A rarity occurred last Thursday at Indian Island Park in Riverhead — both the East Hampton boys and girls cross-country teams won.

    The boys, vying against Sayville and Westhampton Beach, which had recently trounced them at the Peconic County Invitational, edged the Hurricanes 27-28, and went toe-to-toe with Sayville, which wound up a 26-29 winner. The girls meanwhile defeated Elwood-John Glenn 20-29.

    Kevin Barry, the boys’ coach, said afterward that this year’s team, which boasts three freshmen who have hit the ground running, reminds him of his 2000 team, a precursor to his Long Island championship teams of 2001 and ’02.

    He has 22 on the squad, only four of them returnees. One of those, Adam Cebulski, a junior, set a school record on the Indian Island course that day, spurred on by Westhampton’s Graham Brown and Sayville’s Kiernan Harrison.  The three came out of the woods together and raced three abreast over the final yards to the finish line. Brown, whose mother, Laura, is a top age-group runner on the East End, and Harrison crossed the line together, in 17:16, with Cebulski just one tick behind.

    “It was a great finish,” said Barry, who added that Cebulski’s 17:17 had bettered Chris Reich’s 17:23 which he ran at Indian Island in 2003. Reich is now East Hampton’s winter and spring track coach.

    East Hampton’s second finisher was Erik Engstrom, one of the aforementioned freshmen, in 18:25.  He was fourth over all. Thomas Brierley, a junior, who has been bothered lately by shin splints, nevertheless ran a personal-record 18:52 in finishing sixth. East Hampton’s other two scorers were freshmen: Jackson Rafferty, in 18:56, and — “the biggest surprise,” according to Barry — T.J. Paradiso, in 19:16.

    All of his runners had “P.R.’d,” (set personal records), that day, the coach said. “On average, they dropped a minute from the meet with John Glenn of two weeks before. T.J. ran a 20:30 in that meet with Glenn.”

    Sayville’s places, then, were first, third, fifth, eighth, and ninth, while East Hampton’s were second, fourth, sixth, seventh, and 10th.

    Versus Westhampton’s runners East Hampton finished second, fourth, sixth, seventh, and eighth while the Hurricanes garnered first, third, fifth, ninth, and 10th.

     “It was nice what Adam did, but our last three scorers made the difference,” said Barry.

    Westhampton, as aforesaid, had trounced the Bonac boys at the recent Peconic Invitational, but that was owing to the fact that the three freshmen phenoms — Engstrom, Rafferty, and Paradiso — had swept the freshman race that day with Engstrom covering the 1.5-mile course in 8:35 (a course record), followed by Rafferty, in 8:53, and Paradiso, in 9:00.

    Going into Tuesday’s meet with Miller Place at Sunken Meadow State Park, Barry’s team was 2-1. “We haven’t been there this year,” Barry said during a telephone conversation Sunday, “and Miller Place has raced there several times. Still, I think we can win, and if we do and if we go on to beat Rocky Point, which I think we can, we’ll be running against Harborfields at the end of the month for the title.”

    “Harborfields,” he added, “is the defending county co-champion with Shoreham-Wading River.”

    Whatever this fall’s outcome, Barry said, “These guys are going to put a banner up on the wall pretty soon.”

    Not only were his charges talented, “but they have good chemistry too.”

    It was evident as those who had finished cheered on East Hampton’s last runner, Anton Albukrek (also a freshman), who had made a wrong turn in the woods, “adding about a half-mile to the course,” according to his coach. He’s got a new nickname now, ‘Wrong Way’ Albukrek.”

Thursday, October 11

GOLF, Pierson vs. East Hampton, South Fork Country Club, Amagansett, 4 p.m.

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

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

BOYS VOLLEYBALL, East Hampton at Westhampton Beach, 4:30 p.m.

CROSS-COUNTRY, East Hampton boys and girls at invitational meet, Indian Island County Park, Riverhead, 4:30 p.m.

Friday, October 12

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

GIRLS SWIMMING, East Hampton at West Babylon, 4:30 p.m.

Saturday, October 13

CROSS-COUNTRY, East Hampton boys and girls at invitational meet, Van Cortlandt Park, the Bronx, 9 a.m.

GIRLS VOLLEYBALL, East Hampton at Rocky Point, 10:30 a.m.

FIELD HOCKEY, East Hampton at Port Jefferson, noon.

FOOTBALL, Port Jefferson at East Hampton, 2 p.m.

GIRLS SOCCER, East Hampton at Rocky Point, 7 p.m.

Monday, October 15

FIELD HOCKEY, East Hampton at Riverhead, 4:30 p.m.

Tuesday, October 16

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

BOYS CROSS-COUNTRY, East Hampton vs. Harborfields, Sunken Meadow State Park, Kings Park, 4:30 p.m.

GIRLS CROSS-COUNTRY, East Hampton vs. Miller Place, Sunken Meadow State Park, Kings Park, 4:30 p.m.

GOLF, Southampton vs. East Hampton, South Fork Country Club, Amagansett, 4 p.m.

BOYS VOLLEYBALL, East Hampton at Shoreham-Wading River, 5 p.m.

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

GIRLS SOCCER, East Hampton at Harborfields, 4:30 p.m.

Wednesday, October 17

GIRLS SOCCER, East Hampton at Eastport-South Manor, 4:30 p.m.

GIRLS SWIMMING, East Hampton at West Islip, 4:30 p.m.

    As of Tuesday morning, standings posted on Section XI’s Web site showed East Hampton High’s boys soccer and girls swimming teams in first place in league competition, with boys and girls volleyball and girls cross-country in runner-up positions.

    The golf team, which has been a perennial champion over the greater part of the past decade, is not faring as well match-wise as in the past, though Claude Beudert, the team’s longtime coach, said that “it’s been a really gratifying year coaching-wise. This is a young team, and we began the year just hoping to compete. During the course of the season the kids have gotten so much better.”

    “Southampton is very good — the fact that they beat Pierson on Pierson’s course shows how good they are.”

    The Bonackers played at Southampton this past week, and lost 8.5-.5, though the individual matches were competitive, the coach said. The Mariners, led by Scott Ricca, shot 184 over all — a course record as far as Beudert knew — which worked out to a 38.4-stroke average. The 9-hole par at Southampton is 34.

    At one, Ricca bested East Hampton’s senior number-one, Ian Lynch, 35-39; at two, Bonac’s number-two, Stephen King, who is a freshman, lost 38-43 to Matt Kreymborg. Evan Scheuck, Southampton’s number-three, parred in his match with Andrew Winthrop, who shot a 43.

    At four, Clinton Oakley and Matt Griffiths, an East Hampton junior, halved, with each at 38, and at five, Eddie McLaughlin shot a 39 to Josue Palacio’s 44.

    “If Southampton beats Pierson at their place, they’ll win the league, with one or no losses,” Beudert said. “If Pierson beats Southampton, we could tie for first if we beat Southampton at our place, which I think we can. In any case, it’s out of our hands.”

    Girls cross-country came through last week, defeating Westhampton Beach 26-30 in Riverhead. Diane O’Donnell, the coach, said, “It was a great performance. We had talked about it and had told the girls it was within their reach, and that it would come down to who wanted to win.”

    Dana Cebulski, East Hampton’s number-one, won in 20 minutes and 13 seconds. Westhampton took second and third, but then Bonac’s pack came into play: Jackie Messemer placed fourth in 22:33, her best time at Indian Island so far; Devon Brown placed sixth, in 22:58; Emma Newburger placed seventh, in 23:10, and Jamie Staubitser, East Hampton’s last runner to be scored, placed eighth, in 23:12.

    “Our middle guys made the difference,” said O’Donnell, “but everybody did well.”

    “It’s been a long time since we won two meets in a row,” she said, with a laugh.

    There may be some good news for cross-country fans here next fall inasmuch as Section XI is expected to certify a 2.7-mile course that Kevin Barry, the boys coach, and O’Donnell have laid out at Cedar Point County Park. “We’ve been working on [returning meets to Cedar Point] for three years,” said O’Donnell. “At first the county wanted to centralize everything, but more and more schools are getting to hold meets now on home courses. I think 1990 was the last year we had some home meets.”

    The boys and girls teams, which normally would run at Brown University this weekend, are going instead to Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx for a regional invitational there.

    “The boys team is really young,” said O’Donnell, who added that that team had come up just a couple of points short in a meet with Miller Place that Barry had thought his charges might win.

    As of Tuesday, the girls were 2-1 in league competition, tied for second place among the six teams, and the 2-2 boys were fourth among seven teams in their league.

    Girls tennis, coached by Michelle Kennedy, has been competitive this season. Before Friday’s match here with Shoreham-Wading River (which East Hampton won 7-0), Kennedy said, “We’ve had a number of close ones. The first time with Mercy we lost 4-3, the second time we won 4-3. We lost 4-3 to Westhampton, and we lost 4-3 to Ross,” the ninth-ranked team on Long Island as of Tuesday.

    East Hampton’s number-one, Abby Okin, a ninth grader, had as of that day lost only one match, to Mercy’s Cassidy Lessard — a three-setter. She was to avenge herself on Lessard in a subsequent match, however, winning 7-5 in the third.

    Okin was to have played Aimee Manfredo, Shoreham’s all-state player, on Friday, but Manfredo didn’t make the trip.

    Kennedy said the top five from leagues one, three, five, and seven will make the playoffs. The top two from leagues four, six, and eight will go, she said.

    Carly Grossman, a junior, is playing number-two for East Hampton; Sydney Sanicola, a senior, is three, and Julia Talasko, a junior, is four.

    At first doubles are Gillian Neubert and Danni Dunphy, both juniors. Madison Aldrich, a sophomore, and Cece Combemale, a Pierson ninth grader, play at two, and Sarah Becker and Margaux Eckert, both seniors, are the third team.

    Ricki Slater, a senior who had played first doubles, and Phoebe Gianis, another senior, who played third singles, are sidelined by injuries.

    Others on the squad, Kennedy said, are Cosima Schelfhout, a junior, Melanie Schwagerl, a junior, Sabrina Re, a ninth grader, Maxine DeHavenon, a sophomore, Isabella Facendola, a senior, and Evan Johnson, a freshman.

    John McGeehan, the girls swimming team’s coach, was quite pleased to hear his team was in first place as of Tuesday.

    “We did lose some strong swimmers to graduation, so I thought this year we might not be quite as strong, but I have the largest team I ever have had — 21 girls, a couple of whom have never swum competitively before.”

    East Hampton defeated Hauppauge at the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter pool Friday, and was to have had a meet here with Huntington Tuesday.

    Marina Preiss, a junior all-state swimmer, in the 50 and 100-yard freestyle races, and Lydia Florio, a senior, who has come close to doing a county-qualifying time in the breaststroke, are leading the team, which includes, among other competitive swimmers, Laura Gundersen, a senior, Lindsey Stevens, a junior, Shannon Ryan, a junior, and Marikate Ryan, an eighth grader.

    And last, but not least, field hockey. Becky Schwartz, the team’s coach, was happy to report during halftime of Saturday’s football game that her charges had that morning shut out William Floyd 4-0 behind Sophia DePasquale’s “second or third hat trick of the season.” Casey Waleko, a junior, as is DePasquale, also had a goal that day. Leanella Acevedo, the sophomore goalie, “only touched the ball five times,” Schwartz added.

    The win improved East Hampton to 5-4 in league play. The top six, said Schwartz, are to go to the playoffs.

   Two platform tennis courts were officially opened at the East Hampton Indoor-Outdoor Tennis Club this past weekend with well-attended clinics put on by Marco Grangeiro, the New York Athletic Club’s paddle director in Pelham, and Marie Minnick of East Hampton, who teaches the increasingly popular racket sport at four clubs on the South Fork.

    Platform tennis, or “paddle,” as it is known  colloquially, was last written about on the sports pages of this newspaper in March of 1978. That story, by Steve Bromley Jr., this writer’s predecessor as The Star’s sportswriter, was headlined “The Winter Game.”

    “It remains a winter game basically,” said Scott Rubenstein, E.H.I.T.’s managing partner. “For paddle it’s better if it’s 25 degrees out than 50.” Though, since the courts (which have lights) were finished a month or two ago, they’ve been getting quite a bit of play no matter what the weather.

    “I got the idea,” said Rubenstein, when questioned following Sunday morning’s clinic, “when I heard our members were no longer able to play at the clubs here that had courts. Seven years ago, things opened up and everybody was playing. Then, about three years ago, our members, who had been playing as guests, were asked to leave. That’s when I thought it would be nice to have our own courts and to open them up to the public. . . . I’m a strong believer that there should be more recreation here for everyone of all ages.”

    Paddle is a doubles serve-and-volley game, though the lob, Grangeiro stressed, is “the most aggressive stroke.”

    “Ninety-five percent of the time,” said Minnick, who is the fourth-ranked mixed over-60s player in the country and the reigning over-50 Long Island champion, “the last one to hit the ball loses the point.”

    The point being that in paddle, finesse and strategy trump power. As in squash, the court (four of them can fit into one tennis court, but are otherwise the same save that the net is two inches shorter) is bounded on all four sides — by chicken wire in platform tennis’s case, rather than laminated wood as is the case with squash. Which means that theoretically, a player skilled at playing the spongy ball off the wires can send up lobs all day.

    While the lob is paddle’s most aggressive shot, the first volley, the clinic-givers said, is the most important. That volley, Grangeiro and Minnick said, ought to be hit with the paddle squarely in front of one’s chest with knees bent  and with the feet square to the net. No lunging, no stabbing. Simply block it back.

    Servers in paddle get only one chance, which concentrates the mind. Just get the ball in, Minnick and Grangeiro said, and follow the ball to the net as quickly as you can, taking up a position straddling the T with your partner closer to the net at your left or right, depending on the court — ad or deuce — into which you served.

    This writer, a doubles tennis player these days who last picked up a platform tennis racket 30 or so years ago, was reminded during the clinic that the two games are, indeed, somewhat different. One needs to be more patient in paddle, for one thing, for it’s likely the rallies — assuming everyone can play the ball off the wires pretty well — will be longer. Aside from the first volley, all drives, lobs, overheads, and wire shots are to be hit from a sideways position. Backhand overheads are to be eschewed: only forehand overheads should be hit. Serve returners should favor their stronger stroke, and thus should, facing sideways and with their back toward a side screen, await the serve with one foot in the alley and one foot just beyond the baseline.

    Moreover, in paddle you can’t get away with wristy shots, and, because the court is so much narrower, there are fewer angles to be exploited. In fact, partners can pretty much control the net, the clinic-givers said, by leaving the third of it diagonally opposite the striker open.

    When lobbing, Minnick asked us to think that we were holding a frying pan in front of us, and to follow through smoothly into a Statue of Liberty pose — again, standing sideways, with the lead shoulder pointing toward where one wants the ball to go. “If I have a 6-4 partner,” the 5-foot-3 Minnick said, “you’ll want to lob over me.”

    Rubenstein said that the club’s tennis members can play paddle for $300 seven days a week year-round, until 11 or so at night. For non-members that fee will be $500. 

    “There will be no court fees,” he said, “and we’ll help set up games, the same way we do in tennis.”

    Moreover, there will be weekday paddle memberships costing $250 for E.H.I.T. members and $350 for non-members.

    A warming hut between the courts, under which there are heaters to melt ice and snow, will have a microwave, toaster, refrigerator, hot chocolate, and coffee.

    “It looks like there’s a lot of interest — it’s exciting,” said Rubenstein, who added that “the last time I played paddle was in 1978 with the late Sandy Ingraham. We played at the East Hampton Tennis Club. I was pretty confident, for I was good at tennis, table tennis, and racquetball.  He trounced me — I didn’t win a point.”

    “That was the last time I played,” he said with a smile, “though I may do it again.”

   The East Hampton High School boys soccer team clinched a county Class A playoff berth with Friday’s 5-1 win here over Mount Sinai, though while that game went smoothly, the team two days before spotted Bayport-Blue Point to a 2-0 lead before coming back to win in overtime.

    Rich King, East Hampton’s coach, said that had his charges lost to Bayport-Blue Point, “it would have been uncharted territory. We were coming off a loss to Amityville, and a loss to Bayport would have made it two in a row. Frankly, I don’t remember the last time we’ve lost two in a row in the past three years.”

    East Hampton is the defending county Class A champion, and while it lost a lot of firepower with the graduation of Mario Olaya and Milton Farez last June, their successors, among them Donte Donegal, Esteban Valverde, Nick West, and J.C. Barrientos, are very worthy.

    In clinching a playoff berth “we accomplished our first goal,” said King. “Our next is to repeat as the league champion [East Hampton, with a 6-1 record, was in first place as of Monday] and to get the highest possible seed. The only other team to have qualified so far is Sayville [the team East Hampton defeated in last year’s final]. This week, two or three more will qualify, and by the end of next week we should know all the teams. There are usually eight or nine.”

    King confessed that he was “pretty nervous” after the Bonackers had spotted Bayport-Blue Point to a 2-0 lead in the first half of the game played here on Oct. 3. A counter that caught the attacking Bonackers flat-footed led to the Phantoms’ first one, and the second, which came soon after, ascended into the upper right corner of the goal from the foot of a forward who’d beaten his defender to a teammate’s cross across the goal mouth.

    Nick Quiroz got East Hampton on the board before the first half ended with a nifty ground-hugger that beat Bayport’s diving goalie at the near post.

    “That goal was huge, perhaps our biggest of the season so far,” said King. “It was a momentum changer.”

    It’s not that the Bonackers played poorly in the first half, “we played well, but we were unlucky,” said King. “Three of our shots went off the posts. With a little bit of luck, we could have been up 4 or 5-1 going into the break.”

    East Hampton dominated play in the second half. Fourteen minutes into the 40-minute period, Denis Espana rocketed what King said might be the most beautiful goal he’s seen in high school soccer into the upper left corner of Bayport’s nets from about 25 yards out. Espana’s goal evened things at 2-2.

    With seven minutes to play in regulation, West was tripped at the edge of the penalty area. His free kick, which went just wide of the left post, was kept in play by Alvaro Aguilar, but the Bonackers couldn’t cash in.

    With five minutes to go, a header by Espana went just wide.

    And so the game went into overtime as darkness was falling — two 10-minute periods. The first team to score would win.

    That team, thanks to J.C. Barrientos’s full-sprint volley from the right side with about two and a half minutes gone, was East Hampton.

    Later, Emma Barrientos, the mother of East Hampton’s senior center midfielder,  said she came to realize it was her son who had made the goal “when I saw his [bright yellow] shoes.”

    The Bonackers, who often have been late starters this fall, lost no time on Friday, scoring two goals within the first several minutes — the first by Valverde, assisted by Donegal, who had faked out defenders with some fancy footwork near the endline, and the second by Cristian Barrientos, who’d received a pass from West.

    Mount Sinai got one back before the half. Closure was provided in the second half by Donegal (two goals) and West, on a free kick from 20 yards out.

    The Bonackers are to play Miller Place, in second place as of Monday, tomorrow. “That will be a big one for us,” said King.

    All week leading up to Saturday’s homecoming football game with Southampton, the winner of which would take home the handsome silver Hampton Cup that was introduced into the rivalry by Bridgehampton National Bank in 1982, East Hampton High’s coaches fed the emotional fires, and came the big night, the Bonackers scorched their ancient foes 42-7 before a full house under the lights.

    It was only the 14th time in the 89-year span of the rivalry — one of the Island’s oldest — that an East Hampton team had defeated its Southampton counterpart. Leroy DeBoard, a 1951 graduate who had earlier that day been inducted as a member of the first class of East Hampton High School’s Hall of Fame, recalled that his team’s 6-0 win over Southampton in 1949 had been only the third for East Hampton since the rivalry began in 1923.

    East Hampton’s head coach, Bill Barbour Jr., and one of his assistants, Jason Menu, had a similar tale to tell their charges, to wit, that they had been teammates when East Hampton last won the Cup, in 1987 — 25 years ago.

    So, given that history, the community spirit attending homecomings, and the inaugural Hall of Fame class’s celebrations that day, there was plenty of fuel for the fire.

    The next day, when a knowledgeable observer remarked that Southampton’s eleven was sorely wanting, and that he’d been hoping for a better game, the sentiment was dismissed by a Bonac partisan who was still reveling in the rout.

    From the start, the Bonackers cut through the Mariners like warm butter, scoring on their first three possessions, capped by the junior quarterback Cortland Heneveld’s 13-yard keeper, a 15-yard third-down pass by him to Pete Vaziri, and by an 11-yard touchdown pass to John Pizzo, who played on East Hampton’s championship golf team last fall.

    And, more wonderful to tell, Max Lerner, East Hampton’s sophomore kicker, bisected the goalposts on all three point-after attempts.

    “I don’t remember the last time we led 21-0 before the first quarter was over,” said Cid Cerchiai, a longtime volunteer assistant.

    Following all the tumult and the shouting, Dave Fioriello, after letting this writer into the locked press booth so he could extract Southampton’s lineup from the wastebasket, said he couldn’t remember a homecoming win in the past decade, nor could he remember the last time a Bonac team cashed in the opening kickoff.

    The Mariners got one back early in the second quarter, though because the scoreboard was on the fritz — the result of deferred maintenance on the school board’s part — it was hard to keep track of the passage of time. Before the break, East Hampton added another score, spanning 75 yards in two plays — a 45-yard gain by Heneveld on a keeper and a 30-yard pitch to Pizzo.

    You could see in the visitors’ eyes as they trudged off to the locker room at halftime that they were a beaten team.

    A 43-yard touchdown run up the middle by Andre Cherrington in the third quarter and an 18-yard TD by Danny Barros in the fourth were yet to come, after which the joyous Bonackers swept across the field with the Hampton Cup hoisted high, to the delight of their fans.

    Barbour, whose postgame demeanor has often been sober in recent years, was as ebullient as he’s been since taking over the coaching reins six years ago.

    He told his players in the postgame huddle that now they knew what could come from hard work, that every single one of them had contributed to the win, that they’d done everything that had been asked of them, and that they deserved to be proud of themselves. Heady moments like the one they were relishing didn’t come along very often in life, the coach said.

    Heneveld, Cherrington, Vaziri, Pizzo, Jamie Wolf (who seemed to be everywhere on defense), Lerner, Chris Milia, the young offensive line . . . the kids on the bench — everyone came in for Barbour kudos afterward.

    You play for these moments, he said in talking with sportswriters. Football was more than a game — it was about teammates and parents and community-building. And playing for the Hampton Cup was, he said, indeed special. “We won it in ’85, lost it in ’86, won it in ’87, and had to give it back in ’88, the year I was a captain. . . . It was awesome, even though sometimes it was awful!”

Thursday, October 4

GIRLS VOLLEYBALL, East Hampton at Islip, 5 p.m.

GIRLS SOCCER, East Hampton at Islip, 4:30 p.m.

GOLF, East Hampton at Southampton, 4p.m.

FIELD HOCKEY, East Hampton at Southampton, 4:30 p.m.

Friday, October 5

GIRLS TENNIS, Shoreham at East Hampton, 4 p.m.

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

Saturday, October 6

BOYS CROSS-COUNTRY, East Hampton vs. St. Anthony’s, Sunken Meadow, 9:30 a.m.

GIRLS CROSS-COUNTRY, East Hampton vs. St. Anthony’s, Sunken Meadow, 9:30 a.m.

BOYS VOLLEYBALL, East Hampton at Center Moriches, 2 p.m.

FOOTBALL, Mount Sinai at East Hampton, 2 p.m.

FIELD HOCKEY, East Hampton at William Floyd, 2 p.m.

Tuesday, October 9

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

GIRLS CROSS-COUNTRY, Shoreham-Wading River vs. East Hampton, Indian Island, Riverhead, 4:30 p.m.

BOYS CROSS-COUNTRY, East Hampton vs. Rocky Point, Sunken Meadow, 4:30 p.m.

GOLF, East Hampton at Westhampton Beach, 4 p.m.

BOYS VOLLEYBALL, East Hampton at Sayville, 4:30 p.m.

GIRLS TENNIS, East Hampton at William Floyd 4 p.m

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

Wednesday, October 10

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

   While John Glenn’s Sarah Hardie finished first in last Thursday’s girls cross-country race at Indian Island County Park in Riverhead, East Hampton’s team won, by a score of 20-29.

    Dana Cebulski, a sophomore who became the first East Hampton girl to vie in a state cross-country meet last fall, was the runner-up to Hardie, in 20 minutes and 46 seconds, 24 seconds  behind the winner.

    Then came East Hampton’s pack — Jamie Staubitser, in 23:45, Emma Newburger, in 23:56, Jackie Messemer, in 24:06, and Merissah Gilbert, in 24:18.

    “Dana ran a good race,” East Hampton’s coach, Diane O’Donnell, said afterward. “Sarah’s been racing a lot, whereas Dana hasn’t. She’s where she should be in her training cycle — she’ll be improving in every race from here on in.”

    It was the first win for Bonac’s girls this season. “We beat Glenn last year too, so I told the girls it was a must-win,” said the coach, who added that “we’ve got a solid group this year. It would be even more solid if we had Jennie DiSunno [a senior who’s rehabbing an Achilles tendon injury].”

    O’Donnell had been hoping to have DiSunno, her number-two runner, for Tuesday’s meet with Westhampton, “but it doesn’t look as if we will,” she said during a conversation Monday. “With Jennie, we would stand a good chance of beating them.”

    The East Hampton High School football team fell back to earth here Saturday as Shoreham-Wading River, whose Tyler Anderson broke countless tackles in rushing for 328 yards and five touchdowns, won 42-14.

    Anderson, a tall back who averaged almost 30 yards per carry, invariably ran right up the middle, after having made a stutter step, leaving Bonac fans to cry out futilely in his wake, “Stop him! Stop him!”

    Later, when asked how many yards Anderson had gained, a Shoreham coach said, “A million.”

    Anderson got Shoreham on the board with a 47-yard dash into the end zone early in the first quarter, after which the Bonackers launched a drive of their own, getting down to a fourth-and-2 on Shoreham’s 16 before Andre Cherrington was stopped one yard shy of a first down.

    Two downs later, Anderson was off to the races again — a 79-yard carry that left Bill Barbour Jr., East Hampton’s coach, fuming.

    Pete Vaziri most likely would have broken the subsequent kickoff return had he not stumbled at the 50. The offense sputtered there, however, and the first period ended with the Bonackers trailing 14-0.

    By the half it was 35-7, East Hampton’s lone bright spot being the quarterback Cort Heneveld’s pitch to Vaziri, who, from 7 yards out, dived with the ball into the end zone.

    That drive began with a terrific kickoff runback by Johnny Pizzo — let’s hear it again for special teams — to Shoreham’s 28.

    A 22-yard TD run by Anderson and a 29-yard score by Avery Friedman preceded Vaziri’s dash, and an 80-yard unmolested romp by Anderson was to follow before the break.

    Anderson scored his fifth touchdown of the day when the third quarter opened, advancing through flailing arms from Shoreham’s 35 to Bonac’s end zone 65 yards away, after which he returned in triumph to the visitors’ bench for the remainder of the game.

    With the outcome long since assured, Shoreham played its subs in the second half.

    Max Lerner, East Hampton’s sophomore kicker, who took a turn at the quarterback position near game’s end, rewarded the fans who stayed — and perplexed his coaches — when, rather than punt from East Hampton’s 20, as instructed, he took off, zigging and zagging his way into the visitors’ end zone 80 yards away. He then split the uprights for the 42-14 final.

    Afterward, Barbour said, “This game was lost last winter when all of their kids were in the weight room and a handful of ours were. There were no surprises today, there was nothing fancy. We knew what they’d do, and we were in position, but their front line dominated our front line.”

    “We knew what was coming: ‘Blast and Ice’ to the strong side, ‘Blast and Ice’ to the weak side.”

    “It’s bad,” he said, in reply to a question, “when the return team is your highlight. At least we know we don’t have to work a lot with special teams.”

    Undefeated Mount Sinai is to play here Saturday. Recalling that his 2008 team, then 1-5, had toppled undefeated Harborfields in an away game, Barbour said, “It’s high school football — stranger things have happened.”

   Nic Roldan, who summers in Water Mill and has played with teams contesting cups at the Bridgehampton Polo Club for years, and Tommy Biddle, another Bridgehampton veteran who once quarterbacked the University of South Carolina’s football team, are to square off in the featured match at the Scottsdale, Ariz., polo championships on Oct. 20.

   Biddle will captain the Hamptons team, and Roldan will captain the Los Angeles-based Bel Air team.

   Also on the bill will be a match pitting Harvard University versus Work to Ride, of West Philadelphia, which in 2011, with Kareem and Daymar Rosser and Brandon Rease, became the first African-American team to win the national interscholastic championship.