Sunday, November 19

MEN’S SOCCER, over-30 men’s league, Charruas 1950 vs. Hampton United, Hampton Bays High School, 2:30 p.m.

Monday, November 20

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

Wednesday, November 22

GIRLS BASKETBALL, Patchogue-Medford at East Hampton, scrimmage, and Riverhead at Pierson, scrimmage, 10 a.m.

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

November 5, 1992

Bears Lose by Grisly Margin

Any member of the East Hampton High School football team will tell you Saturday was a perfect day for football, but for the Stony Brook Bears it was a cold and bitter day indeed.

Bonac used the occasion of its annual homecoming game to demolish the outclassed visitors 47-28, rolling to a 20-0 first-quarter lead and scoring 27 more points before the halftime gun sounded.

The winners used a punishing ground attack to seize control of the game early before going to the air to put the Bears away for good.

The victory left the Bonackers with a 3-3 mark and kept their playoff hopes alive; Stony Brook dropped to 2-4.

. . . East Hampton must get in front of fourth-place Southampton (4-2) to qualify for the playoffs, so the remaining two games on the schedule are musts. The team travels to Port Jefferson Saturday and gets the first-place team in the conference, Mount Sinai, at home the following week.

November 12, 1992

Saturday afternoon was pretty in Port Jefferson, with fall light slanting through the turning shade trees that ring the high school’s football field. And for the East Hampton High School football team, Saturday proved to be a lot of fun, probably the most fun the Bonackers have had all season.

By the time the shadows lengthened, East Hampton had routed the home team 39-14, scoring six touchdowns to the Royals’ two, and virtually everyone had gotten into the act, especially the offensive line, which continually blazed trails for the chief ball carriers, Todd Carberry, Max Finazzo, and, later, Rob Balnis.

Carberry rushed for a gargantuan 292 yards in 28 carries, an East Hampton “first” in the athletic director Dick Cooney’s memory.

. . . With the offensive linemen, Mike Vasti, Paul Poutouves, David Barbour, John Hayes, and Shane Davis, pushing their counterparts around, Carberry and Max Finazzo took turns reeling off yardage. 

. . . The linebackers, Poutouves, Ron Gatlin, Trevor Darrell, and Will Stedman, came up big defensively, as did the linemen — Davis, Gus Gomez, Gavin Menu, and Hayes — the cornerbacks, Carberry and Kenny Brabant, and the free safety, Brendan Collins.

. . . East Hampton did it on the ground and in the air. Carberry tallied three times, on runs of 26 and 22 yards and on a 20-yard reception. Steven Quick, the tight end, caught a 31-yard touchdown pass from the quarterback, Marcus Borowsky, who also scored on a 6-yard keeper. Balnis, a quick sophomore, completed the rout with a 36-yard ramble near the end of the game.

Janelle Kraus, a Pierson-Shelter Island harrier, a small but strong freshman, captured the county Class C cross-country title at Sunken Meadow State Park Friday, in 20 minutes and 59 seconds.

Kraus is the latest in a string of success stories orchestrated by Cliff Clark, the Team Shelter Island guru, who is aiming high despite the low combined enrollments of Pierson and Shelter Island High Schools.

“We’ve been watching her since she was in the sixth grade,” Clark said this week. “She was a real competitor, but nothing forewarned us that she would be this good.” Kraus hung with Melissa Lingle of Stony Brook and Sandy Kutzing of Port Jefferson for over two miles, and blew by both about three-quarters of the way up Cardiac Hill, a steep incline that has been the traditional bane of runners who test the Sunken Meadow course. Once on top, she accelerated quickly and coasted to a 13-second victory over Lingle.

In recent postseason action, the East Hampton High School boys cross-country team, the county Class B champion, followed form by placing ninth last weekend at the state meet.

The meet was held near Rochester on a 23-degree day, and the 5K course, at Wayne Central High School, was said to be icy and muddy. Ryan Fowkes was East Hampton’s first runner to be scored, placing 63rd in the 127-runner Class B field in 18 minutes and 12.20 seconds. 

Fowkes was followed by Omar Leon (100th in 19:07.50), Ethan McCormac (103rd in 19:15.80), Gio Espinoza (105th in 19:29.80), Nicolas Villante (116th in 20:24.20), and Frank Bellucci (125th in 21:00.20).

Kal Lewis, of Shelter Island, won the Class D race, in 16:44.60, and his team placed fourth. East Hampton’s Ava Engstrom, a ninth grader, placed 87th among 187 entries in the state’s girls Class B race.

Pierson (Sag Harbor) High School’s girls volleyball team is to make its first-ever appearance in a state Final Four this weekend, at the Glens Falls Civic Center. The Whalers, coached by Donna Fischer, bested Stony Brook 3-1 in the county Class C final and then knocked off East Rockaway, also by 3-1, to advance to the Final Four.

Pierson’s boys soccer team, coached by Peter Solow, also advanced to the state Final Four in Middletown this past weekend  — also a “first” in Pierson annals — where it lost 2-0 to Lansing. 

In golf, East Hampton’s Turner Foster, the defending county champion, placed second this time around to Port Jefferson’s Shane DeVincenzo. Foster defeated DeVincenzo in a one-hole playoff last year. This time, DeVincenzo topped the field by 6 strokes. 

Double bogeys on the par-4 ninth and 10th holes did him in. He had been one stroke back after the first eight holes on the second day. 

“Still, Turner didn’t do badly,” said East Hampton’s coach, Claude Beudert. “He had rounds of 72 and 74 — he had a 148 last year. Shane shot a two-under 140, so both of them improved. There were 25 golfers hoping to make the states. Turner will be one of the nine going. The state tournament will be at Cornell from June 1 through 4. Turner finished fifth last year. This is Turner’s second year at the states. He could be one of a handful from Suffolk to play in the states three years in a row. Ian Lynch did — in 2010, 2011, and 2012.”

East Hampton’s team placed 10th in the county tournament among the 56 schools that vied in it. Westhampton Beach was fourth, and Pierson was tied for eighth. “We lost to Pierson by two shots at our place [the South Fork Country Club in Amagansett],” said Beudert. “Otherwise we would have had a share of the league title. . . . We haven’t won in the last two years. Before that we won 14 in a row.”

At the athletic awards ceremony at the high school on Nov. 6, Beudert named Foster as the team’s most valuable player, Nate Wright, the team’s number-two, as its most-improved player, and Hunter Medler as the recipient of the coach’s award.

Foster was named to the all-county team, for the second year in a row, and Wright was named to the all-conference team, as was Jackson Murphy, East Hampton’s number-three.

Other m.v.p., most-improved, and coach’s award recipients this fall were: Fowkes, Bellucci, and Espinoza in boys cross-country; Liana Paradiso, Ava Engstrom, and Isabella Tarbet in girls cross-country; Elizabeth Bistrian, Rianna Helier, and Julia Short in field hockey, and Wilmer Guzman, Marco Gutama, and Noah Gualtieri in boys soccer.

Lucy Short, Yeymi Chavez, and Alden Powers in girls soccer; Sophia Swanson, Patricia Figueroa, and Angela Dolan Jeffrey in girls swimming; Rebecca Kuperschmid, Olivia Baris, and Pamela Pillco in girls tennis; Logan Gurney, James Foster, and Eamon Spencer in boys volleyball, and Mikela Junemann, Madison Smullen, and Olivia Brauer in girls volleyball. Dance did not give out a most-improved award. Claire Belhumeur was its m.v.p. and Valeria Luna Mendez was its coach’s award recipient.

There was plenty of soccer action this past week as: 

The fall indoor season wound up at the Sportime Arena in Amagansett Saturday night with victories by Liga Sayausi in the open men’s final, by La Tri in the over-38 men’s final, and by A.D.N. in the open women’s championship game.

Sag Harbor United, which has been kicked around for the past few years in the Wednesday evening men’s 7-on-7 league, notched its first win of the fall by defeating Tortorella Pools 3-2 at East Hampton’s Herrick Park on Nov. 8.

Hampton United, an over-30 team playing in the Suffolk Men’s Soccer League’s first division, lost its first game of the season Sunday, by a score of 2-1, to Massapequa, the defending champion, on a last-minute penalty kick — a loss that dropped it into second place, by 1 point, behind Charruas 1950, this Sunday’s opponent.

And the Pierson-Bridgehampton boys soccer team, after winning a first-ever county Class C title, lost 2-0 to Lansing Saturday in a state semifinal played at Middletown High School’s turf field. It was the first time that a Whaler boys soccer team had ever advanced to a state Final Four.

Quique Araya said of the over-30 men’s team loss at Massapequa that it had hinged on a controversial hand-ball call in the final minutes. “It happened just outside the penalty area, but the ref said it happened inside,” said the veteran goalie. 

“It was a hard-fought game all the way,” he added. “They scored first, but we tied it, on a beautiful 20-yard free kick by Miguel Munoz over a ‘wall’ of defenders. It was 1-1 at halftime, and it was back-and-forth in the second, with us having plenty of chances, until that call in the final minutes.”

At 5-1-1, Hampton United was listed in second place, behind 5-0-2 Charruas 1950, in the 10-team league’s standings as of Monday. Four games — one of them a Cup game — remain before the winter break in mid-December. Charruas and Hampton United are to play at the locals’ home field at Hampton Bays High School on Sunday at 2:30. However, Hampton United will be missing Araya and Jose Almansa, the center midfielder, who largely orchestrates the team’s attacks. 

Facing a Barcelona team that had some East Hampton High School players on it — Wilmer Guzman, Justin Carpio, and Gustavo Gutama among them — Liga Sayausi, anchored by such surefooted veterans as Xavi Piedramartel and Antonio Padilla, had little trouble in putting Barcelona, the summer champion, away, by a score of 6-1 in Sportime’s open men’s final.

Piedramartel scored three of the winners’ goals, two of them early in the first half, sandwiched around one by Guzman. Jimmy Baculima had two goals for Liga Sayausi. 

Juliana Garcia scored all of A.D.N.’s goals in a 3-1 win over Family in the open women’s final. La Tri bested the Cosmos 3-2 for the over-38 men’s title.

In the 7-on-7 league on Nov. 8, Sag Harbor United, as aforesaid, bested Tortorella Pools 3-2 for its first win of the season; Tuxpan defeated Maidstone Market 3-1, and Bateman Painting forfeited to Hampton F.C.-Bill Miller.

As for the Sag Harbor-Tortorella game, Leslie Czeladko, Tortorella’s manager and the league’s spokesman, attributed the loss to a controversial “unsportsmanlike behavior” call that nullified a presumptive game-tying goal by David Rodriguez with about eight minutes left to play.

“A defender, who had kicked the ball, which had come to him off the Sag Harbor goalie’s chest, could only get it to the 10-yard penalty line, where David Rodriguez was waiting. Before blasting the ball into the nets on the left side, David said, ‘Mine.’ The referee ruled that that was unsportsmanlike behavior, even though he was all alone, wasn’t deceiving anyone, and was an attacking player. . . .” 

Sag Harbor, which had tied the week before, had come to play, said Czeladko, who stepped in to play goalie in the absence of Alejandro Bolanos. 

Stiven Orrego and Eddie Lopez scored Tortorella’s goals — Orrego in the first half, Lopez in the second. 

Tuxpan’s 3-1 win over Maidstone was owing to goals by Juan Carlos Chavez, Manuel Gonzalez, and Jorge de Los Santos. Mario Olaya scored for the Market.

As of earlier this week, Tuxpan and Bill Miller led the league, each at 3-0-3, with 12 points, followed by Maidstone Market, at 2-2-2, with 8 points, Bateman Painting, at 2-3-1, with 7 points, Tortorella Pools, at 1-3-2, with 5 points, and Sag Harbor United, at 1-4-1, with 4 points. The top four teams will make the playoffs.

Saturday, November 11

CROSS-COUNTRY, East Hampton at state meet, Wayne Central High School, Ontario Center, N.Y.

RUGBY, Montauk Rugby Club vs. Suffolk Bull Moose R.C., Farmingville, 1 p.m.

BOYS SOCCER, Class C state semifinal, Pierson vs. Lansing, Middletown High School, 4 p.m.

MEN’S SOCCER, indoor finals, Sportime Arena, Abraham’s Path, Amagansett, 8-11:30 p.m.

Sunday, November 12

BOYS SOCCER, Class C state final, Middletown High School, 10:30 a.m.

RUNNING, 3.3-mile Dock race, from Montauk Post Office to Dock bar and restaurant, 11:30 a.m.

MEN’S SOCCER, Hampton United at Massapequa, 6 p.m.

Monday, November 13

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

Wednesday, November 15

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

Dock Race

The revived Dock Race, from the post office in downtown Montauk to George and Chris Watson’s Dock bar and restaurant on Lake Montauk, will be held Sunday at 11:30 a.m. “Everyone will get a T-shirt and free beer afterward,” said George Watson, adding that the entry fee would be $20.

Last year’s race attracted 188 entrants and was won by Ryan Fowkes, East Hampton High’s top cross-country runner, in 20 minutes and 4 seconds. The distance is 3.3 miles give or take.

Denison Wins

Alyssa Bahel, who plays left wing on Denison University’s field hockey team, celebrated with her teammates Denison’s 2-1 win over Wittenberg in the North Coast Athletic Conference championship game Saturday. The team was to have played a first-round N.C.A.A. Division III game at Washington and Lee in Lexington, Va., yesterday. The winner will play at Messiah College, in Mechanicsburg, Pa., this Saturday.

Denison, in Glanville, Ohio, brought a 15-game winning streak into yesterday’s matchup with Washington and Lee, a team that it had defeated in the regular season.

Going Upstate

Pierson (Sag Harbor) High School’s teams have been prominent in the playoffs, especially boys soccer, which this week — for the first time — advanced to the state’s Final Four as the result of defeating S.S. Seward 3-1 in a regional final.

Sam Warne scored two of the Whalers’ goals, the second, which clinched it, a header that converted a chipped pass from Luis Padilla with about six minutes to go. Jorge Alvarado tacked on the third goal in the final two minutes. Grady Burton got the assist.

Pierson had won the county Class C title by defeating Southold 1-0 on a goal by Alvarado in the first half.

The Whalers’ field hockey team, also a county champion, by a score of 4-0 over Babylon, lost 2-0 to Carle Place in the Long Island Class C championship game. It was the second year in a row that the Frogs had eaten the Whalers’ dreams of going upstate.

Pierson’s girls volleyball team was to have played Stony Brook in the county Class C championship match Tuesday. Stony Brook defeated the Whalers twice, by 3-0 scores, during the regular season.

Ultimate Champ

Sas Peters of Amagansett last weekend played on the Minneapolis-based team that won the world great grandmasters (over-50) Ultimate disc championship in Sarasota, Fla.

Peters, who is 61, has been in demand lately, having been invited not only to play with the Surly Boys — the team that just won the great grandmasters title — but also with an all-star team, Currier Island, that competed in the world beach Ultimate great grandmasters championships in Meco, Portugal, last June, and with a team that competed in the North American grandmasters (over-40) mixed division in Montreal in September.

Asked how he trained to keep up with the fast-paced sport, Peters said he pedals a stationary bike, lifts weights, and does plyometrics exercises originally designed for East German sprinters.

East Hampton High School’s girls volleyball team, which proved compelling this season what with the strong all-around play of Mikela Junemann (especially at the net), the setting of Elle Johnson, and the grit of its defenders, Molly Mamay and — until she got hurt — Zoe Leach chief among them, lost a quarterfinal county playoff match in five here on Halloween after dropping the first two sets.

The opponent, East Islip, the county A bracket’s fifth seed (East Hampton was seeded fourth), won in the end, 25-21, 25-22, 15-25, 26-28, 25-21.

“I can only attribute [the loss] to good serving by E.I. and to our sophomore and junior-laden team’s inexperience,” Kathy McGeehan, East Hampton’s veteran coach, said afterward. “I’m still baffled as to why we couldn’t sideout with our first rotation in the fifth set. . . . I hope playing in a hard-fought playoff match before an electric crowd will inspire our returning players to go beyond the quarterfinals next year.”

A half-dozen service errors helped do the Bonackers in in the first set. Still, it was close going down the stretch. A service error by Mary Macdonald, who had come off the bench, treated the visitors to a 22-19 lead, but a kill by Erin Decker got the ball back into East Hampton’s hands. The Bonackers, however, could win only one of the four succeeding points — on a crosscourt kill by Madyson Neff that made it 21-24. Her subsequent serve sailed long, and that was it.

The Bonackers were up 21-15 in the second set, but couldn’t hold on. East Islip tied it at 21-21 on a hitting error by Decker, after which the visitors reeled off the remaining four points.

East Hampton won the third, trailing only once on its way to a 25-15 final. 

A kill by Junemann treated McGeehan’s crew to an 18-12 lead in the fourth, and East Hampton held on — though barely. There were five ties in crunch time, during which East Islip came up empty on four set points before East Hampton, which tied it at 26-26 on a double block by Ella Gurney and Olivia Brauer, came through with kills by Neff, to the endline, and by Gurney, after she’d been set at the middle of the net by Johnson.

You would have thought that spirited 28-26 win would have carried over into the early moments of the pivotal fifth, but it didn’t. East Islip’s setter reeled off nine service points before the Bonackers, thanks to a kill by Junemann, sided out. It was all uphill after that. 

East Hampton was still down by nine, at 12-21, Junemann having just hit the antenna at the left side of the net, as the endgame neared.

A long kill attempt put the ball in Decker’s hands. A kill by Neff, an East Islip error, and a dink by Neff brought East Hampton to 16-21. A dink by East Islip made it 16-22, but then Neff hit the line for 17-22. 

With Maddie Smullen serving, a returnable ball was allowed to hit the floor as players exchanged Alphonse and Gaston looks. That miscue put East Islip within two points of the match. 

A subsequent error by Gurney made it 17-24. East Hampton fought back to 21-24 thanks to a netted serve and double hit by East Islip, a service ace by Brauer, and a two-handed lob to the endline by Neff, before the visitors put the match away as one of their hitters ripped a kill through a double block.

Afterward, McGeehan said she would nominate Johnson as a member of the all-county tournament team for her 43 assists and 18 digs. Mamay, she said, had 46 digs, a personal best.

“We will miss our two seniors, Olivia Brauer and Maddie Smullen,” she said, “but with 10 returning players we hope they will be more prepared and more confident when the playoffs arrive next year.”

“I was so proud of their effort and resilience the other day, to come back the way they did after losing the first two sets — also by the way they came back in the fifth,” McGeehan continued. “I thought it was a beautiful battle between two evenly matched teams.”

East Hampton’s boys volleyball team also made the playoffs, those contested by the county’s smaller schools. The fourth seed in Division II, Josh Brussell’s team lost at first-seeded Hauppauge Saturday. Hauppauge and Sayville were to play for the Division II title at Suffolk Community College-Brentwood yesterday.

The girls finished with a 10-4 record in League VI, behind Sayville and Westhampton Beach, each at 13-1. They were 11-4 over all. The boys, who prevailed 3-2 over Shoreham-Wading River in the last game of the regular season, were 6-12 over all.

   The Gubbins Running Ahead stores here are high-energy places, and Gubbins’s four new salesmen fit the bill nicely.

    Running under the Gubbins Distance Project team banner, the four — Owen Dawson, an all-American 800 runner from Penn State, Ryan Hagen, a second-team all-American from Virginia Tech, Shawn Roberts, a two-time all A.C.C. runner from Georgia Tech, and Will McFall, an all-Ivy 800 runner from Cornell — are expected to pretty much dominate whatever races they may enter here this summer.

    Roberts made his debut by easily winning the Bonac on Board to Wellness 5K recently, and Dawson has won both 5Ks he’s entered — at Southampton and, last week, at Sayville.

    Asked why she hadn’t taken Dawson to Shelter Island, his employer, Barbara Gubbins said, “He doesn’t run 10Ks.”

    “For years,” she said when asked how she and her husband, Justin, had come to put the team together, “it’s been really hard for us to get runners to work for us — there’s such a small pool out here. Other stores have pipelines into the colleges. Bryn Mawr Running, for instance, gets all its workers from Villanova.”

    “So, this past winter, I contacted coaches in the Ivies, and the A.C.C., and at the N.C.A.A. nationals. They’re all middle-distance runners. They’ll be training together and working for us for a year, after which they can decide what they want to do, whether they want to stay or go on and do something else. . . . Their times are great. Owen ran a 3:59 in the Penn Relays, Ryan has run a 4:02, Shawn’s done a 4:03, I think, and Will a 4:08. I’m taking them all to a road mile in Mastic Beach on June 29. In the fall, they’ll run at Van Cortlandt . . . we’re going to enter them in the 4-by-1,500 in next year’s Penn Relays. . . .”

    During a brief conversation at the Gubbins New Balance store last Thursday with Dawson, Hagen, and McFall — Roberts hadn’t come in yet — when asked what exactly he liked about running, Dawson, who majored in kinesiology, said, matter-of-factly, “Winning.”

    Hagen, who recently graduated from Virginia Tech with a degree in health, nutrition, foods, and exercise, said, “From a noncompetitive standpoint, it doesn’t take much to run, just some sneakers and shorts . . . you’re in nature and you’re moving, which is what we’re supposed to do.”

    McFall, an applied economics major who has played basketball, said, “In basketball you need a team, but in running you can get out on your own and also be a member of a team.”

    The four, who are living in Sag Harbor, and who pair up in shifts at Gubbins, run the trails there either before or after work.

    “We’re averaging about 40 miles per week now — we’re in our buildup phase,” Dawson said. “By mid-July we’ll be up to 70.”

    Gubbins said the four are now participating in the weekly distance runs that set off from the New Balance store in the Reutershan Parking Lot at 8 Sunday mornings. A lot of the some 35 to 50 attendees were training for the Hamptons Marathon in the fall, she said, “though everyone is welcome. This past Sunday we did a 7-miler, to Indian Wells Beach and back, and a 9-miler, out Bluff Road and up Hand’s Lane.”

    Asked if her new employees took it slow, Gubbins laughed. “Their pace for the 9-miler was 6:08! Diane [Weinberger, one of the marathon’s directors] wanted to take a picture of them, but they went out so fast she couldn’t. Now you see them, now you don’t!”

   Going up against the dominant defending-champion Reds in the East Hampton Town Little League’s 11-to-12-year-old “world series” presented a challenge for the very young Pirates, but Tim Garneau’s team acquitted itself well in the best-of-three final, which ended with a 4-1 Reds’ victory at the Pantigo fields Friday night.

    Steve Minskoff’s Reds finished the regular season with an 11-1 mark, the Pirates, who were the National Division’s runner-up, finished at 7-5. Nevertheless, it was not a David and Goliath affair, the Reds’ coach, Steve Minskoff said. “I only had one returnee this year, Christian Johnson, and only one 12-year-old.”

    The Pirates scuttled the Reds 6-4 in game one, “behind the masterful pitching of Elian Abreu,” Garneau said.

    The Buccaneers extended an early 1-0 lead with three runs in the fourth inning. John Walters, the center fielder, led it off with a triple, after which Skylar Minardi drove him in with a single. Then Burton Garneau (one of two 9-year-olds on the team, the other being Matthew McGovern) doubled in Minardi for 3-0. The Pirates’ fourth run scored on a fielder’s choice.

    The Reds came back, however, scoring once in the bottom of the fifth and plating three more in the sixth (a two-run double by James Foster being the big blow) before Burton Garneau closed them out, on two strikeouts and a popup that he gathered in for the game-ending out.

    The Reds reasserted themselves in game two, “mercying” the Pirates 13-3 after four innings. “Ryan Brewer pitched a masterpiece,” said Garneau, “giving up just three hits and striking out seven.”

    Patrick DeSanti, Brewer, Christian Johnson, and Hayden Soloviev were among the Reds’ heavy hitters. Soloviev lashed a bases-clearing triple in the top of the fourth that extended the margin to 10-3, after which the Reds tacked on three more runs to close out the game.

    Game three, said Garneau, “was a pitchers’ duel — Christian Johnson and Elian matched each other strikeout for strikeout.”

    Abreu had to reach back, however, when he confronted bases-loaded, two-out situations in the first and third innings, getting out of the jam each time. The Pirates led 1-0 [the result of a sac fly by J.B. Stewart] going into the bottom of the fifth, at which point the elder Garneau told his charges, “Six more outs and we’re done.”

    But it wasn’t to be. Soloviev began the Reds’ comeback by reaching first base safely on an infield error. DeSanti then forced him at second, but Brewer’s single up the middle put runners at the corners for Johnson, who, after taking three balls, was intentionally walked. With the bases loaded and one out, Abreu struck out Max Bahi on three pitches. That brought up James Foster.

    Abreu had by that time maxed out his pitch count at 85, and had to give way to Burton Garneau. When play resumed, Foster lofted a two-out bases-loaded blooper just over the second baseman Quentin Bazar’s reach that enabled two runs to come in.

    With runners at the corners, a wild pitch enabled Johnson to score the Reds’ third run. An inning-ending strikeout followed, but not before a passed ball led to another run for the Reds, who, by that point led 4-1.

    Johnson struck out the Pirates’ J.B. Stewart to lead off the top of the sixth, after which Henry Garneau drew a walk. A wild pitch with John Walters at bat enabled Garneau to go to second, but Johnson came back to strike out Walters for the second out. That pitch proved to be his 85th, which prompted Minskoff to replace Johnson, who went to short, with Nate Wright.

    “Guys, we’re a two-out ballclub, let’s do it right here,” the elder Garneau said.

    But Wright, after getting two quick strikes on Abreu, clinched the championship — the Reds’ second in a row — as Abreu grounded out to Johnson, who, after the final out was made, rolled delightedly over and over in the dust of the mound as his teammates rushed in to celebrate.

    “Christian is unbelievable,” Minskoff said of the winning pitcher, who is 11 years old. “He has another gear like no other kid in our league. You see a kid like him only once in a very long while.”

    Minskoff (whose assistant coach is Rudy DeSanti) and Garneau were to have coached East Hampton’s all-star travel teams — Minskoff the 11-12s and Garneau the 9-10s — in District 36 tournaments whose opening-round games were to have been played Monday.

    The 9-10s roster comprises Jackson Baris, Tucker Coleman, Logan Gurney, Burton Garneau, Tucker Genovese, Liam Leach, Matthew McGovern, Callum Menelaws, Colin Ruddy, Owen Ruddy, and Hayden Soloviev.

    The 11-12 traveling all-stars are Auggie Gladstone, Patrick DeSanti, Max Bahi, Chasen Dubs, Ethan Pratt, James Foster, Seth Martin, Christian Johnson, Kurt Matthews, Anthony Genovese, Lou Britton, Elian Abreu, and Ryan Brewer.

     A number of strong volleyballers, including Kim Valverde, whose Hillsborough Junior College team placed seventh in the nation, Jesse Libath, Hayden Ward, the State University Athletic Conference’s player of the year in men’s basketball, and Tahlia Miller, showed up at Gurney’s Inn in Montauk last Thursday evening for an informal round of 4-on-4 games — a prelude to a six-week league to begin July 11.

    Valverde, an honorable mention all-American libero when she was at East Hampton High, is playing on Air & Speed, last year’s runner-up to the Beach Diplomats, along with Josh Brussell, Bonac’s boys volleyball coach, and his assistant, Jon Jamet.

    Libath, who played for the champion Beach Diplomats last season, ought to provide considerable firepower for Bonac Yard Sale. Tahlia Miller and her brother, Connor, better known perhaps for his play on the rugby pitch, James Keogh, and Rachael and Sarah Faraone should make the Burritos very competitive.

    Another strong player who was not there that night undoubtedly will be Raya O’Neal, who, said Kathy McGeehan, the league’s organizer, was at U.S.A. Volleyball’s junior championships in Texas. O’Neal, who set a career assist record on McGeehan’s team last fall, with 1,616, will be a senior at East Hampton High School this fall.

    League play, as aforesaid, is to begin next Thursday. “We’ll go for six weeks,” said McGeehan, “and end it on Aug. 15. We’re ending earlier this year than last because so many have to leave for college.”

    McGeehan added that it was nice to see among the players some children — namely Lydia and Jenna Budd and Katie Brierley — of people she’d played beach volleyball with at Indian Wells Beach in Amagansett 25 years ago, the last time there was organized beach volleyball here.

    Besides the above-named, other entries in the Gurney’s Inn league are Hamptons Free Ride, Sea Capture, Sloppy Tuna A and B, Gurney’s, Naturally Good/On Point, the Montauk Beach House, Lydi, and Shelter Island Volleyball.