A Winter Luau to benefit the Hampton Lifeguard Association is to be held next Thursday from 7 to 11 p.m. at East by Northeast restaurant in Montauk. John Ryan Sr. of East Hampton and Mary Lownes of Amagansett are handling reservations.

Tickets bought in advance cost $75 per couple and $40 per person. They will cost $85 and $45 at the door.

    Asked during a conversation in between county classification contests last Thursday how his team, the Pierson High School Whalers, got to be so good, Dan White, who’s in his second season coaching boys basketball in Sag Harbor, said, “The big thing is that the kids are playing year round.”

    Last year’s senior-heavy team, whose players didn’t play the year round, went 5-9 in league competition, but this winter White reaped a bonanza as Jon Tortorella’s 12-2 junior varsity moved up.

    Before this campaign began, White, who played in New York State’s Final Four Class C tournament in 2005 with Hoosic Valley High School’s team, and who later was a guard at Springfield College in Springfield, Mass., made a gentleman’s bet with his former-New York Knick assistant, Eric Anderson, as to how the 2011-12 Whalers would do.

    “Anderson said he thought we’d go 10-4, and I said 11-3. He won.”

    While there are no D-1 prospects on the team, Pierson’s players are energetic, tough, well drilled, and they’ve benefited, their coach said, from “playing against guys who are more athletic than they are in the off-season.”

    Pierson finished one game behind Stony Brook in League VIII and then went on to topple the Bears 34-32 in the final second of the county Class C championship game thanks to the sophomore Forrest Loesch’s 3-pointer from 22 feet out on the left wing.

    That victory — the first county boys basketball championship the school had won in 18 years — followed an equally exciting semifinal with Port Jefferson played in Pierson’s gym on Feb. 17. Loesch came up big in that one too, scoring all 4 of the Whalers’ points in O.T. on the way to a 36-35 final.

    “These guys play together on travel teams in the spring, summer, and fall — I set it up,” said White, whom Anderson has described as “a perfect coach — he’s a basketball junkie, and he’s got that number-one thing every A.D. looks for — that motor, that energy.”

    Joe Zucker, Carl Johnson’s assistant at Bridgehampton, had nice things to say about White as well before the county’s C-D game was played by Bridgehampton and Pierson at Farmingdale State College on Feb. 22. “He’s done a great job with his team,” Zucker said. “They run a tough man-for-man defense, they’re good with the ball, they run the clock, and they can all shoot.”

    It was true, White said last Thursday, “they were always good shooters. But there’s more to the game than that. We’ve been working with them on such things as ball pressure, running the floor, finishing. . . . Now they’re starting to become physically and mentally tough. There are no stars; they play as a pretty solid unit, with mutual respect.”

    “Ninety percent of the time,” he said, in reply to a question, “we play man-for-man defense. We played man against Port Jeff and man against Bridgehampton, but if a team has a couple of good shooters who can give us trouble, like Stony Brook had, we’ll play a match-up zone.”

    He was looking forward, he said, to the following day’s county B-C-D game with Class B champion Center Moriches “because they play a style we’re not used to. They constantly press — pressure, pressure, pressure. It will be an excellent warm-up for the state tournament.”

    Pierson is to play East Rockaway in a state regional semifinal at Farmingdale on Tuesday at 5 p.m. The winner of that game is to play the Section I/IX winner at the State University at New Paltz on March 10. Bridgehampton is also to play at New Paltz that day, versus the Section I/IX Class D winner.

    White said he saw East Rockaway, a team that bested the Killer Bees 73-60 in the Beehive in December, defeat Friends Academy on television recently. “Their inside men are a little bigger, but I think our guards are a little better.”

    Speaking of guards, Pierson’s coach said his sophomore point guard, Ian Barrett, “makes us go . . . Jackson Marienfeld [a junior] is good too.”

    Eric Anderson, he said, “has brought Sam Miller, our inside man, a long way — he’s been close to averaging 10 points and 10 rebounds a game for us in the second half of the season. . . . And Joey Butts, while at 5-7 he’s not physically imposing, is a shooter. He’s great coming off screens, he has a quick release, and can beat guys off the dribble. We look for him to shoot 10 to 15 times a game.”

    “Our defense,” White added, “has been giving up 43 points on average, which is pretty good, and we try to take 55 shots a game. If we score 50 to 60 points and play good defense we ought to be able to win most of the time.”

    League VIII was topsy-turvy this winter. The Whalers, for instance, handily defeated Bridgehampton twice in league play, but lost both times to Greenport, which, in turn, was routed 73-50 by the Bees in the recent county Class D championship game. Pierson split with Ross, losing 65-30 to the Cosmos on Feb. 7, and the Whalers split, as well, with league-champion Stony Brook, losing 60-35 to the Bears at home on Jan. 17 but rebounding to defeat the Brooksters 49-45 on Feb. 13.

    “The second time we played Stony Brook, when we beat them at their place, I began to think we might have a good playoff run,” said White, “that if we played our game we could go pretty far.”

    While he’s taking it one game at a time, Pierson’s young coach is aware that Pierson hasn’t won a state boys basketball championship since 1978. However the Whalers do in the state tourney this year, White is secure in the knowledge that “we’re turning things around.”

    It was “complete dumb luck” that he had ever come down here, he said, in answer to another question. “I had graduated from college and I was about to become an assistant coach on the college team when Jeff Nichols [Pierson’s principal] called. He’d seen my résumé online. It was July of ’09. I hopped on a ferry and gave a lesson in European handball to a group at the middle school. But I think he liked it that I had a basketball background. I was offered a job that day, and here I am.”

    “It’s easy,” he continued, “when you work with kids who want to learn. I work with the middle school kids too. Joey Butts never stops working, so why should I?”

   The Bees may be back, but the Whalers are too, and so it was that in the county C-D boys basketball game at Farmingdale State on Feb. 22, Sag Harbor’s players took the measure of their Bridgehampton counterparts by a score of 57-41.

    The outcome, however, was moot insofar as the state tournament was concerned. Both teams had already made it by virtue of county championship wins — the Class D Bees over Greenport and the Class C Whalers over Stony Brook. Yet Pierson will have to scale one more hurdle — on Tuesday at Farmingdale State, where it is to meet East Rockaway — before the Whalers can join Bridgehampton in Southeast Regional competition at the State University at New Paltz on March 10, the Bees having been granted a pass because there are no Class D schools in Nassau County.

    The Whalers were to go on to lose 68-36 Friday to a full-court-pressing Center Moriches team in the county B-C-D game, a contest that Pierson’s coach, Dan White, said he hoped would help prepare his charges for the state tourney.

    Last week’s clash between the Killer Bees and Whalers was the third of the season for the South Fork schools, who played in League VIII, the Whalers having won both regular-season games by comfortable margins.

    Before it began, Joe Zucker, who assists Carl Johnson in coaching Bridgehampton, said, with a smile, “I don’t know, we just seem to struggle against them. Greenport clobbered them in one of their games and Ross waxed them in one of theirs, but we can’t seem to beat them. . . . Pierson outhustled us in the first two games. It will come down to who executes the best and who wants it the most.”

    It was Pierson that turned out to have more desire that day, as evidenced by its energetic man-for-man defense that only Caanan Campbell, the Bees’ 6-foot-5-inch star, who finished with 21 points, could withstand, and by its swift ball movement at the other end of the court, which frequently found the open man.

    The teams played toe-to-toe throughout the first one and a half quarters, though, at that point, the Whalers began to pull away a bit thanks to two foul shots by Patrick Sloane, a 3-pointer from the top of the key by Jackson Marienfeld after Sloane had picked Jason Hopson’s pocket, and a basket by Sloane, who was fed by Forrest Loesch — the sophomore hero of the Whalers’ 36-35 Class C semifinal win over Port Jefferson and the 34-32 win over Stony Brook in the Class C championship game.

    The hero role this time, however, fell to Joey Butts, a hard-working 5-7 junior guard who was to finish with a team-high 17 points. A coast-to-coast layup of his after he’d stolen the ball from Hopson got the third quarter going and increased Pierson’s lead to 13. A 3-pointer of his in the final two minutes of the third period extended the Whalers’ lead to 45-27, and back-to-back fast-break layups by him, driving the margin up to 17, earned Butts and his fellow starters seats on the bench, and applause, as their coach brought on the subs.

    Butts, as aforesaid, finished with 17 points. Sloane had 12, and Sam Miller, the senior inside man, had 10 to go with 10 rebounds.

   Hayden Ward, who played on back-to-back East Hampton High School state Final Four basketball teams in 2008 and ’09, has kicked it up a notch at Oswego State, which with his considerable help went 21-0 in conference play before sweeping through tournament games this past week with New Paltz, Brockport, and Cortland to become the State University of New York Athletic Conference champion.

    The last time the Lakers, who take an overall record of 25-3 into the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s Division III tournament, wound up at the top of the SUNYAC heap was in 1965, almost 50 years ago.

    A junior who is 6 feet 6 inches tall and weighs 220 pounds — 20 pounds heavier than he was in high school, “most of it muscle” — Ward has been a force underneath for Oswego State the past two seasons. He was named by the conference’s coaches to the all-SUNYAC first team Monday, two days after his 24-point, 13-rebound performance — his eighth double-double of the season — led Oswego State to a 66-57 win over Cortland in the SUNYAC final. He was named to the all-tournament team, and a teammate of his, Chad Burridge, was named the tournament’s M.V.P.

    As a result of its conference championship, Oswego State is one of 62 teams in the nationwide N.C.A.A. tourney, and is to play host this weekend to first and second-round games. The Lakers are to play Endicott (20-8) tomorrow, and, should they win, the Eastern Connecticut State-Medaille winner at home Saturday. Eastern Connecticut takes a 22-5 record into the tournament, Medaille, a Buffalo school, comes in with a 25-2 mark. 

    Sectional games are to be played at sites yet to be determined on March 9 and 10. The Final Four games are to be played in Salem, Va., at the Salem Civic Center, over the March 16 to 17 weekend.

    The affable Montauker said during a telephone conversation Monday that he had been pleasantly surprised to see his family in the stands at the final — “It’s a long trip, eight to nine hours” — and pleased, as well, to receive a congratulatory phone call afterward from his former coach, Ed Petrie, who had watched a Webcast of the game.

    It was the third time in a row that Oswego State had beaten Cortland, but going through the league undefeated, said Ward, who has averaged 16 points and 9 rebounds per game, “was by no means a walk in the park — we could have lost a couple of those games.”

    Asked to what extent he had improved since his high school days, Ward said, presumably with a slight smile, “I’m a little bit stronger and a little bit smarter.” He had worked hard on his vertical leap off-season, he added.

    Petrie, who told this writer that Ward had “played a terrific game,” remarked in the post-game conversation on his protege’s “hard work down low” and on the way he’d gone after rebounds.

    Ward’s coach, Jason Leone, had this to say in an e-mail message: “Hayden has had a phenomenal junior season during which his game has reached new heights because of his hard work. In addition, he’s become a more committed defensive player and is more physical around the basket, which has allowed him to shoot more free throws per game and thus improve his scoring numbers. He is an integral part of our team and I’m proud of him.”

    When asked about the coming N.C.A.A. tournament, Ward said, “We’ve got a very strong team — we’ve been playing together for three years now. We’re confident. If we play as hard and compete as well as we did in our conference tournament, I think we can play with anybody in the country.”

    Diane O’Donnell, who coaches East Hampton High School’s girls cross-country team, said during recent physical evaluations of Springs’s I-Tri girls at the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter that she thought they were “ready to take the next step . . . you can see a difference in these girls, they have more of a spark.”

    Theresa Roden, who founded the I-Tri (Transformation Through Triathlon) program at the Springs School about three years ago as a means to empower the minds and bodies of early-adolescent girls who did not see themselves as athletes, and who were in danger of “making some bad choices,” agreed.

    “We now have 30 girls from Springs, including 14 alumnae who act as mentors for the younger ones, and we’ve added 15 girls from the Montauk School,” she said during a recent conversation. “We’ve doubled our numbers in one year, and have quadrupled them since I-Tri began.”

    On I-Tri’s new Web site, itrigirls.org, Roden, a former teacher who now publishes Captain’s Guide yachting and boating destination magazines with her husband, Rob, said that, until discovering triathloning herself some seven years ago, she had largely also been on the sidelines as it were, very much like the girls she has been mentoring with the help of Sharon McCobb, Annette MacNiven, and Amanda Husslein, among others. They mix swimming, cycling, and running workouts with weekly self-esteem-building workshops.

    Roden’s charges, who each year train for and participate in a popular Youth Triathlon that McCobb oversees at Maidstone Park in the summer, now see themselves as athletes, as triathletes, in fact. (Three of I-Tri’s alums, Abby Roden, the founder’s daughter, Alexa Berti, and Alana Ellis intend to do the Montauk Sprint triathlon as a team this summer.)

    “For most who start off with us in the sixth grade, running is their least favorite thing,” Roden said when the cross-country coach’s comments were mentioned. “Though now we’ve got some strong runners who are about to enter the high school.”

    Presumably, O’Donnell, who, like Roden, did not participate in sports when she was in high school, and who did not start running until the age of 27, will be among those to reap the benefits of I-Tri’s transformative efforts.

    I-Tri’s success has been furthered by financial contributions from such organizations as the East Hampton Healthcare Foundation, the Women’s Sports Foundation, Simple Works, the Long Island Fund for Women and Girls, the Old Montauk Athletic Club, and the East Hampton Rotary Club. “Adolescent girls go through a tough time when they are unsure of who they are, or of how they fit in,” Roden said. “I-Tri gives them a common ground, something they can be a part of that is bigger than themselves. It’s about empowerment.”

    Things are to get going in earnest for the 45 I-Tri girls of Springs and Montauk this week. The Montaukers are to get medical evaluations at Southampton Hospital today, there is to be a retreat for I-Triers and their mothers — who have pushed for this — at the East Hampton Day Care Center Saturday, and a spin class at B-East in Amagansett next Thursday. “It’s the third year Romaine Gordon has done this for us,” said Roden.

    For the rest of the school year, the girls will be given classes in various athletic disciplines every Thursday afternoon, they’ll swim at the Y’s pool on Saturday afternoons, coached by MacNiven and Husslein, and Gurney’s Inn volunteers are to give the Montauk girls fitness classes on Tuesday afternoons. In addition, self-esteem-building workshops will be held at each of the schools one day a week during a lunch-recess period.     “Our big fund-raising event is to be a Celebrity Turbo Tri on June 16 on the Maidstone Park [300-yard bay swim, 7-mile bike, and 1.5-mile run] course,” said Roden. “A couple of professional triathletes have agreed to do it and we’re working on getting celebrities. We also want to get 100 percent participation from the staffs at the Springs and Montauk Schools — either as participants or as contributors to the participants’ $100 entry fees. It looks as if it should happen.”

    The Youth Triathlon is to be held at Maidstone Park on July 22.

    Roden added that the I-Tri girls who are to enter East Hampton High School in the fall have been working — along with McCobb’s daughter, Lena Vergnes, a junior racewalker — with the high school’s principal Adam Fine to have I-Tri included among the school’s clubs next year.

    Abby Roden said during the recent fitness testing at the Y that they wouldn’t stop there. “We want to make it worldwide,” she said, with a broad smile.

Friday, February 24

BOYS BASKETBALL, county B-C-D game, Suffolk Community College-Selden, 6 p.m.

Sunday, February 26

TRIATHLONING, second session of four-part Indoor Tri series, Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter, 9 a.m.

STRETCHING, partners stretch class with Rosie Orlando, Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter, 11:30 a.m.

RUNNING FILM, “Unbreakable: The Western States 100,” Guild Hall, East Hampton, 4 p.m.

Wednesday, February 29

BADMINTON, open play on three courts, Amagansett School, 7-9 p.m.

BOYS BASKETBALL, county small schools championship game, State College at Farmingdale, 7:30 p.m.

   The Pierson (Sag Harbor) High School Whalers won the county Class C championship at Suffolk Community College-Selden Monday by virtue of Forrest Loesch’s last-second desperation 3-pointer that stunned Stony Brook 34-32.

    It was the first county championship for the Whalers since 1994 when they won the Class D title with Tyler Ratcliffe, John Schroeder, Jeremy Brandt, and Eric Bramoff.

    Pierson, which made it to the C final in similar fashion, edging Port Jefferson 36-35 Friday behind Loesch’s 4 overtime points, was to have played Bridgehampton, the D champ, in the county’s C-D game at the State College at Farmingdale yesterday.

    The B-C-D game is to be played tomorrow at Suffolk Community College-Selden at 6 p.m. The county small schools championship game is to be played at Farmingdale Wednesday at 7:30 p.m.

    As for the state Class C tourney, the Whalers are to play East Rockaway for the Long Island championship at Farmingdale on March 6 at 5 p.m.

   East Hampton High’s underclassmen got a taste of the playoffs at Shoreham-Wading River Saturday night, and, as a result, Bill McKee, the boys’ coach, said after the 51-40 loss that he hoped they’d play in the interim and come back ready to go further in the postseason next winter.

    “Our goal was to try to do something in the playoffs this year, but, in the end, we were happy to get there,” said McKee, who graduates two seniors — Cameron Yusko, a 3-point shooter, and Patrick McGuirk, who, at 6 feet 2 inches was the team’s tallest player.

    Unfortunately, McGuirk, who could have been expected to give East Hampton a stronger inside presence at Shoreham, didn’t play much this season, because of a preseason appendectomy and, at the end, because of a broken thumb suffered in a 42-point loss at Shoreham on Feb. 7.

    “Don’t say if Patrick played we would have won,” McKee cautioned, when his name came up, “but he certainly would have helped.”

    As it was, an energetic defense designed to limit the Wildcats’ offensive rebounding was quite effective. “They killed us on the boards in that second game,” McKee said. But the Bonackers shot poorly, until mounting a pleasant 18-3 run in the fourth quarter, giving the team’s many fans who’d made the trip reason to look forward to next year.

    A 22-8 third quarter proved fatal. A basket in the lane by Juan Cuevas, assisted by Yusko, got that period going, but then the home team went on a 15-0 tear that effectively put the game away. During that dispiriting span, East Hampton went 0-for-8, until, with three minutes left, Thomas King netted a 3-pointer — one of three he was to have that night — for 31-19.

    With 4:26 remaining, East Hampton trailed by 26, obviating any chance of repeating its fabled comeback here against the same team on Jan. 10, a game in which the Bonackers uncannily erased a 15-point Shoreham lead in the final five-and-a-half minutes to win 57-56 on King’s coast-to-coast layup.

    Still, the final minutes were fun. East Hampton inbounded after a timeout and Cuevas drew a foul as he drove to the hoop. He made both free throws, and then, following a miss from 3-point range by Yusko, King hit a 3, prompting another timeout, after which Cuevas chipped in with a 3 and Brandon Hughes, a sophomore brought up from Bonac’s strong junior varssity, made a 3-point play.

    Enter Andre Cherrington, a junior forward, who put back his own miss for 49-35. Thomas Nelson, a sophomore forward, answered a Shoreham basket by putting back a miss of King’s from beyond the arc, and Cherrington hit a 3 before the final buzzer sounded.

    Thus ended East Hampton’s season, at 8-10, though with King, Cuevas, Danny McKee, Nelson, Donja Davis, Cherrington, and Hughes coming back, and given the strong jayvee, McKee can expect good results next year.

    In parting, he said he hoped his charges would play basketball in the off-season, “and I’d also like to thank Joe Vas [East Hampton’s athletic director] for having supported us the way he did. It was great to see him there at the playoff game and all the fans.”

    For East Hampton’s girls, who had been expected to make the playoffs, but did not, the 7-10 (4-8 league) campaign was a bit disappointing. They had also been urged by their coaches to play in the off-season, but for the most part did not.

    Howard Wood, East Hampton’s coach, was hoping for a strong farewell in the regular-season finale with Westhampton Beach on Feb. 14, but did not get it as the Hurricanes, who were playing for a playoff spot, wound up winning 35-24.

    The Bonackers pulled to 18-14 early in the third quarter on a basket by Nicole Miksinski, with an assist from Sarah Johnson, and, soon after, Kaelyn Ward, East Hampton’s star junior point guard, made it 18-17 by way of a 3-point play, but thereafter the visitors pulled away thanks to an 11-1 run during which East Hampton went 0-for-7 and turned the ball over three times.

    With four minutes left, East Hampton trailed by 9, but couldn’t make any headway. Johnson, the senior center, fouled out with three minutes remaining.

    Ward, a fine all-around player who drew most of East Hampton’s opponents’ attention, Jackie Messemer, a resilient freshman with good moves, and Quincy King ought to give reason for hope in 2012-13.

    The week past was a stellar one for Cameron Yusko, a senior captain of East Hampton High’s boys basketball team. During it, he was named, by virtue of his 98.5 unweighted average, as East Hampton’s valedictorian and received Channel 12’s scholar-athlete-of-the-month award.

    He was only the fourth Bonacker to be so honored since Robin Streck first won the award in the fall of 1990.

    Yusko, who’s going to attend Duke University in the fall — where he’s wanted to go, he said, since he was 10-years-old — is a three-sport athlete (golf, basketball, and baseball) and was a co-captain of the golf and basketball teams.

    “All the teams Cameron’s played on in the past year have made the playoffs,” said his golf coach, Claude Beudert. He’s equally well-rounded academically. When asked if he’d decided yet on a college major, he said, “I’m undecided, but I do like biology.”

    During a visit to the school Friday, Channel 12 interviewed two of the honoree’s coaches, Beudert and Ed Bahns, the baseball mentor, as well as the athletic director Joe Vas. The award-winner surfed the Internet, and stroked softly-tossed baseballs and hit some golf balls on the school’s turf field for the cameras.

    The scholar-athlete segment is to be aired on Channel 12 Tuesday on the hour from 5 p.m.

    A six-year varsity golfer, a two-year varsity basketball player, and a four-year veteran of the varsity baseball team, Yusko said that the day last spring when the county-championship golf team won the Long Island championship “was one of the best days of my life,” and added, that he thought the baseball team will make the playoffs this spring in spite of the fact that one of its best pitchers, Maykell Guzman, is now concentrating on the sport in the Dominican Republic.

   East Hampton High’s varsity football and girls lacrosse teams are to move down a division in the next school year, each having cut ties, at least temporarily, with Pierson High School in Sag Harbor. In addition, next fall’s boys volleyball team will be combined with Bridgehampton.

    “We’re still an ‘A’ school,” said East Hampton’s athletic director, Joe Vas, “though, instead of being the smallest A school in Conference III, we’ll be a good-sized one in Conference IV.”

    In football, the Bonackers were 0-8 in Division III last fall, and in the past five years East Hampton’s record has been 11-30. “We’ll be playing schools closer to our size, which will be a little more realistic,” Vas said. “Still, there are some very good teams in the conference, including John Glenn, Mount Sinai, Shoreham, and Babylon.”

    Babylon used to be a thorn in East Hampton’s side in the ’80s, a role Comsewogue took over in the ’90s, and in recent years it’s been a virtual briar patch. Geographically, the shift could be a plus too, given the fact that a number of the Division IV schools, Stony Brook, Shoreham, Mercy, Greenport, Hampton Bays, and Southampton among them, are closer to home than Huntington, Harborfields, and Kings Park.

    “Looking at our enrollment in grades 9 through 11 of the previous year, we found that our population was 662, by ourselves,” said Vas. “Continuing to be combined with Pierson, which had no players on our football varsity this fall, would have put us over. (Forty percent of the feeder schools’ enrollments are applied in reckoning divisional placements.)

    “We’ll remain combined in football with Bridgehampton because their numbers don’t put us over, and we’re still combined with Pierson in football at the jayvee and middle school level. We’ve got two Pierson players on the jayvee. . . . I’m aware that there’s been a tradition of being combined with Pierson, so we’ll revisit the numbers question every year.”

    East Hampton had moved down a division in girls lacrosse for the same reasons, Vas said. “We’ve got no kids from Pierson, and playing schools more our size ought to be a benefit.”

    Dropping into a division with Southampton, whose football team also went 0-8 this past fall, raises the prospect of reviving one of New York State’s oldest rivalries, which dates to 1923. Whether the two teams will play each other in the fall won’t be known until the 2012 schedules come out in May. Vas said he thinks East Hampton “will be in the middle of the pack” in the preseason rankings, “say fifth or sixth among the 14 schools.”

    To honor the East Hampton-Southampton rivalry, the Bridgehampton National Bank in 1982 began presenting the winner of the game with a handsome silver Hampton Cup. There have been only two such games played in the past 19 years, with Southampton winning both — in 1993 by a score of 14-8, and in 2006, by a score of 28-13.

    That win of Southampton’s in ’06, the year before Bill Barbour Jr. took over from David MacGarva as Bonac’s head coach, was its 49th in the series. East Hampton has only won 13 times — its last victory coming in 1985 — and there have been three ties.

    The A.D. said a recent meeting Barbour held with prospective footballers from seventh grade up and their parents was “well attended.”

    In the coming month, a group of four seventh and eighth-grade “leaders” picked by Gary Stanis, who brought traveling Police Athletic League football to East Hampton in 2008, and  Don Reese, the P.A.L. president, are to embark on a 10-week pilot course in strength, speed, agility, and nutrition training at Rich Decker’s Studio 89 off Clay Pit Road in Sag Harbor.

    Stanis and Reese hope the four boys’ progress will persuade about 20 of their peers to join them for a 12-week program at Studio 89 this summer, and further hope that this early training will help to strengthen East Hampton’s football program.

    “All the schools up the Island are doing this,” Stanis said in an article on the subject in November. “By the time you get into the weight room at the high school it’s too late.”