Ryan Pilla, “the Car Doctor,” won both ends of a national sports car doubleheader at Watkins Glen over the course of a recent weekend, setting the track’s speed record for Mazdas in the process.

    “I’ve been racing all summer long, and I’ve always been in the top five,” Pilla said on his return, “though this is my biggest achievement — the Sports Car Club of America’s Mazda series has been contested since 1990, almost 23 years.”

    Watkins Glen, he said in answer to a question, was “similar to the old Bridgehampton track, though there’s significant elevation, it being upstate.”

    The opener, said Pilla, was “on the long [3.4-mile] track. I had the pole position; there were 60 entries in the field. I went from first to third to fifth and back to second with two minutes left in the 40-minute race. I was able to outbrake the car that was in first going into a high-speed turn at about 135 miles per hour, and was able to take the lead again with two laps remaining and took the checkered flag.”

    Pilla and his Car Doctor Motorsports crew, which had built “a brand new” Mazda for the weekend, then went to work preparing the car for the second race the following day over the short (2.451-mile) course. “This track,” said Pilla, “is known as the Nascar track because Nascar runs its sprint series races on it. I qualified second out of 60 and was thus one position shy of the pole.”

    “My goal was to be in the top five,” he continued, “but I moved into first place after the third lap and stayed in first place for the entire race.”

    “As the front pack reached the 35th minute of the 40-minute race, lap traffic started to play an interesting role. We had to keep our composure vis-a-vis each other while trying to get past the lap traffic at the same time. The top three were all within a car length of each other, with fourth through eighth not far behind. It was anyone’s race. . . . It was a door, nose, to tail photo finish. Coming out of the last turn before the final straightaway, I was able to hold on and cross the finish line a half-car length ahead of the second-place guy, who almost, through drafting, was able to slingshot by me. What a race!”

    “The spectators said it was one of the best racing events they’d seen in years. But it wasn’t over for me yet: I had to go to the scales to make sure that my car was legal, which it was. Then I learned from the chief steward that I had turned a new track record. . . . It doesn’t get any better than this.”

   The brother and sister act of Adam and Dana Cebulski was on display Labor Day morning as each of them won first-place medals in the Great Bonac Footrace’s 5K.

    Adam, a 17-year-old junior at East Hampton High School, won running away in 18 minutes and 10 seconds. He’d been hoping for a 17:30 or a 17:45, but was nevertheless happy, knowing that he had run hard.

    Dana, the first Bonac girls cross-country runner ever to make the state meet, was the female winner in 21:08. She credited “running the hills” at a recent camp in Liberty, N.Y., with improving her fitness.

    “That’s all we did,” said Adam, who also went to the camp, which was overseen by Bart Sessa, Syosset’s coach.

    “They came back crying,” said the Cebulskis’ mother, Nidia, “not because they were overworked, but because they’d made so many friends there.”

    The 10K winners that morning were Peter Heinz, 25, of New York City, in 38:16, and Heather Wright, 39, of Westhampton Beach, in 40:10. The runner-up to Wright was Laura Brown, 45, of East Hampton. Sharon McCobb, 49, of East Hampton, was fourth, and Heather Caputo, 35, of East Hampton, was sixth.

    McCobb, Caputo, and Paul Maidment, 61, also of East Hampton, won their age groups, as did Christopher Tracey, 24, Robin Streck, 38, Barbara Tracey, 54, and Harriet Oster, 70, in the 5K.

    “It was my second 10K here, I did the 5K last year,” said Heinz. Asked how he’d done, Heinz said, “Not too great.” The eventual second and third-place finishers, Peter Tufaro, 30, and Garreth Hedgson, 41, both of New York City, had given him trouble in the beginning, he said, but he began to pull away at the third mile.

    Getting back to East Hampton High cross-country, both Diane O’Donnell, the girls coach, and Kevin Barry, who coaches the boys (and who placed sixth in the 10K, in 42:58) are excited about the coming season.

    “I don’t know how the wins and losses will go, but these guys will qualify for the county championships,” said Barry, who, in addition to Adam Cebulski, has Thomas Brierley, Alex Osborne, and Jack Link, all juniors, John Grogan, the senior captain, Donya Davis, also a senior, Paul King, a sophomore, and Thomas Papa, a sophomore, returning, and a group of gung-ho freshmen — Erik Engstrom, Jackson Rafferty, Leo Panish, Will Hamilton, and T.J. Paradiso.

    Engstrom placed third in the 5K, nosed out by Steve Cuomo, 29, whose father, Steve Sr., brought out many special-needs runners who belong to his Rolling Thunder Running Club.

    Steve Cuomo’s runner-up time was 18:55, Engstrom, who’s 14, ran the 3.1-mile course in 18:56. Another Rolling Thunder runner, Marcus Sanders, 42, was fourth, in 19:20.

    “I don’t know who my top seven are yet,” said Barry. “I’ve never had this many freshmen capable of making such an impact. As the season goes on, four or five of our top seven could be ninth graders. They’re very coachable and they’ll go far.”

    It’s pretty much the same for O’Donnell, who, as has been the case with Barry, is, after a rather long hiatus, reaping the rewards of a resurgence of interest in running here. There was not only a strong showing Monday among the high school runners, but also of middle schoolers.

    “In our meets last year,” said O’Donnell, “we’d always get one and two with Ashley [West, now at Susquehanna University] and Dana, but then there’d be a big gap. It wasn’t until the middle of the season that our middle-of-the-pack runners began to realize that in order to score we needed to displace our opponents’ packs. They’ve got it now — they know what they have to do.”

    Besides Dana Cebulski, O’Donnell has among her returnees Jennie DiSunno, a senior, Lena Vergnes, a senior, Jackie Messemer, a sophomore, and Emma Newburger — “a solid top five.” Then there are three promising ninth graders, Devon Brown, Anna Hoffman, and Sheryl Hayes, to go with her middle-of-the-pack returnees — Brittany Rivkind, a junior, Jamie Staubitser, a senior, Tess Talmage, a senior, Julia DeSousa, a junior, and Marissa Gilbert, a sophomore.

    Gilbert is a recruit from track, a sprinter. “She’s been asking me when we start practicing for our event,” O’Donnell said with a smile. “I tell her, ‘This is our event, Marissa.’ ”

   The last line, as it were, of the Hampton Classic’s $250,000 Grand Prix was writ large insofar as about a third of the 35 horse-and-rider combinations were concerned.

    Eleven of them, by one count, came to grief at the 17-effort course’s final hurdle, a skinny vertical four short strides off a wide oxer that followed a double liverpool (a double jump under which small water trenches lay).

    Thus the riders, nearing the end of a course that WVVH-TV’s Peter Leone (who enjoyed a good week competition-wise) had called the toughest he’d seen at the Classic in five years, had to be both bold and cautious (though not too cautious) at almost the same time. And at the end they had to keep time in mind as well. Fourteen of the 35 entrants had time faults, which is to say they exceeded the 91 seconds the course’s Brazilian-born designer, Guilherme Jorge, had deemed sufficient.

    Later, Leone, whose “Show Jumping Clinic: Success Strategies for Equestrian Athletes” was on sale at the A.S.P.C.A. tent throughout the week, said, “There were other factors in play too: It was such a long, tough course that the horses were tired by that point; two, they went into that wide oxer off a short left uphill turn and the time allowed was so tight that the riders had to make that short turn even shorter. You had to ride into that spread with a lot of power — you had to squeeze your horse — and then you were faced with four short strides to that delicate, skinny vertical that you had to jump extra carefully.”

    The triple bar to a vertical to an oxer that spanned the length of the V.I.P. tent posed striding questions too, he said, as did the fifth fence, an oxer that “was relatively hidden behind the water jump. Normally, you can see jumps, but the riders approached this one off a relatively blind turn. Because of the time constraint they couldn’t go out to the left and get their horses’ eyes on it. They had only three strides at best, then — boom — there it is.”

    Kent Farrington, a frequent “bridesmaid” at the Grand Prix but never a winner — he lost to his friend McLain Ward by two-tenths of a second in last year’s jumpoff — prevailed this time, aboard Amalaya Investments’ Voyeur.

    Voyeur and he, the ninth to go, were the first in the field to go clean. Ward, who had won Friday’s qualifier on Antares F, his Olympic horse and the one he won the Grand Prix here on last year, was the first to go.

    It used to be that the winner of Friday’s qualifier class would get to go last in Sunday’s Grand Prix, “but because the Grand Prix is also a World Cup Qualifier, it’s an open draw,” said Steve Stephens, the show’s manager and one of its course designers. “From our standpoint, it would have been great to see McLain go last, but, as it was, he picked number-one out of the hat.”

    Ward, a two-time Olympic gold medalist and the Classic Grand Prix’s three-time defending champion who bestrides the show jumping world as Tiger Woods once dominated golf, was undoubtedly kicking himself after Antares F tipped over the final fence’s top rail after having been perfect theretofore.

    For a while, it looked as if this might be a jumpoff-less Grand Prix, but the Irish-born Shane Sweetnam and Spy Coast Farm’s Amaretto D’Arco, the 19th to go, went clean too, as did Molly Ashe-Cawley and Olivia Jack’s Carissimo, who were 32nd in the order.

    Farrington and Voyeur looped speedily and cleanly around the pared-down eight-obstacle jumpoff course in 47.53 seconds, leaving the top rail of the FTI Consulting wall shivering (though not falling) in their wake. Neither Sweetnam, who had a rail down at the aforementioned wide oxer (the sixth obstacle in the jumpoff) nor Ashe-Cawley and Carissimo (who, after having lost a shoe, slipped and plowed through the sixth jump) could match the winners.

Thursday, September 13

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

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

CROSS-COUNTRY, East Hampton boys and girls at invitational meet, Red Creek Park, Hampton Bays, 4 p.m.

Friday, September 14

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

GIRLS TENNIS, East Hampton at Shoreham-Wading River, 4 p.m.

FOOTBALL, East Hampton at Stony Brook, 7:30 p.m.

Saturday, September 15

GIRLS VOLLEYBALL, East Hampton at Smithtown West invitational tournament, 8:30 a.m.

GIRLS TENNIS, East Hampton at Ross School, noon.

BOYS SOCCER, East Hampton at Jericho, nonleague, 11 a.m.

Wednesday, September 19

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

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

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

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

BOYS SOCCER, East Hampton at Center Moriches, nonleague, 5:30 p.m.

August 6, 1987

    Bridgehampton High School’s sophomore wing, Bobby Hopson, and East Hampton’s junior center, Kenny Wood, were starters on the Long Island team that played in the Empire State Games at Syracuse last weekend.

    About 150 spectators watched as a Racquet Club of East Hampton pro, Frank Ackley, defeated Ken Trell, a member of the Green Hollow Tennis Club, 7-5, 6-2 in the finals of the senior men’s open tournament held Sunday at the Racquet Club.

August 13, 1987

    The Bridgehampton High School boys basketball team last week won the Brookhaven Town summer league playoff championship, for the second year in a row, by defeating Longwood in the final last Thursday, 71-70.

    A 3-point buzzer beater by Bill Richard as the first 20-minute half ended proved to be “the key,” according to the coach, John Niles. “That put us up 37-36; the second half was 34-34.”

    Bobby Hopson led the Bees’ scoring with 24 points, followed by Duane White, with 18, Richard, with 11, Corey Johnson, with 8, Kyle Jones, with 6, and Maurice Gholson, with 4.

    Mike Tramontano, six feet and 200 pounds of solid gentility and intelligence, by day an airplane mechanic and by 5:30 a body-building devotee who subscribes to the natural no-steroids approach, recently provided this writer with her first glimpse into what pumping iron is all about.

    . . . Among the body builders canvassed, regimes and goals don’t appear to be standardized, although year-round workouts, six days a week, seem to be the norm. Winters or non-competitive periods are generally spent building up, with the emphasis on a high-protein diet in order to gain muscle mass. Toward the competitive season, calories and especially fat intake is reduced in order to increase definition, known in the parlance as “getting ripped” or “cut-up.” And the last 24 hours prior to a contest, competitors concentrate on reducing water retention in order to maximize definition.      Bonnie Maslin        

August 20, 1987

    Paul Simon, the songwriter, who played left field for the Artists in the Artists-Writers Softball Game, was the consensus m.v.p. inasmuch as he went 4-for-5 at the plate, drove in three runs, played flawlessly in the field, and tagged out the Writers’ Mike Thomas in a sixth-inning rundown between second and third.

    “It’s the rich and famous versus the poor and obscure,” said Mike Landi as John Scanlon announced the Writers’ starting lineup, which included Peter Maas, Richard Reeves, George Plimpton, Ben Bradlee, Larry O’Donnell, Ed Tivnan, Ken Auletta, Jackie Leo, Avery Corman, and Norman Lear.

    The Artists started Sam Cohn on the mound, Charles Slackman, Victor Caglioti, Dan Welden, Jack Dowd, Dan Christensen, Simon, Dennis Lawrence, Ken Keegan, and Landi.

    Saturday’s Artists-Writers Softball Game was an hour late getting started because of a rare Herrick Park permit mixup.

    . . . While the sight of Ultimate disc and softball players using the park at the same time was a cheering one inasmuch as Herrick is rarely used to such an extent, the teams, whose playing areas overlapped, found themselves on a collision course.

    Batting practice was limited to infield grounders and soft flies, though a couple of times there were near beanings.

August 27, 1987

    The most exciting of last Saturday’s whaleboat races in Sag Harbor was won by a Sag Harbor Fire Department team comprising Beaver Early, Jimmy Remkus, Glenn Ficorilli, and Ed Burke Jr.

    . . . Just as Burke’s harpoon made its mark, a race official announced that an oar the crew had lost overboard earlier had to be retrieved to make the win legitimate. The crowd let out a loud moan.

    But these guys, having got that far, and still in the lead, weren’t about to give up. Ficorilli headed the boat back over to the wharf for the drifting oar, and, with the crowd cheering all the way, the boat made it to the beach victorious.

    . . .Over 16 Suffolk County fire departments had entered the competition, but still Sag Harbor came out on top.             

   A surf contest is a crap shoot in that it is dependent on ocean swells that in turn depend on distant storms formed by weather patterns controlled by sun spots, upper atmospheric winds, global warming, and ultimately by Kahuna, god of surf.

    Kahuna smiled at Ditch Plain Beach in Montauk on Sunday. Tropical storm Leslie had been inching north and east, hovering around Bermuda for days. Organizers of the annual Espo’s Summer Surf Classic, a contest sanctioned by the Eastern Surfing Association, stayed glued to their Magic Seaweed and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration sites hoping the arrival of Leslie’s swells would coincide with the date of the competition. They did.

    It was a south swell due to Leslie’s position relative to Montauk. On Sunday, Leslie’s long lines reached the rock reef at Ditch Plain to produce overhead waves with a perfect offshore wind to groom them.

    Sunday’s contest results are:

    Menehune (pronounced men-a-hunee) is Hawaiian for little people. Chase Lieder took first place in the menehune short board division. Brook Esposito and Ian Brightenbeck took second and third respectively.

    In the boys short board competition, Jared Bono, Joseph Graham, and Eric Perez finished one, two, three.

    Patrick Vita, Steven Cahn, and Brandon Gardner were the first, second, and third-place winners of the junior men’s shortboard surf-off.

    In the men’s shortboard contest, Jake Stiles took first place. Jonathan Cahn and Trevor Lecaros finished second and third.

    Craig Lieder of Montauk took top honors in the senior men’s shortboard contest with Mike Becker finishing right behind him, and Patrick Mahoney surfed his shortboard to a win in the grandmasters division.

    Every sport has its legends and Ed Fawess has certainly earned the title on Long Island as a surfer, as well as a surfboard shaper and glasser. He won first place in the legend competition for shortboard surfing.

    In the girls competition, Liz Kohler took first place, Maggie Purcell, second. Selena Moberly and Erin Kohler grabbed first and second places in junior women’s. Lorraine Costa, Liz Quinn, and Kim Romagnesi placed first, second, and third in the contest for senior women.

    In the longboard events, Jared Bono grabbed first place in the menehune contest, Brandon Gardner took first among the junior men, Craig Lieder finished first in the masters competition, and Fawess was again the top legend on his longboard. Erin Kohler returned with her longboard to take first place among the junior women, and Liz Quinn took first place in the senior women’s contest.

    In the “sponge” (bodyboard) contest, Chase Lieder took first with Tim Keynborg, and Patrick Maloney finishing second and third.

    Craig Lieder carved his standup paddleboard to the number one spot in the SUP competition. Mark Angillilo and Edgar Lituma finished second and third. 

   Alexander Peters and Peter Bennett, two regulars in the Ultimate flying disc competitions held on Friday nights at Herrick Park in East Hampton, took part in the Ultimate national championships in Blaine, Minn., over the Labor Day weekend.

   The two played on the Brooklyn team, one of 18 in the tournament from all over the country. “It’s one of the toughest tournaments in the world,” Peters said Monday. “It was great. We both played really well.”

Their team didn’t have a full complement of players, he reported. “We started out ranked in the middle of the pack, and that’s how we ended up.”

    East Hampton High School’s football team has nowhere to go but up, and this fall it presumably will.

    Last year, if you recall, the Bonackers, who were outnumbered, undersized, and outplayed by all their Division III opponents, went 0-8.

    In the second game of the season, with Kings Park, the starting senior quarterback, Ryan Joudeh, went down with a severe ankle sprain, and his sophomore backup, Cort Heneveld, and the team’s best defender, Dan Barros, were taken to the sidelines with concussions, a “first” in this writer’s memory. And so it went.

    But there was some not-so-bad news last February when East Hampton shed Pierson in football at the varsity level — at least temporarily — in order to move down from the black-and-blue Division III (where the team had compiled an 11-30 record in the past five years) to the somewhat less daunting Divison IV. East Hampton entered the season Friday ranked sixth, in the middle of the pack of the division’s 14 schools.

    Bill Barbour Jr., the head coach, said following a recent preseason early-morning practice, that while Division IV had its football powers too — John Glenn, Babylon, and Mount Sinai among them — “renewing old rivalries, with teams like Babylon, Port Jefferson, Mercy, and Southampton (which also went 0-8 last year) should be a lot of fun.”

    The rivalry with Southampton dates to 1923, making it one of the oldest on Long Island, though the teams have played just a few times in the past quarter-century, the last being in 2006, the year before Barbour took over from David MacGarva as head coach.

    The numbers this fall are somewhat better than last, with 27 on the varsity squad (and 20 to 21 on the junior varsity) as of Labor Day weekend, though there is plenty of experience as the result of some of last year’s younger players having undergone trials by fire.

    Steve Redlus, the offensive coach — Barbour is overseeing the defense, and Jason Menu is in charge of special teams — said East Hampton is running the “flex bone offense that Navy and Georgia Tech, and to some extent the other service academies — Army and the Air Force Academy — employ.”

    “It’s a quick-hitting, triple-option offense,” Redlus explained. “We’ve moved the quarterback under the center instead of having him four yards back as we did with ‘the pistol,’ which didn’t work for us last year because we didn’t have the speed or the athleticism required — it took too long for the plays to develop.”

    The coaches are confident that Heneveld — who learned this past year that he’d been accepted at Annapolis, a singular coup for a high school sophomore — will make good decisions as an option quarterback. With the fullback three yards behind him, Heneveld will be flanked by two halfbacks at the edges of a five-man line, and there will be two wide receivers.

    Among the other experienced returnees are Barros, Pete Vaziri (whose 95-yard kickoff return against Kings Park was probably last year’s highlight, that and the initial touchdown drive that Heneveld orchestrated at Rocky Point), Thomas Nelson, Andre Cherington, Sergio Betancur, Jamie Wolf, and Bryan Gamble, the lone returning offensive lineman.

    “We’ve got some big boys on the line, and some who aren’t that big but who are tough,” said Barbour, adding that “at the skill positions we’ve got a ton of guys.”

    In answer to other questions, the coaches said they had kids who could run, catch, and, in the person of Max Lerner, a sophomore, kick.

    The team scored a couple of times — more than the Jets had as of that date — in a three-way scrimmage at Hampton Bays with Mercy and Southampton on Aug. 29. Concerning that scrimmage, Redlus said, “We saw a lot of good things . . . we got a lot done. There were a couple of mental mistakes, but we’ll clean those up.”

   If you need proof that bowling is a lifetime sport, just come to East Hampton Bowl Wednesday mornings.

    There you’ll see some pretty keen competitors in the Senior Men’s League, whose average age, Ken McFall, a member of the league for the past seven years, reckoned, was “pushing 80.”

    “I’m 74, and I’m probably the youngest,” said Joe Ambrose of Sag Harbor, a retired East Hampton High School math teacher and varsity bowling coach. As is the case with just about all of his 18 fellows, Ambrose’s average has dropped, though his enthusiasm for the exacting game — often mentioned in the same breath as golf — has not diminished, even though he had a hip replacement recently, not to mention a shoulder replacement in 1995.

    “From 1995 to 2011 I didn’t pick up a ball,” he said. “I still can’t play golf, it hurts too much, but I can do this. This is my first year with these guys — everyone gets along, no one knocks anyone.”

    “I averaged 182-183 when I bowled in the Tuesday night businessmen’s league [the Bowl’s most competitive league]. I’m averaging 148 now, which isn’t bad. Like I say,” Ambrose said with a smile, “I’m improving. I had a 201 earlier this summer.” He still bowls with a 15-pound ball, though most of his peers have gone down to 14, and, in some cases, 12-pounders.

    Dot Allen, the food and beverage manager at East Hampton Bowl, who was looking on appreciatively, said, “I open up for them at 8 in the morning — they’re early risers — and I make the coffee.”

    Al Alster, who oversees the league with Charlie Broadmeadow and has the high average, a 172, brings the doughnuts.

    When told by this writer that he’d heard Vinnie Sterace was “legally blind,” Dot Allen said, “Legally blind isn’t totally blind. If you can see the white of the pins you can bowl.”

    Later, Sterace, who’s 86 and lives in Noyac, said, with a laugh, “The other guys tell me what pins are up.”

    His high game that morning was a 140, “which, for me, is pretty good.” The week before, he started out with a spare and a strike.

    “You should also say,” he added, “that if anybody wants to join, just come down here at 9 a.m. on Wednesdays. Just show up. We used to have eight teams, now we have four.”

    “We’d love it if there were more guys,” said Sterace’s teammate Ken McFall, who had a 180 that morning as Team 3 (he, Ambrose, Ed Hedges, and Sterace) took 8 of 11 points from league-leading Team 2 (Alster, Al Martino, Carmine Martino, and Don Jaeger). “We’re all relatively friendly — we haven’t had anyone killed yet, as least I don’t think so. . . . We do this year round, though some of us go away for a while in the winter.”

    “It’s good for our wives,” he added, with a smile. “It gets us out of the house. They like the idea of us bowling, and it’s a big social occasion. What is the current expression? It’s good for ‘male bonding.’ ”

    McFall, an East Hamptoner, said that when he had joined seven years ago — “time flies when you’re having fun” — he had been the youngest at 67. “We’ve got a guy now, Billy Connelie, who’s 91, and he’s a good bowler, too.”

    “I love watching these guys — they’re a lot of fun,” said Will Garbowski, a former Bonac bowler who has been the Bowl’s mechanic for the past half-dozen years. “They act like they’re teenagers again.”

   Grand Prix Sunday at the Hampton Classic ran the gamut age-wise, from 2-to-4-year-olds in leadline classes to the 50-year-old Jeffrey Welles, a two-time former Grand Prix winner, who on Merlin placed eighth in the day’s main event.

    Stuart Nayman, as he was watching his wife, Hilary, lead their 4-year-old daughter, Rachel, around the Anne Aspinall Ring that morning under the discerning eyes of two judges, said, when questioned, that Rachel had been riding “practically since birth.”

    Hilary and Rachel Nayman ride at Stony Hill Stables in Amagansett, where Chrissy Clark, who divides her time between managing a string of polo ponies for the Michelob Ultra team in Florida and at Stony Hill, is a trainer.

    Many East Hamptoners, summer kids and year-rounders, have learned to ride at Stony Hill, the best known former student being Norman Dello Joio, whose son, Nick, competed in Sunday afternoon’s $250,000 Grand Prix.

    “The last time I rode in the Classic was six years ago,” Rachel’s mother said. “But I’m coming back — I’ve got to get a horse.”

    As for Rachel, “she’s just started cantering,” though the 2-to-4-year-old riders weren’t required to do that that day — just walk and, when queried by the judges, answer questions as to equine body parts and such. “The judge asked her what color horse she was on, and Rachel answered correctly — a palomino,” Hilary Nayman said.

    When Rachel was done and had been told by Clark that she’d been “a superstar,” she was greeted in the warm-up ring by her 10-year-old brother, Ben, and by her 5-year-old boyfriend, Jackson Shell.

    “What’s the world coming to,” mused Donald Sheeler, the father of another Stony Hill entrant, his 6-year-old daughter, J.T., when this writer said he hadn’t begun going out with girls until he was 10. “And ever since they’ve been getting us into trouble.”

    His daughter, said Sheeler, had been in the leadline class last year, as well. Asked if he rode, he said, “No, I’m a spectator, a proud daddy.”

    Cody Abt, a 17-year-old volunteer who summers in Sag Harbor and rides at Andre DeLeyer’s East End Stables, said, when questioned near the in-gate, that she’d been riding since age 2.

    “I was the most relaxed kid,” she said when asked about her experiences in the Classic’s leadline classes. “I was so comfortable . . . I got a ribbon. I still have it.”

    Pernilla Ammann, whose 5-year-old daughter, Philippa, was being prepared for the 5-7 leadline competition by Clark, said her older daughter, Katarina, 7, had placed fourth in a short stirrup class earlier in the week. She, herself, did dressage (ballet on a horse) with Wick Hotchkiss, Stony Hill’s owner. “They don’t do dressage at the Classic,” she said. “It’s very difficult, though jumping is too. The two really oughtn’t to be compared.”

    Besides the above-mentioned, Clark brought with her that day Madeline Liceaga, Sebastian Liceaga, Lilah Juneja, and Samantha Ramos.

    Asked if Lara Lowlicht, an East Hampton Middle School fifth grader, who was awarded Stony Hill’s first-ever riding scholarship earlier this summer, had competed that week, Clark, who doesn’t train her — Aisha Ali does — said she had.

    “She’s been doing excellently in competitions all summer. She was fourth and seventh, I think, in Short Stirrup Equitation 10-12 Section B, and,” Clark said, reaching into a tubular container she held, “she was that class’s ESI Photography poster child.”

    As for the Stony Hill Foundation’s scholarships, Clark said, “They’d like to give out a few more. They conduct a review every six months. The next one will be in November.”