Thursday, January 17

BOWLING, Southampton vs. East Hampton, East Hampton Bowl, 3:30 p.m.

BOYS SWIMMING, Harborfields vs. East Hampton, Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter, 4:30 p.m.

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

GIRLS BASKETBALL, East Hampton at Mount Sinai, 4:30 p.m.

Friday, January 18

WRESTLING, East Hampton at Westhampton Beach, 6 p.m.

Saturday, January 19

WRESTLING, East Hampton at Mattituck tournament, 8 a.m.

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

Sunday, January 20

WINTER TRACK, East Hampton boys at Coaches meet, Suffolk Community College-Brentwood, 10 a.m.

Tuesday, January 22

BOWLING, East Hampton vs. Eastport-South Manor, Shirley Bowl, 4 p.m.

Wednesday, January 23

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

Coach on Goalie

    Brad McCarty, coach of the national champion Messiah College men’s soccer team, whose goalie is Brandon West, a former Bonac star, had this to say by way of e-mail: “One of the things that separates Brandon from everyone else is his work ethic, on and off the field.”

    “When it comes to goaltending, his strength and speed give him the athleticism to compete at a high level. Second, he has developed his footwork and technique in the last year and a half, allowing him to be more consistent, and, third, he has the aggressiveness and confidence necessary to play in the goal.”

    “I believe he certainly has the potential to play soccer after his collegiate career. It is extremely competitive at the next level, though Brandon brings with him a number of attributes that will transfer to the professional game.”

Girls Track

    Shani Cuesta, who coaches East Hampton High’s girls winter track team, in writing about the Jim Howard memorial meet of the past weekend, said her charges turned in 14 personal-best performances.

    First and foremost, Dana Cebulski was the small schools runner-up, and fourth over all, in the 1,500-meter race in a personal-best time of 5 minutes and 20/100ths of a second. Cebulski took third among the small school competitors in the 1,000, in 3:10.74.

    There were five personal bests in the 55-meter dash, Gabbie McKay’s 8.34 being the fastest of the Bonac times. Annie Schuppe’s throw of 26 feet, 2 inches in the shot-put was a “p.r.,” as was Alexa Berti’s 48.67 in the 300.

    The league championships are to be contested at Suffolk Community College-Brentwood on Jan. 26.

   Doug and Kathryn de Groot, who own the Buckskill Tennis Club here, which is turned over to skating in the winter, are making a big push for the young set.

    “We’re putting an emphasis on kids with our after-school and weekend junior hockey, figure skating, and regular skating offerings,” Kathryn de Groot said Saturday morning as 20-plus youngsters, under Tim Luzadre’s direction, were doing hockey drills and scrimmaging on Buckskill’s rink, which overlies about six Har-Tru tennis courts.

    Chris Doran, an East Hampton High School senior who played high school hockey in New Jersey the past two years before moving here, said he was happy indeed that Buckskill’s hockey program is growing. “I’m here almost every day,”  said Doran, who hopes to play (and take F.B.I. preparatory courses) at New Haven College.

    Tim Garneau, whose sons, Henry, 10, and Barton, 9, play every Tuesday and Thursday afternoons in the club’s intramural ice hockey, said, “I’m hoping they’ll play on a high school hockey team here some day. The last two winters I’ve taken them to the Rinx in Hauppauge. They have the only youth league in the county, but it’s an hour and 20-minute drive. So I’m much happier that they can come here and get two hours of ice time.” The program for seventh through 12th-grade boys and girls welcomes students from the Bridgehampton, Southampton, East Hampton, Sag Harbor, and Ross schools.

    “We want everybody to come,” Kathryn de Groot said, “which is why the fee for the after-school program is modest, and why, if some parents can’t afford it, scholarships are available.”

    She and her husband said that they hope the intramural ice hockey program under way will lead eventually — perhaps in two years’ time — to an interscholastic travel team made up of South Fork high school students.

    “The team could practice here and play games here as well as up the Island, where they have an interscholastic hockey league,” said Doug de Groot.

    The club’s Web site is buckskillwinterclub.com.

   There’s a war on locally. I don’t mean the war on D.W.I.s or the war on drugs, I mean the war on the white-tailed deer, Odocoileus virginiana. It was here on Long Island before we were, even before the first Amerindians, and is the only member of the antlered-mammal family native to Long Island, we never had moose, elk, or caribou. Apparently, being too native is similar to being too alien. I once heard a well-known gourmet writer on North Haven call them “rats.”

    Coming back from the end of East Lake Drive in Montauk after the Montauk Christmas bird count a few Saturdays ago, it was just getting dark when I started out, pitch black when I arrived home in Noyac. In that 20-or-so-mile stretch including Montauk Highway, Bluff Road, Further and Dunemere Lanes, Route 114, and Noyac Road, I counted no less than 80 deer. There were 20 in Montauk, a handful on Napeague, 60 more in the Village of East Hampton, where it begins just east of Two Mile Hollow Road to the ocean.

    The adults were grazing peacefully; some of this year’s fawns were feeling their oats and frolicking. Apparently, the elders knew that they were safe in the village because when I stopped to observe them as well as about 1,000 Canada geese foraging beside them in the spacious still-green fields that used to be part of the Rock Foundation property on the north side of Further Lane, they paid me no mind. In a word, they were in deer heaven.

    I did count one very freshly killed doe on East Lake Drive’s shoulder. It wasn’t there when I came by the other way four hours earlier. What to do, what to do? Growing up on the North Fork in the 1940s and 1950s I might see a deer or two every other year, the kind of observation that would end up in the weekly paper as a headline — “Farmer sees deer in field.” Now deer have become so commonplace on the East End that the newspapers only tell us over and over in smaller print how commonplace they’ve become, nothing about their grace and beauty, nothing about their nativity, only negativity.

    For centuries the newspapers never had much good to say about the local Indians, as well. It’s only lately that they have warmed up to them a little, but not to the point where any of us are willing to give them some of their lands back. Ownership of land backed by titles and deeds is an English invention. In the heyday of conquering hordes, later of diplomatic imperialism, the invaders and intruders merely claimed the land for their kings. No, no one bothered with signed and notarized legal documents to back their claims.

    Well it’s the Christmas season (or should I say more politically correctly) the holiday season, and we are confronted with an odd paradox. We welcome the annual arrival of Donner, Blitzen, and the rest of the gang from up north, at the same time wishing that their cousins here on the South Fork would just go away. If some of us object to this double standard, it is called the “Bambi Syndrome,” a kind of disease like Autism, Asperger’s syndrome, or dementia.

    Deer are not suicide bombers or jihadists out to destroy the rest of us. They don’t have stocks of chemical and nuclear weapons, they don’t know how to fire AR-15s. They do indulge in combat charades, but only in the way we, ourselves, used to play cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians when we were kids. One deer very, very rarely harms another, say in the way that a male lion will eat an unattended cub if he’s hungry enough.

     In that respect one might say, deer are more highly evolved than humans. Interestingly, in this regard, white-tailed deer have a matriarchal culture. Hmmm, I wonder what human culture would be like if it were more matriarchal and less the other way?

    I’ve observed deer, hunted deer, suffered from post-Lyme syndrome, and dreamt about deer. I regularly have deer in my yard in Noyac, even though my lot is less than a quarter acre in size. I should be concerned — I have a lot of potted plants, a lot of plants in the ground, no lawn to speak of. But I’m not. Let’s say they visit me regularly, stay for a bit, and then pass on. My wife and I are mindful of them, happy when they’re around, happy when they’ve passed on.

    The more I see of them and come to know them the more I am in wonder of them. I know I will never be able to totally fathom them, and though I know Russian and Mandarin, I’ll never be able to communicate with them in their language. They have such a simple regimen. The does are very mindful of their fawns, the males don’t indulge in pedophilia and other bizarre acts, they all seem to get on with each other with very little internecine strife. They seem to have their own set of Commandments which they follow better than we follow ours.

    We hustle and bustle, fight with and envy our neighbors, spend inordinate time at malls and recreating, fret and worry over the simplest of dilemmas, need to drink, smoke, take meds, have trouble sleeping, have to spend an inordinate amount of time doing paperwork and so on. I’ve been looking for a trouble-free existence throughout my 77 years. If there was such a thing as reincarnation, I might like to come back as a deer.

   It took about 10 minutes for East Hampton High School’s boys basketball team to warm up in a league game played here on Dec. 19 with Miller Place.

    A steal by Rolando Garces early in the second quarter that Thomas Nelson followed with a fast-break layup, and a subsequent coast-to-coast drive by Garces, following a steal by Nelson, got the blood flowing, and from that point on the Bonackers, who improved to 6-0 as a result of the 60-39 win, were in the driver’s seat.

    Bill McKee’s charges took a 29-22 lead into the halftime break, and they outscored the visitors 17-9 in the third, during which Brendan Hughes, Garces, Thomas King, and Nelson all made baskets.

    A floater in the lane by Garces, another fastbreak-capping layup by Nelson, and a 3-pointer by a recent call-up from the junior varsity, Brandon Neff, treated the home team to a 53-33 lead in the opening moments of the fourth, and so it went. Mc­Kee, with a victory well assured, emptied his bench in the final two minutes.

    Neff, East Hampton’s version of Steve Novak, had made his debut at Mount Sinai, McKee said, when asked afterward who number 33 was. “He’s been shooting the lights out for the jayvee, and, so far, he’s been doing the same for us,” he said of the thin 6-foot-2-inch sophomore. “He gives us another weapon.”

   While the team’s offensive total wasn’t all that high, Mc­Kee’s assistant, Bob Vacca, noted that the shooting percentages were creditable.

   “Thomas King went 7-for-9 from the floor, and he had eight rebounds and five assists,” Vacca said. “Brendan Hughes was 5-for-5, Brendan Neff was 3-for-5 from 3-point range, Thomas Nelson was 4-for-5, and Rolando was 3-for-4 on 2s and 1-for-2 on 3s. Thomas Nelson also had four steals, which was significant.”

   The only fault Vacca could find was that King, the team’s senior point guard, who, according to McKee, “had another great all-around game,” had been left pretty much on his own when it came to rebounding. “Usually, we have several kids with seven or so boards — we didn’t have that tonight,” said Vacca.

   “I thought we played well in the second half,” said McKee. “Defensively, we mixed it up. Basically, we clogged the middle, which gave them problems,” causing plenty of turnovers.

   “They were keying on Thomas [King], but he broke their press and did a great job distributing the ball — he didn’t force anything. Another great all-around game for him.”

   McKee said that the impressive start owed much to the fact that “a lot of these guys — Thomas, my son Danny, Rolando, and Thomas Nelson — have experience. They showed that at Mount Sinai where we started out with an 18-point lead, saw it vanish, and then came back to win. We went down by 1 or 2 points a number of times in the third period, but the kids kept plugging away. They’ve been finding ways to win.”

   King finished with 15 points, Hughes with 11, Neff and Garces with 9 each, and Nelson and Danny McKee with 8 each.

   Pat Hand, who coaches East Hampton High School’s bowling team, confessed after Dec. 18’s big win here over Eastport-South Manor, the defending league champion, that she had been pleasantly surprised.

    The Sharks, after all, had been racking up some 1,000-plus-point games, while East Hampton’s best game as of that day had been a 934.

    The visitors, dressed in dark blue jerseys and khaki cargo shorts, exuded confidence on their arrival at East Hampton Bowl. And they started off strong, sweeping the alleys clean of pins in the early going of the first game.

    By the midway point, Eastport-South Manor led by 104 pins, but the Bonackers, paced by Jacob Grossman, whose parents manage the Bowl, and Brianna Semb, whose grandmother, Jane Maxey, was looking on — and whose presence could well have served as inspiration — didn’t yield.

    “It’s always a fight when we bowl them,” Hand said. “Each game goes down to the last frame.”

    The Dec. 18 encounter was no exception. East Hampton, thanks largely to Grossman and Semb, led 735-723 after nine frames in game one. But three opens in the finale served to do them in 933-922.

    During the break, Hand wondered whether she shouldn’t sub for three of her starters — Jackson Clark, Gabby Green, and Chris Duran, the senior anchorman — who hadn’t done well in game one. Clark had rolled a 153, Green a 158, and Duran a 160, about 30 points below his average.

    She ended up giving them another chance, and she said later that she was very happy she did, for in the second game Clark improved to 180, Green soared to 211, and Duran to 203.

    Meanwhile, Semb continued to impress, with a 202, and Grossman, who bowls out of a crouch, and who was East Hampton’s most consistent competitor that day, chipped in with a creditable 192.

    “I told Jacob [who’s a sophomore] that if he’d gotten just 11 more pins, we would have had our first 1,000-point game of the season,” said the coach, with a smile.

    Going into the third, and decisive, game, “the kids were fired up — they were determined,” Hand continued.

    The Bonackers, who improved to 5-0 as a result of the victory, wound up winning the third by 4 pins, faring better in the final frame than they had in game one. “Jacob [205] and Christopher [212] finished strong, and their anchorman, Doug Pinelli [182], didn’t.”

    When everything was tallied — games won, high single game, total wood, and individual points — East Hampton won 21.5-11.5.

    Asked how the Sharks’ coach had taken it, Hand smiled. “I heard him say to one kid, ‘All you need to know is we lost — get on the bus.’ ”

    Eastport’s Brian O’Sullivan, a lefty with a deadly hook, wound up with the day’s high series, a 236-683. Grossman finished with a 258-655.

    “We’ve made the counties in all but two years since I began coaching in 2003,” Hand said the next day. “Our biggest year was ’05-’06, when we won the league championship — the only time we’ve ever done so — and the team, which had Mikey Graham and Ryan Rhodes on it, averaged 194. This year, the top two go. Last year, we were third, the year before that second. I’ve never had a bowler roll 300 in competition. I think Jacob can do it. I also think we’ll make 1,000 as a team.”

   The East Hampton High School boys basketball team lost its first game of the season Friday as the Dalton School, sporting a formidable point guard and a 6-foot-5-inch center, prevailed over the Bonackers 64-54 in the first round of the Southampton Recreation Center’s Holiday Classic tournament.

    Bill McKee’s team, which had gone into the tourney with a 6-0 record, played hard, but Dalton’s energetic man-for-man defense made the Bonackers work hard for their shots.

    At the other end of the court, Dalton’s big man, Adisa Majors, despite fronting and backing by defenders, frequently muscled the ball up underneath while the aforementioned point guard, Connor Jacobson, who ran the offense well, proved to be pretty deadly from the 3-point arc.

    It looked as if it would be a blowout in the beginning. By the end of the first quarter, the New York City private school led 14-3 and East Hampton had made only one of its eight shots, a perimeter jumper by Thomas King.

    Things were to get better, however. But not until the third quarter, when the Bonackers, who trailed by 15 at one point, fought back to 46-41.

    Down 45-30 in the final minutes of the period, Mckee’s crew, mixing 3’s in with steals and fast-break layups, went on an 11-1 tear that put them back in the game.

    Alas, they couldn’t keep the hot hand in the fourth after Rolando Garces’s 3-pointer closed the gap to 4 in the opening moments. They then proceeded to come up empty on seven occasions from beyond the arc; Danny McKee missing three times, Brandon Neff missing twice, and Garces and Thomas Nelson once each.

    Later, the elder McKee said, “We struggled on offense, but you have to credit Dalton’s defense for that. We cut it to 4 points at one time, but we came up empty on our next four possessions. While we were missing our 3s, they were making theirs. Their point guard hurt us and so did their big guy. Between them [Jacobson finished with 27 points, Majors with 22] they scored most of their points.”

    But, McKee added, “It was a good nonleague game for us. Obviously we wanted to win, but it was what we needed — it can only help because we’ll be facing teams like that in league play.”

    Because of its first-round loss, East Hampton played Bridgehampton (which lost 71-44 to Southampton Friday) in Saturday’s consolation game.

    The Bees, who are young and whose chief scoring threat is Jason Hopson, a 6-foot-3-inch senior guard-forward, fell behind 15-4 in the first quarter, though the overconfident Bonackers pretty much frittered that advantage away in the second period. Going into the halftime break, following a 7-2 spurt by the energized Bees, East Hampton clung to a slim 22-18 lead.

    Obviously what McKee said to his charges during the intermission registered, for they came out on fire in the third quarter.

    Later, following the 61-42 win, Mc­Kee said no adjustments had been made. “It was simply that we put in a better effort in the second half.” As for what he had said to his players during halftime, “You wouldn’t want to print what I said to them in your paper.”

    In the first five minutes of the third, the Bonackers outscored their younger neighbors 19-2, an animated full-court pressure run during which Thomas Nelson had three steals, the lightning-quick Garces scored 9 points, and Brendan Hughes, a solid inside player, scored 5.

    McKee and Garces, each of whom hit four 3-pointers, finished with 14 points each, King had 10, and Hughes, 9. Hopson, who had scored 16 against Southampton, had 12 for the Bees, as did Josh Lamison, a freshman.

Thursday, January 3

BOYS BASKETBALL, East Hampton at Shoreham-Wading River, 4:30 p.m.

GIRLS BASKETBALL, Shoreham-Wading River at East Hampton, 6:15 p.m.

Friday, January 4

WRESTLING, East Hampton at Mount Sinai, 4:30 p.m.

Sunday, January 6

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

Monday, January 7

WINTER TRACK, East Hampton boys at crossover meet, Suffolk Community College-Brentwood, 5 p.m.

Tuesday, January 8

BOWLING, Southold vs. East Hampton, East Hampton Bowl, 4 p.m.

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

BOYS BASKETBALL, Elwood-John Glenn at East Hampton, 6:15 p.m.

Wednesday, January 9

BOWLING, East Hampton at singles tournament, Sayville Lanes, 4 p.m.

BOYS SWIMMING, Hauppauge vs. East Hampton, Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter, 4:30 p.m.

WRESTLING, Shoreham-Wading River at East Hampton, 4:30 p.m.

    As 2012 began, Dr. Paul Weinhold, a sports psychologist, said that “The best are confident — in any sport. They’re not adding an enormous amount of pressure on themselves because they’ve already incorporated into themselves the knowledge that they will not always be perfect. It makes no difference whether you’re an athlete or a surgeon or a musician. . . . They want to be focused, confident, to quiet the mind.”

    In February, Larry Keller, who had set a state — and East Hampton High School — discus record of 175 feet, 7.5 inches in 1994, said that he had used “the same visualization I used with the discus” as he lay paralyzed in a hospital bed, with depression nipping at his heels following a horrific car accident in July 2009.

    “The doctors told me I might never walk again. I thought that may be, but I told them, ‘Don’t ever say that to me again,’ and I started looking for ways to get back.”

    He took his first steps five weeks after the accident. He is now able to stand and walk on flat ground with the help of a cane. . . . An Action Trackchair, a cross between a conventional wheelchair and a small tank whose treads conquer mud and sand, has enabled him to get back where he loves to be, on the beach at Ditch Plain in the sun and with his girlfriend, Sharyn Marks.

    In March, Abby Roden, whose mother, Theresa, oversees the I-Tri program here that uses triathletic training and self-esteem workshops to empower the minds and bodies of early adolescent girls, said she would not only like to see the program extended from the Springs and Montauk Schools to East Hampton High School, but also throughout the world.

    Also that month, Pete Spagnoli, who made it to the top of Mount McKinley on his second try, said, “Compared to the last trip [in 2009], this was perfect. It was cold and it snowed, but we were able to progress steadily. We didn’t get stuck in our tents this time. . . . As you go up it gets harder.”

    The summit of Mount McKinley was about the size of his living room rug, the physical therapist said. “You’re freezing and exhausted, but euphoric. It’s an unbelievable feeling. You’re on top of the world, in the clouds. There’s a marker and a prayer flag. Scott [Pleban, a member of the climbing party] was going to take a photo of me, but my camera was frozen.”

    “You can see how they take to it,” said Whitney Reidlinger, an occupational therapist at the Springs School, as 60 young bowlers with disabilities participated in a Special Olympics tournament at East Hampton Bowl in mid-March. “They very much like the competition and the socialization, which helps them develop independence. Some of them two years ago had to have others put their shoes on and to carry the ball. Now, they can do these things themselves.”

    “They’ll have just about everything at the track and field meet in May but the hurdles. Sprints, the shot-put, the long jump, the high jump. . . . In one of the meets I was at a blind athlete, tethered to a guide rope, ran the 800!”

    In April, Zvile Ngo, a native of Lithuania who recently began to compete in the figures category in body building competitions, said, “I’m trying to improve every day. I want people to see that everything is possible. I was a skinny, closed, shy person, and I did it. . . . I just want to help people . . . it’s just the beginning for me.”

    Later that month, after he’d won the Trip of a Lifetime raffle following the East Hampton Coaches Association’s golf outing at the South Fork Country Club, John Pizzo gave the trip for two to any one of this country’s 13 major sporting events — or to Hawaii, the Caribbean, or Alaska — to Matt Maloney, who he knew was soon to be married.

    “He’s such a sports nut though that I think I’ll let his wife choose,” said Pizzo. “Otherwise, they may wind up in a basketball court on their honeymoon.”

    The day after May 23, World Turtle Day, Larry Penny said in his nature column, “When the fabulist Aesop matched the turtle against the hare in a race two millenniums ago, he must have known something about turtles that hadn’t come to light in the world of science until the middle of the last century. Turtles may not move as fast as rabbits, but they outlive them by scores of years. Thus, if the race is long enough, the turtle will always win in the end.”

    Kousaku Yokota, a 65-year-old international karate master who gave a weekend seminar at John Turnbull Sensei’s dojo in Southampton in May, said that faithful practice furthered self-realization and helped the karateka [karate practitioner] face down his biggest enemy — himself.

    “When you’re older you do the movements more efficiently,” the eighth-degree black belt said. “The key part is breathing. That’s very important. And daily practice of the forms and stretching. I try to flow like water,” he said, with a smile, when his interviewer said he’d seen his movements so described.

    “Sometimes, at our dojo we flow like molasses,” Turnbull Sensei interjected, with a laugh.

    At East Hampton High School’s athletic awards dinner in early June, J.C. Barrientos, a star on the high school’s county-champion soccer team, was hailed, in addition, for having a few days before saved the life of a drowning man at the Driftwood ocean resort where he was working as a cabana boy.

    “If it weren’t for J.C., that man would be dead,” John Ryan Sr., who, with his son, John Jr., oversees lifeguard training here, said. “The ocean was rough that day. A couple of our ocean rescue guys had to struggle swimming from Indian Wells to Atlantic. I’m convinced that if J.C. hadn’t had the presence of mind to take that torpedo out [200 yards into the ocean] with him, one of them would have died.”

    “All the credit goes to the kid,” said Randy Hoffman, an advanced emergency medical technician whose bag valve oxygen delivery machine restored the victim’s breathing.

    Amy Winters, an ultra-distance competitor who is a below-the-knee amputee, the result of a motorcycle accident when she was 21, said at the Turbo triathlon to raise money for the I-Tri program here at the end of June that “everybody faces something in life, a crisis that presents you with a choice. Do you give up or do you move on?”

    Leslie Andrews, a golf pro at Montauk Downs whose book, “Even Par,” encourages women in the business world to get into the game, said, “Anyone can learn to play golf during the course of three months with a little persistence. . . . Grab a 5-iron and carpe diem.”

    At the Swim Across America cancer-research fund-raising event on Gardiner’s Bay in July, Sinead FitzGibbon, an Irish-born physical therapist who won among the 5K women, said on emerging from the water that “this is one of the most important sports events on the East End. There’s a rare sense of community here. We’re doing it for the sport, which can be likened to moving meditation, and for the spirit.”

    Swimming was interesting too, she said, because, with the purging of wasteful motion one could more efficiently and thus more swiftly glide through the water. “It’s sort of a metaphor for life,” she said with a smile.

    In recalling Andy Neidnig, the inveterate runner, who died in August at the age of 93, Howard Lebwith said, “I remember after that New York marathon where he broke the record, he just kept running — he didn’t know how to get home on the subway.”

    During an interview on the occasion of his 90th birthday, when this writer said he was still playing tennis, Neidnig said, “Good, don’t stop. Nature takes care of that. Meanwhile, don’t think about it.”

    At East Hampton High School’s inaugural Hall of Fame ceremony in September, “one of the great days in Bonac sports history,” in the words of Jim Nicoletti, the 19-member selection committee’s president, the University of Tennessee and Spanish premier league basketball star, Howard Wood, who led East Hampton to a 42-2 record in the 1976 and ’77 seasons, said, “I wish all of you could have one time in your lives to feel what I’m feeling here today.”

    Another honoree, Ellamae Gurney, who captained the 1994 field hockey, basketball, and softball teams, spoke winningly as well. “My teammates,” she said at one point, “passed me the ball and I passed the ball to them and that’s what it’s about.”

January 7, 1988

    Kenny Wood, East Hampton’s 6-foot-4 1/2-inch junior center, who has averaged 31.3 points per game since the season began, and 35.0 in the past five games, during which he has been virtually unstoppable, tied the school’s single-game scoring record, set by Bill Myrick in 1968, as he tallied 40 points in Saturday’s game with Alexander Hamilton, which was played as part of a doubleheader at Manhasset High School. Even so, East Hampton wound up losing in the final seconds, 65-62.

January 14, 1988

    The Bridgehampton High School boys basketball team was, according to its coach, John Niles, “almost destroyed” Monday when Niles was notified that five players, three of them starters, had been declared academically ineligible.

    In the case of a course failure, the school’s policy provides a three-week probationary period at the end of which the failure or failures must be rectified. One-third of the upper-grade student body was said to be affected. The ineligibilities were announced on Dec. 23, just before the Christmas break.

    The probationary period “only included four school days,” said Coach Niles. “How can kids be expected to seek help from teachers, who may be away or otherwise occupied, during vacations? Last year, when Kenny Ross was the superintendent, and the same policy was in effect, vacation time didn’t count as part of the probationary period. Now it does.”

    The players now ineligible will have three more weeks (until Jan. 29), during which they cannot compete, to rectify the failing grades.

    Recently, Pierson High School had been the focus of controversy concerning its academic eligibility policy, which includes a weekly review and a one-week probationary period. Pierson’s coach, John Bertang, complained strenuously of the school’s policy in mid-December after being notified that four members of his squad — none of them starters — were academically ineligible. At the time, he suggested a revision in light of apparently more flexible eligibility policies at neighboring schools.

    Ed Petrie Sr., the East Hampton High School varsity boys basketball coach, retired from teaching as of Jan. 1, although he said he will continue to coach basketball here “on a year-to-year basis.”

January 21, 1988

    The Bridgehampton High School basketball team, as the result of a move that both surprised and greatly relieved its coach, John Niles, was reconstituted Friday as the five players who had been declared academically ineligible on Jan. 11 pending a review at the end of the month were reinstated by the district superintendent, Menzer Doud.

    “Just in time to go out and lose another one,” Niles said, wryly, in noting that the five players in question had not practiced for a week.

January 28, 1988

    The action at Friday’s basketball game between Bridgehampton and East Hampton in the Beehive, as Bridgehampton’s gym has come to be known, was nonstop, and all the more intense given the Bees’ tiny court and an animated standing-room-only crowd of 300. Admission was only granted ticketholders to keep within the fire safety limits. “Otherwise,” said Bridgehampton’s coach, John Niles, “we would have had 600 there.”