kick.

Johnson, who was to finish the night with three touchdowns, ran 62 yards into Southampton’s end zone in the opening minutes of the second quarter, but a holding call on Maya annulled it.

“After that,” said McKee, “Southampton, which is a very good team, began to come on.”

East Hampton went into the halftime break leading 27-26, thanks largely to strong running by Barranco (one touchdown) and Dominick Williams (two). 

Play in that quarter was interrupted for 20 or so minutes because of a downed East Hampton lineman, John Albarracin, who had been felled in stopping Barranco at East Hampton’s 16-yard line following a six-yard gain on first down. 

“It was head-on-head contact,” Mc­Kee said Monday. “He went to the hospital’s emergency room, though I saw him afterward and he’s fine, looking forward to next year.”

The Mariners took their first lead of the game early in the third quarter, a drive during which McKee was heard to tell his players, “This is going to be a battle of will.”

The Bonackers replied with a touchdown of their own, on a 41-yard run by Johnson, who’d spun out of the grasp of would-be tacklers in the backfield, and a point-after kick by Chavez, wresting the lead back at 34-33.

Before the period was over Southampton tried to add a field goal to its total, but Brindle’s 22-yard try went awry.

With about four minutes left to play, Williams capped a 55-yard, seven-play Southampton drive with a five-yard burst into East Hampton’s end zone, and followed up with a 2-point carry that treated the Mariners to a 41-34 lead. 

Facing fourth-and-11 at East Hampton’s 44, and with little more than a minute left, Cullen went deep for Johnson, who gathered the ball in at about the Southampton 30 and ran untouched the rest of the way for his third touchdown of the night. And the rest you know.

The 41-40 win was Southampton’s seventh vis-à-vis one loss, to Hampton Bays.

East Hampton finished at 2-5, “but, aside from the loss to Mount Sinai, which went undefeated, all the games were close,” said McKee. “This is definitely a close-knit group of kids. I think they’ll stick with it. I’m expecting all 25 back next year, and I’d like to think that we’ll be able to move up to a varsity program in Division IV. . . . We had six juniors on the team this season, so we’ll have a solid group of seniors, and we had 11 sophomores, who will be juniors next year.”

While East Hampton’s spread offense had clicked and the offensive line had played solidly, its defenders had trouble keeping Mariner runners from turning the corners, McKee said, citing one phase of play that needed to be worked on.

Another bright spot, the coach added, was the prospect of eighth graders coming up from Dave Fioriello and Rob Rivera’s East Hampton Middle School team, which he said was doing well despite the numbers being a little low.

Getting back to the finale, McKee said, “You couldn’t have asked for a better night, a beautiful October night. It was a great, great way to end the season. . . . It’s really nice to get the program back. It’s nice to have football at East Hampton High School again.”

Saturday, November 10

CROSS-COUNTRY, New York State meet, Class B girls race, 10 a.m., and Class B boys race, noon, Sunken Meadow State Park, Kings Park. 

BREWATHLON, 5,000-meter row, 15K bike, 5K run, and 2,500-meter row, Montauk Brewery, 2 p.m.

Sunday, November 11

DOCK RACE, 3.3-miles, Montauk Post Office to the Dock bar and restaurant, 11:30 a.m.

Monday, November 12

MEN’S SOCCER, 7-on-7 league, Tortorella Pools vs. Hampton F.C.-Pool Shark, 6:30 p.m.; Maidstone Market vs. Sag Harbor United, 7:25, and F.C. Tuxpan vs. Hampton Construction, 8:20, Herrick Park, East Hampton.

MEN’S SLOW-PITCH, fall league playoffs, Terry King ball field, Abraham’s Path, Amagansett, 7 p.m. 

Tuesday, November 13

WINTER SPORTS, practices begin at local schools, 3 p.m.

MEN’S SLOW-PITCH, fall league playoffs, Terry King ball field, Abraham’s Path, Amagansett, 7 p.m.

Wednesday, November 14

MEN’S SOCCER, 7-on-7 league, playoff semifinals, fourth seed vs. first seed, 6:30 p.m., and third seed vs. second seed, 7:40, Herrick Park, East Hampton.

About Field Hockey

Nicole Ficeto, the first-year coach of East Hampton High’s field hockey team, said, when asked why with a 9-5 record her squad hadn’t qualified for the playoffs, “With the power-rating system our wins didn’t earn us enough points to make them. We might have had a better chance if we’d been able to play teams like Miller Place, Rocky Point, Bayport-Blue Point, and Sayville. Sayville also finished at 9-5 and didn’t make the playoffs.”

The team’s leading scorer was Cate Wicker, a senior, with seven goals and three assists. Grace Meyer, also a senior, had five and two, after which came Hanna Medler, a freshman, with four and one, and Anna Hugo, a sophomore, with three and two. Ficeto will lose nine seniors to graduation, but expects to keep her six juniors, seven sophomores, and 12 ninth graders active during the winter with clinics here and UpIsland, and in Wednesday evening scrimmages at the Southampton Recreation Center.

County Golf Runner-Up

Turner Foster, a senior who plays number-one on East Hampton High School’s golf team, and who won the county tournament two years ago, was the runner-up this past week (as he was last year), enabling him to play in the state championships at Cornell University in the first weekend of June.

A half dozen women in their 40s who train at Ed and Caroline Cashin’s Truth Training fitness studio in East Hampton ran in the New York City Marathon Sunday, and for most of them it was their first attempt at the grueling 26.2-mile distance.

While they’ve been training as a group here for the past 18 weeks, running on the roads and on East Hampton High School’s track, they ran separately through the five boroughs on Sunday — each at a different pace — until they came together again at their hotel. Sinead FitzGibbon and Beth Feit began with the 9:50-pace runners, the rest with the 10:15 wave.

Of the seven, FitzGibbon, who’s run ultramarathon distances, was the quickest, in 3 hours and 21 minutes, Caroline Cashin said during a conversation with Feit and this writer at The Star Monday afternoon. 

Cashin, who finished in 3:51, had been hoping to qualify for Boston, but missed the cutoff by six minutes, a fact that she ascribed to yet another grueling race, the world single-speed 50-mile mountain bike championships in Oregon two weeks before, a race that took her five hours and four seconds to complete — a little more than an hour behind her husband (3:58) and Dan Farnham (3:59), who she still maintains, with a smile, is “the best mountain biker on the East End.”

Besides FitzGibbon, Cashin, and Feit, the Truth Training women included Holly Li, Sue De Lara, Ursula McNamara, and Britton Bistrian, who recently turned 40. It was the first marathon, period, for most of them.

“We were in condition, we had the training down,” said Feit, whose first marathon this was, and yet. . . .

“I have newfound respect for the marathon, it’s not a piece of cake,” said Feit. “I had trained very hard, and yet I struggled. I hit the wall coming off the 59th Street Bridge. My legs were heavy and ached. My mind was saying, ‘Pick it up! Pick it up!’ but I couldn’t. I kind of fell apart after that.”

But she finished, she said, and that was the main thing. “Finishing equals winning in the marathon — that’s our new mantra,” Feit said.

Others from here who were said to have run Sunday included Rita Greene and Cara Nelson, East Hampton Middle School teachers, Chris Hewitt, a former Montauker living now in South Carolina, and Dermot Quinn of Springs, who because of a chest infection had to withdraw, said Cashin, “though he got a deferment, so he’ll be able to do New York next year.”

The list grew as press time loomed to include as well Anne Gibson, a former East Hamptoner living in New York City now, and Fran Kotkov, 68, of Springs and New York City, and her daughter, Gabrielle.

“The weather was perfect,” said Feit, “not too cool, not too hot. Caroline made sleeves out of socks to put on our arms. Because of a connection four of us went by police escort from the Javits Center on an F.D.N.Y. bus to Staten Island. That made the morning stress-free. At the end they gave us nice plastic ponchos with hoods which were very cozy.”

Would she do it again? Feit thought a moment. “Yes, I think I will. Knowing what I know now will help me run a better race.”

“Don’t forget to mention the [5,000-meter row, 15K bike, 5K run, and 2,500-meter row] Brewathlon, which will be in Montauk this Saturday,” said Cashin. “Except for Britton, we’ll all be there. It benefits the Old Montauk Athletic Club. We had to change the original date because of the weather, and they say it will be chilly. I had 30 teams and we’re down to 25 now, but most everyone will be there.”

And with that, Cashin and Feit got up, gingerly, from their chairs.

“I’m feeling good,” Feit said, pausing at the door. “I did it.”

East Hampton High’s girls swimming team, which cruised through the league season undefeated, winning its second championship in a row, placed sixth among the 25 schools contending in the county championship meet at Suffolk Community College-Brentwood Saturday — in fourth place, its coach, Craig Brierley, noted, absent the points award for diving, an event in which the Bonackers do not compete.

In other postseason news, East Hampton’s boys cross-country team saved its best for last, to wit, the county championship meet held Friday at Sunken Meadow State Park in Kings Park.

Kevin Barry, East Hampton’s coach, said the team, which had been seeded seventh in the Class B race, wound up as the runner-up to Westhampton Beach. 

Ryan Fowkes, Bonac’s best runner, a senior, placed third over the difficult 3.1-mile course in 17 minutes and 32 seconds, “a few seconds off his best, but qualifying him to run in the state championships here next Saturday,” Nov. 10, Barry said.

Just as newsworthy was the fact that Evan Masi, a freshman, placed eighth, in 17:59 — just one spot away from a state-qualifying performance — and in so doing broke Erik Engstrom’s freshman Sunken Meadow mark. Now running at the University of Massachusetts, Engstrom went on to become a county champion, East Hampton’s only one thus far.

“Evan and all of his teammates ran personal bests,” said Barry. Ethan McCormac, who placed 16th in 18:27, was followed by Aidan Klarman (18:59), Frank Bellucci (19:02), Joshua Vazquez (19:03), and Nicolas Villante (19:45).

The news was good on the girls’ side too inasmuch as Ava Engstrom, Erik’s younger sister, again qualified for the state meet by finishing fifth in her race, in 20:15, breaking an East Hampton course record that had been held by Dana Cebulski.  Her fellow sophomore, Bella Tarbet, who was set back a bit this fall after breaking a toe in the summer, placed 12th (she had been sixth in this race last year).

“Ava did a great job, starting out hard and holding her spot throughout, beating girls, from Shoreham-Wading River, Miller Place, and Kings Park, whom she hadn’t been expected to beat,” said Diane O’Donnell, the girls coach. “She was seeded ninth and, as I said, finished fifth. Bella had a good race too. She was seeded much further back than she finished. She’s been working hard all fall, and improving in each race. She just ran out of time. One of our goals next year will be to have them both qualify for states.”

Back to swimming, East Hampton’s 200 freestyle relay team of Oona Foulser, Jane Brierley, Julia Brierley, and Sophia Swanson was the runner-up to Ward Melville’s team by one tick in that event, in 1 minute and 40.12 seconds — a time that qualified the above-named for the state meet.

That foursome — Julia Brierley, backstroke, Jane Brierley, breaststroke, Swanson, butterfly, and Foulser, freestyle — also made a splash in the county meet’s first event, the 200 medley relay, placing third, behind Ward Melville and Northport, in 1:49.53, bettering their previous best, which had qualified them for states, by 2.5 seconds.

In addition, Swanson bettered her state-qualifying time by .4 in the 100 fly, placing fourth in 59.35. Jane Brierley, an eighth grader, placed fifth in the 100 breaststroke, in 1:07.79, qualifying her for the state meet as well. Swanson also was fourth in the 100 free, in a personal-best 55.30. She was to lead the teams in points scored, with 30. 

“Throughout the meet Bonac’s girls posted either season bests or lifetime bests,” said the elder Brierley. “A very impressive effort considering they had all turned in season or lifetime bests in the league meet a week before.”

“Kiara Bailey-Williams dropped almost seven seconds in placing 10th in the 200 individual medley, seven spots above what she’d been seeded; all four of our girls — Bailey-Williams, Emma Wiltshire, Caroline Brown, and Camryn Hatch — in the 400 free relay posted season-best split times and a team best by three seconds, and in the 100 back, Julia Brierley (eighth), Darcy McFarland (12th), Camryn Hatch (16th), and Brown (18th) all bettered their previous-best times, by, in order, more than three seconds, 2.6 seconds, almost two seconds, and a half-second.”

Julia Brierley, a junior, “a fierce competitor and a hard worker in practice,” was named East Hampton’s swimmer of the meet “for having played a role in both state-qualifying relays and for having competed in back-to-back events [the 100 backstroke and the 100 breaststroke]. She went a best time in the 50 back on the medley relay, a season best in the 50 free in the 200 free relay, turned in a lifetime best 1:01.37 in the 100 back, and followed that up with an eighth-place finish in the 100 breaststroke.”

Friday, November 2

CROSS-COUNTRY, East Hampton girls and boys at Suffolk County championship meet, Sunken Meadow State Park, 2 and 3:30 p.m.

FOOTBALL, junior high, Southampton at East Hampton, 4:30 p.m.

Saturday, November 3

GIRLS SWIMMING, East Hampton at county championship meet, Suffolk Community College-Brentwood, 10 a.m.

Monday, November 5

GIRLS VOLLEYBALL, Class A tournament semifinal, Islip-Kings Park winner at East Hampton, 4 p.m.

Wednesday, November 7

MEN’S SOCCER, 7-on-7 league, Maidstone Market vs. Hampton F.C.-Pool Shark, 6:30 p.m.; Tortorella Pools vs. F.C. Tuxpan, 7:25, and Sag Harbor United vs. Hampton Construction, 8:20, Herrick Park, East Hampton.

Thursday, November 8

GIRLS VOLLEYBALL, county Class A tournament final, Suffolk Community College-Brentwood, 5 p.m.

BASEBALL, pitching clinic given by Kyle McGowin of the Washington Nationals for 7 through 14-year-olds, Pro Sports Academy, 990 Station Road, Bellport, 6-7:30 p.m.

Cross-Country Division Meet

Kevin Barry said this week that his boys cross-country team had placed fifth among 14 schools in the division meet at Sunken Meadow State Park on Oct. 23. Moreover, he said that Ryan Fowkes, East Hampton High’s top runner, a senior, had placed second in the championship race, in 17 minutes and 23 seconds, a personal best by 12 seconds, and that Evan Masi, a freshman, had placed 10th in the division team race in 18:17, bettering his previous-best Sunken Meadow time by 45 seconds.

The boys are to compete in the county meet at Sunken Meadow tomorrow, as are Ava Engstrom and Bella Tarbet, the leading runners on Diane O’Donnell’s girls team.

Kyle McGowin Baseball Clinic

Kyle McGowin, the Sag Harborite who was called up from the Syracuse Chiefs to pitch for the Washington Nationals in September, is to give a pitching clinic for 7 through 14-year-olds at the Pro Sports Academy at 990 Station Road in Bellport next Thursday, Nov. 8, from 6 to 7:30 p.m.

According to a flier, McGowin will help the clinic-takers with their grips, mechanics, control, and velocity. The clinic’s cost is $50 for those registered by today, $60 for those registering after today. 

When, after her East Hampton High School girls volleyball team had swept through the Westhampton Beach Hurricanes 3-0, sealing an undefeated league season, Kathy McGeehan was asked how many undefeated teams she’d had in the past, she directed her questioner’s gaze upward. The first banner he saw was that of her 2002 team, which, indeed, had been undefeated.

Still, undefeated seasons have been a rarity in McGeehan’s 38-year coaching career — the 2009 team, her only one to go upstate, took a 19-0 record into New York’s Final Four. And while things have yet to be played out, this team seems to be the most balanced one McGeehan’s ever had.

It certainly was hitting on all cylinders here against Westhampton last Thursday. Before the match began, the team’s nine seniors — Mary McDonald, Madyson Neff, Nicole Realmuto, Elle Johnson, Ella Gurney, Connie Chan, Claire Hopkins, Erin Decker, and Julia Kearney — were honored, its being “senior night.”

And then, with Neff serving, East Hampton jumped out to a 3-0 lead, the third point resulting from a double block by Johnson and Gurney. A double-contact call on Westhampton turned the ball over a moment later, and, with Gurney serving, the Bonackers extended their margin to 7-1, and so it went. By the time the visitors were able to put together back-to-back points, for 17-6 and 17-7, the die had been cast: East Hampton was to win 25-13. 

McGeehan’s crew maintained the lead throughout the second set too. Molly Mamay, who rarely lets the ball touch the floor on defense, served six straight points as the Bonackers went from 8-3 to 14-3, at which point Gurney, playing in the middle, was called for touching the top of the net. A timely tip to the floor by Mamay made it 19-9, bringing Mickela Junemann to the service line. Kills by Neff sandwiched around a Hurricane error made it 22-9. The last three East Hampton points resulted from yet another double-contact call assessed Westhampton, a long kill attempt by one of its hitters, and a kill by East Hampton’s setter, Johnson, that closed it out, at 25-11.

The match had drawn a large crowd, filling the bleachers on the right side of the gym. Cries of “Bonac! Bonac!” greeted Johnson as she stepped to the line at the beginning of the third set. A kill by Junemann, a long hit by Westhampton, another double block, by Realmuto and Kearney, a Westhampton error, an ace by Johnson that just went over the net, and a kill by Realmuto, who had missed the previous match because of an ankle injury, put the Hurricanes in a 6-0 hole. 

Not long after, a double block by Johnson and Gurney extended East Hampton’s lead to 15-5, after which the visitors’ setter was called again for double contact. A rare kill to the floor that eluded Mamay and Junemann brought the visitors to within six, at 23-17, but, in the midst of a din, Neff notched a kill to side out, after which she served what was to be the final point of the night, resulting from yet another double-contact call on Westhampton’s setter.

With the victory, which capped a 12-0 league season, relatives and friends of the players ran out onto the floor to join them in the celebration. McGeehan was hugged and kissed. As aforesaid, undefeated seasons have not been the norm in her long career. 

“Their setter struggled,” she was to say when questioned afterward, “and, consequently, they were tight and could never get into a rhythm. . . . We served well, our offense was clicking, and we had great blocking. It was great to have Nicole back. . . .”

The next day, McGeehan learned that, as expected, East Hampton had been awarded the top seed among the six teams in the county Class A playoffs, entitling it to a first-round bye. Westhampton Beach is the second seed. The Bonackers are to meet the Islip-Kings Park winner in a semifinal match at home Monday, at 4 p.m. McGeehan said she’d try to keep her team sharp in the interim, perhaps mixing some scrimmages in with practice sessions.

The Class A final is to be played next Thursday at Suffolk Community College-Brentwood, at 5 p.m. The Long Island championship game is to be played on Sunday, Nov. 11, at Farmingdale State College, at 5 p.m. The Class A Final Four tournament is to be contested at Glens Falls over the Nov. 17-18 weekend.