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.”

    Twelve years ago, after his team had regained the county Class D title by defeating Greenport 62-55, Carl Johnson, the Bridgehampton High School Killer Bees’ coach, said that the graduation of Maurice Manning had not meant the end of Killer Bee dominance in boys basketball.

    And yet . . . and yet it seems hard to believe that Bridgehampton, whose well-known 20-year state championship run ended in 1998, had not, until Monday, won a county title since 2000.

    In conversations before the game with this writer, who had brought with him The Star’s March 2, 2000, sports pages, Johnson and his assistant, Joe Zucker, smiled and said they were quite aware of how long it had been. And of course they had also reminded their players that they had lost to Greenport 58-35 in the 2010 title tilt.

    The long drought was to end with a 73-50 victory in Suffolk East’s gym at Selden that evening, the same gym in which Manning and his Suffolk Community College teammates had, under Rich Wrase, won national junior college championships in 2003 and ’04.

    And yet a Bees victory was by no means assured. “They beat us by 11 at their place early in the season,” Zucker said before the game, “and we beat them by 30 at ours. . . . We have a big height advantage, so if we can get inside I like our chances.”

    While they may have lacked height, Greenport’s players did not lack quickness or combativeness, and there was no doubt that they had come to play. Parlaying a diamond-and-two defense to their advantage, the Porters jumped out to a 15-6 lead before Davion Cooper, a tall, slim freshman, traded places with Bump Hemby.

    “Carl and I agreed that if they played a junk defense, keying on Caanan [Campbell, Bridgehampton’s senior 6-foot-4-inch high-scoring forward] and Jason [Hopson, Campbell’s junior 6-3 counterpart], we’d send in Davion to give us some more length on offense.”

    Cooper, who was to go on to become Bridgehampton’s consensus M.V.P., began to turn things around right away, going on a 7-0 run of his own, with two layups and a 3-pointer, in the period’s final minute.

    By the midway point of the second quarter, with 5 more points from Cooper, who continued to sneak in for layups when he wasn’t hitting from the outside, and 4 by Tylik Furman, the team’s aggressive eighth-grade point guard, the Bees had the lead, at 20-19, and the battle was joined.

    With two minutes gone in the third, a fastbreak layup by Gavin Dibble wrested the lead back for Greenport, at 36-34, but the Bees, whose taller defenders were to wear their smaller opponents down as the game progressed, poured it on thereafter, with Cooper, Hopson, and Campbell draining 3s and with Furman (two), Campbell, and Cooper chipping in with 2’s during a 17-3 run that treated the Bees to a 51-39 lead as the fourth quarter began.

    Cooper finished with a game and career-high 24 points; Hopson and Furman each had 16, and Campbell, 11.

    “We knew what he [Cooper] could do,” Johnson said later in talking with sportswriters. “Like any young player, he’s up and down, but when he made that first shot he got confident. He’s got ice in his veins! . . . Davion got it going and then our defense buckled down.”

    The Bees will go on the road now. They are to play a regional championship game versus the Rockland-Westchester winner on March 10. (Johnson said he’d scout those counties’ finals.)

    The Final Four tournament is to be contested at Glens Falls over the March 16-18 weekend.

    To get to the county final, Bridgehampton, which had lost by 10 points at the Ross School on Feb. 13, turned the tables on the Cosmos in a Class D outbracket game Friday.

    The star of that 72-62 win was Hopson, who tallied 19 points that day vis a vis the 4 he’d scored at Ross four days before. “He’d rolled his ankle and wasn’t 100 percent in that game at Ross,” Johnson said.

    Ross led 36-31 at the half, but the Bees tied it at 38-38 two minutes into the third on a 3-point play by Campbell, after which Hopson canned a 3-pointer, one of four he had that afternoon. Bridgehampton was unheaded after that.

    On May 25, 1994, Larry Keller Jr. dug deep. He visualized how he was going to wind himself up as though compressing the coils of a spring back through time to ancient Greece, coiling his powerful body the way they did during the first Olympic Games. He used his mind to project the way he would uncoil and send the discus flying into the present.

    The throw came during a county championship meet. It was the longest discus toss in New York State that year, 172 feet and 7.5 inches, and it remains the East Hampton High School record.

    In the days and weeks and months that followed the horrific car accident on July 25, 2009, that broke his neck and left him lying paralyzed in a hospital bed, Larry Keller dug deep again. “The visualization I used with the discus, I used it in the hospital. I visualized the nerve cells repairing themselves.”

“I grew up in Montauk. I was paralyzed from the neck down and was told I may never walk again. I was lying in bed. Depression was nipping at my heels. I was asking myself how am I going to get back to where I love to be,” he said on Saturday afternoon. He was where he loves to be, on the beach at Ditch Plain in the sun and with his girlfriend, Sharyn Marks, by virtue of Herculean perseverance and an Action Trackchair, a cross between a conventional wheelchair and a small tank.

Mr. Keller said he and Ms. Marks were watching television one night last year when a public service announcement came on advertising a trade exposition starting the next day in New Jersey. The show was featuring equipment designed to give disabled persons greater mobility.

“We went and I demo-ed several chairs. This one was by far the most capable,” he said, speaking of the Action Trackchair he sat in. The chair, manufactured by the Action Manufacturing company of Minnesota, is propelled by tank treads in place of wheels.

It is powered by two 12-volt batteries, and has a control that allows the driver to tilt the chair to balance it while ascending and descending hills. The treads conquer mud and sand. The Trackchair was invented by Tim Svenson after his son Jeff was injured and disabled. Mr. Svenson wanted to create an all-terrain chair to enable the disabled to have the freedom to enjoy hunting, hiking, fishing, and other outdoor activities.

Mr. Keller said he was so impressed by the chair that he decided to act on the company’s offer to serve as the vehicle’s exclusive Long Island distributor. “I took the summer, made a business plan and went to the S.B.A. [Small Business Administration].”

    Delivery of his Otpmobility company’s first sale will be made to the artist Chuck Close in about two weeks. Mr. Close, a former East Hampton resident, has been having a house constructed near the beach farther west on Long Island in Long Beach. He has another house in Alaska. The artist was paralyzed in 1988 by the collapse of a spinal artery. “He was so excited to see his house from the beach,” Mr. Keller said.

    The champion track athlete has made remarkable progress. 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, but requires the chair for the outdoor activities he loves. Being from Montauk, that includes fishing. Ms. Marks has a degenerative bone disease, and while she gets around well now, the all-terrain chair has personal meaning for her as well.

    “Our goal is to start a foundation after the business takes off,” Mr. Keller said. He said he planned to reach out to the Wounded Warrior Project, and to one day have a storefront that will showcase a variety of chairs and other equipment that can be customized to provide greater mobility to the disabled. Mr. Keller’s company can be found at otpmobility.com. He can be reached at 702-5302.

     On Saturday afternoon Mr. Keller stood beside the chair that brought him to the ocean’s edge. “When it first happened the doctors told me I may never walk again. I thought that may be, but I told them ‘Don’t ever say that to me again.’ I started looking for ways to get back. It seemed like a far-off dream.”

   With the playoffs looming, almost all the boys and girls basketball teams here are in contention.

    As of Monday, East Hampton High’s boys remained in third place in League VI, at 5-4, despite a rather shocking loss here Friday to fourth-place Bayport-Blue Point, and Bonac’s girls, as the result of a 46-37 win at Bayport last Thursday, were in fourth place in league play, at 4-5.

    The boys as of Monday had three regular season games left, at 5-5 Shoreham-Wading River Tuesday, with 9-0 Amityville here Saturday morning, and at 0-9 Westhampton Beach Tuesday. To make the postseason, they’ll have to win one of the three.

    The girls, who seem to be getting stronger as they go on, were to have played 6-4 Shoreham-Wading River here Tuesday. Tomorrow, they travel to 6-3 Amityville, and they are to finish the regular season here with 4-5 Westhampton Beach Tuesday. They’ll have to win two of their final three.

    Asked before Friday’s boys game here for a recounting of the girls game the night before, a game in which the Bonackers outscored the Phantoms 12-3 in the fourth quarter, Louis O’Neal, Howard Wood’s assistant, said “Kaelyn [Ward, the star point guard] got hot, and Sarah [Johnson] must have had at least 12 rebounds. Christina [Cangiolosi] also had an excellent game, rebounding and helping Sarah.”

    Ward finished with 21 points, and Johnson with 14. “They’re beginning to gel,” said O’Neal. “Bayport is well coached, and we turned the ball over a lot, but if we continue to play hard and smart, as we did in the fourth quarter, we can beat all these teams. We’ve got to cut down on our turnovers and get more rebounds though. If Kaelyn can come off screens rather than go one-on-one, we’ll be all right. The girls are playing with a lot of confidence now.”

    In contrast to the girls game, the boys started strong, leading by as many as 9 points late in the second quarter, but wound up in disarray.

    They took a 29-22 lead into the third quarter, but the frenetically pressing visitors made life miserable for the Bonackers in that frame, outscoring them 21-1. Danny McKee’s foul shot early on, which upped the lead to 30-22, was the sole East Hampton point tallied in the period, during which McKee and his teammates went 0-for-13 from the floor (0-for-5 from 3-point range).

    And that pretty much was it on the way to a 60-35 final. In the teams’ first meeting, on Jan. 5, East Hampton prevailed 60-58.

    East Hampton edged Shoreham 57-56 the first time around, here on Jan. 10, overcoming a 15-point deficit with five and a half minutes remaining, the greatest comeback Bob Vacca, Bill McKee’s assistant, had ever seen in Suffolk County basketball. As for the final two opponents, East Hampton lost 70-45 at Amityville on Jan. 12, and bested Westhampton Beach 62-53 here on Jan. 17. To reach the playoffs, the Bonackers must finish with at least a .500 record.

    The big basketball news this week, however, was Kelsey McGayhey’s 1,000th point, which the versatile 5-foot-10-inch Shelter Island senior left-hander scored Friday afternoon at the Ross School. McGayhey, who is to play volleyball at Springfield (Mass.) College, was fourth on Long Island’s scoring list (and first on Suffolk’s) as of Monday, averaging 23.5 points per game. She scored 16 in the game with Ross, which Shelter Island won 41-22.

    As a result of the win, McGayhey’s team improved to 7-2 in League VIII play, behind 9-0 Southold. Pierson-Bridgehampton, a Class C school, was in third as of Monday, at 6-3. Ross, a Class D school, as is Shelter Island, was 0-8.

    Before the girls game, Kelly McKee, who coaches Ross’s boys team, said that the Cosmos, who had to forfeit two games earlier in the season because of an eligibility mix-up that the school’s athletic director, Jaye Cohen, duly reported to Section XI, still had a fighting chance to play in the postseason. That night, the Ross boys defeated the Shelter Island boys 65-45 to improve to 4-6. Liam Chaskey led the way with 23 points. Hayden Aldredge, the team’s best rebounder, had 15 points, and Roosevelt Odidi had 13.

    The Cosmos were to have played 8-2 Pierson at home Tuesday. Tomorrow, they’ll play at 7-2 Stony Brook. Bridgehampton (5-5), whose Caanan Campbell was the Island’s eighth-leading scorer as of Monday, with a 22.8 average, is to play at Ross on Monday.

    Ross lost to all of the above-named teams in the first round. The Cosmos are to finish the regular season Wednesday at 2-8 Smithtown Christian. Ross forfeited to Smithtown Christian on Jan. 20, and forfeited to Greenport on Dec. 12.

    A 13-member committee headed by Jim Nicoletti, who perhaps is best known for the championship baseball teams he coached here between 1985 and ’95, is seeking nominations for an East Hampton High School Hall of Fame.

    “We’ve talked about this for years,” the retired coach, and 1969 East Hampton High School graduate, said during a conversation last week with this writer and the district’s athletic director, Joe Vas. “You walk into our gym and you see all the banners on the wall, three deep, and you can’t help but be impressed by all the athletic history. . . . There are dozens of athletes and teams worthy of recognition. Our goal is to get the nominations in by March 30, to announce the first class at the athletic awards dinner on June 6, and to have an induction ceremony at homecoming in the fall.”

    “That’s our goal,” said Vas, “but if we’re flooded, we may have to alter our timeline — we want to be as fair as we can be.”

    Bonac’s almost 90-year athletic span dates to 1923, the year of East Hampton’s first football team, which was coached by Robert (Pop) Cheney, a Syracuse graduate who taught science here.

    Besides Nicoletti and Vas, the committee that is to decide on the eligibility of the Hall of Fame nominees comprises Ed Bahns (vice president), Ellen Cooper (vice president), Kathy McGeehan (secretary), Dick Cooney, Mike Burns, Bill Herzog, Erin Bock Abran, Hugh King, Sandy Vorpahl, Fred Yardley, and the high school’s principal, Adam Fine. The committee’s (non-voting) historical advisers are Norton (Bucket) Daniels, Steve Marley, Fritz Schenck, Bob Budd, Dave Cheney, and Liz Granitz.

    Cooney and Burns were athletic directors and coaches here, turning out championship teams in football and track, and Budd, likewise, has been associated with the football program for a long time, 58 years by his reckoning. Herzog has coached numerous championship East Hampton track teams as well.

    Cooper, a retiree known for her field hockey teams, and McGeehan, known for her volleyball and gymnastics teams, have presided over the stunning growth here in female athletics since the late 1970s, and Erin Bock Abran, a product of that insurgence — girls teams here have for a while now fared better vis-a-vis their peers than boys teams — now assists Lou Reale in overseeing East Hampton’s strong softball program.

    Yardley, Cheney, and Schenck played on, and Marley managed, the school’s only undefeated, untied football team, the Little Six Conference champions of 1952. Daniels, a former town official who lives in Florida, has written extensively on East Hampton history, including the early football teams.

    “Beginning this week,” said Nicoletti, “people will be able to pick up nomination forms at all the schools and in all the libraries, and at the Y.”

    The forms can either be mailed to Jim Nicoletti, c/o E.H.H.S. Athletics, East Hampton High School, 2 Long Lane, East Hampton, N.Y. 11937, or e-mailed to [email protected].

    The nominating deadline, as aforesaid, is March 30.

    There are four nomination categories — athlete (who has been out of the high school for at least 10 years), retired coach and/or athletic administrator, team (with Long Island or New York State recognition), and honorary (a category for those who have made outstanding contributions to East Hampton High School athletes and programs).

    “Someone only has to be nominated once to be considered by the committee,” Nicoletti said in reply to a question. “Forms recommending nominees who haven’t met the 10-year criterion will be kept on file.”

    “We want people to realize that this is going to be a process; it will take several years to get everybody in who deserves to be taken in,” said Vas, who added, “this is a great committee; it’s been meeting since the summer, and now it’s ready to reach out to the community. . . . We’re not going to get everyone all at once. It will be an ongoing process.”

    “Though, arguably,” said Nicoletti, “this inaugural class will be the largest.”

    Committee members’ terms, he and Vas added, have been staggered from one to three years in order to keep it vital, and, because of the 10-year requirement for nominees, “every year,” said Nicoletti, “there will be new people eligible. . . . The idea is that this process of nominations, committee review, and annual Hall of Fame inductions will never end.”

    The Hall of Fame’s underlying “philosophy,” they said, has been summed up thus: “The East Hampton Union Free School District has proved over the years to be a school district that has a rich tradition and long history of success in its athletic programs. The program’s goal is to provide our athletes an environment that focuses on sportsmanship, honesty, loyalty, dedication, teamwork, self-discipline, and commitment.”

    “The East Hampton High School Hall of Fame recognizes those individuals and teams who have made outstanding contributions to the athletic programs at East Hampton High School and beyond, through their participation as athletes, coaches, and administrators.”

Saturday, February 18

BOYS BASKETBALL, playoffs begin, site of higher seeds, times to be announced; Class D outbracket game, Ross vs. Bridgehampton, site and time to be announced.

BOYS SWIMMING, county meet, Suffolk County Community College-Brentwood, 2 p.m.

Sunday, February 19

STRETCHING, Carolyn Giacalone’s class for men, Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter, 10:30 a.m.-noon.

Monday, February 20

BOYS BASKETBALL, county Class D championship game, 4 p.m., and Class C championship game, 6:30, Suffolk Community College-Selden.

Tuesday, February 21

GIRLS BASKETBALL, county C-D game, St. Joseph’s College, Patchogue, 6 p.m.

Wednesday, February 22

BOYS BASKETBALL, county C-D game, New York State College at Farmingdale, 5 p.m.

    Dennis Fabiszak, the East Hampton Library’s executive director, has been for a while now an ultradistance runner, which is to say he competes in 50-and-up events, though he’s never been in the ne plus ultra of ultra competitions, the Western States 100.

    For the moment then, he will have to content himself with viewing — along with many others, he hopes — a two-hour documentary on the 2010 Western States 100 at East Hampton’s Guild Hall on Feb. 26. It’s the last film in the library’s free winter series, which has featured foreign films.

    Fabiszak touts “Unbreakable: The Western States 100” as “the best film about running I’ve ever seen, and one that should be of interest not only to runners, but to anyone interested in sports.”

    A flier advertising the documentary, which was filmed at the 2010 competition, says that it “follows the four lead men [all undefeated as of then] on this amazing journey. . . . Three must break and only one can remain unbreakable.”

    The featured four are Hal Koerner of Ashland, Ore., the two-time defending Western States champion, Geoff Roes, an organic chef from Juneau, Alaska, also undefeated at the 100-mile distance, Anton Krupicka, a Boulder, Colo., graduate student who “is undefeated in every ultramarathon he has ever started,” and Kilian Jornet, the two-time Ultra-Trail Du Mont Blanc champion from Spain.

    Jornet, who had run up Mount Kilimanjaro in seven and a half hours, “divides his year between cross-country skiing and mountain running,” said the library’s director, who added during a conversation the other day, “You don’t know what’s going to happen until the end.”

“Getting into the Western States,” he said, “is like getting into Boston or New York. You need to meet a qualifying time and you need to volunteer in another ultra in order to enter the raffle. The field is limited to 357. The Park Service oversees it.”

Fabiszak, who has done 50-milers and 100Ks (62-milers) in the past, but not 100-milers, will do his first 100, the Umstead 100-Mile Endurance Race, on March 31 outside Raleigh, N.C., with Rich Sandstrom and Jeff Butler, fellow Hamptons Running Club members.

“The top guys will be shooting for 15 hours or less — they’ll be flying; my goal will be to do it in less than 24. If you’re still on the course after 30 hours, they’ll make you stop.”

Speaking about speed, Fabiszak said the North Carolina race was fully registered “within 30 seconds! Rich went online a minute after the posting the week of Labor Day, and he missed out. Later, he was pulled off the waiting list. It’s a very popular race. The field was limited to 300.”

The documentary, he added, was being shown in small theaters. “We’ll have the DVD for sale, and we’re going to add it to our collection at the library as well.”

Some in the audience on Feb. 26 will have run 13 miles at Hither Hills before the film’s showing at 4 p.m. The group, which Sinead FitzGibbon, a mountain biker and long-distance runner, is getting together, is to meet at Ed Ecker Park off Montauk’s Industrial Road at 11 a.m. that day. “We should be good and ready for the movie,” she said in an e-mail, “after running 13 miles in Hither Woods, doing 300 push-ups and a couple of hundred kettle-bell squats.”

   The East Hampton High School girls basketball team dug itself into a hole with a 2-point loss here to Shoreham-Wading River on Feb. 7, a game it could well have won. In a must-win situation, at Amityville’s inhospitable gym three nights later, the team fell out of playoff contention.

    Bonac’s boys lost to their Amityville counterparts too, by a lopsided 60-32, here on Saturday, but, at 5-6, they still had a chance to make the postseason if they defeated winless Westhampton Beach in an away game Tuesday.

    The girls’ 48-39 loss at Amityville, which had edged the Bonackers 44-43 here on Jan. 13 as the result of a last-second 3-point “Hail Mary” heave, dropped Howard Wood’s team to 4-6 with one game left to play, with Westhampton Beach here Tuesday.

    When told the opposing coach had said East Hampton “had a foul to give” in the final 20 seconds of the stunning loss to Shoreham — a game decided when one of its players was hammered in the lane as she drove to the hoop with 2.4 seconds left, Wood said he had been more concerned with “playing good D and not fouling” as the clock wound down. “I may have lost track of the fouls, but the fact is we lost that game in the third quarter when we came up empty in our first seven possessions,” said the coach, who played professionally for a decade in Spanish leagues.

    The girls went into the second quarter trailing 16-8, but closed to 25-26 before it was over thanks to fast-break layups by Nicole Miksinski and Jackie Messemer, and a perimeter jumper by Messemer in the final 24 seconds.

    But the Bonackers couldn’t get it done in the third as they went 1-for-9 from the floor and turned the ball over a number of times. Messemer ended the drought with a basket from the foul line just before the 8-2 quarter ended.

    Wood’s team came back again in the fourth, however, erasing a 9-point deficit with three baskets and a foul shot by Kaelyn Ward, the star junior point guard, and a 3-point play by Messemer. A 3-pointer by Ward, with 1:56 to play, capped the 11-1 run, and gave East Hampton a 38-37 lead, its first lead since the opening minutes of the game.

     A foul shot by Sarah Johnson, Bonac’s senior post player, made it 39-37 with 1:04 left, but the visitors’ Courtney Clasen tied the score at 39 on a layup with :50 to go.

    After a miss in close by Ward and a jump ball call that allowed Shoreham to bring the ball up with :19.6 remaining, the visitors worked the clock down before Alyssa Fleming drove the lane and picked up the foul that was to prove fatal. Fleming made both of her free throws, wresting the lead back for Shoreham, at 41-39. On the inbounds play, East Hampton got the ball up to Messemer, who let go a long 3-point try from inside the half-court line, but it bounced off the backboard.

    Fleming, with 12 points, and Clasen, with 10, led the visitors. Messemer, a promising freshman, with 13 points, and Ward, with 12, led East Hampton.

    One could have taken heart perhaps in the fact that the first time out Shoreham had bested the Bonackers by 26, but Wood, who remembered that “last year we beat them here after they’d beaten us by 33,” was not having any of that. It had been a disappointing season, he said, especially given the fact that the girls had made the playoffs last year.

    “It’s not a good feeling. We never should have been in that position [having to win the penultimate game at Amityville in order to make the postseason]. There were games here with Bayport and Amityville that we shouldn’t have lost. . . . Though I take responsibility. We’re looking to put on a good show Tuesday. It’s senior night and we’re going to come out ready to play.”

    Westhampton, at 5-6 and with a playoff berth on the line, presumably had plenty of incentive as well.

    “We competed all season,” Wood continued, “but if the girls had played in the off-season — I still think basketball is the hardest game to play — we would have been a lot better.”

    Battling from the get-go, the Ross School boys basketball team, the Cosmos, took Bridgehampton’s Killer Bees to school at Ross’s well-appointed gym Monday night before a packed house, which was entertained as well by numerous and lively Ross and Bridgehampton cheerleaders.

    For the Cosmos, who had to forfeit two games earlier in the season because of a self-reported eligibility mix-up, it was a must-win situation. The Bees had already clinched a playoff spot, though the prospect of eliminating their Class D rivals was nevertheless beguiling.

    Before the game, Kelly McKee, Ross’s coach, called his five seniors out on the floor, where they were greeted by their parents. And they, Fuhito Yoshida, Liam Chaskey, Hayden Aldredge, Max Rowen, and Dylan Stilin, responded soon after by pounding the boards and hitting from inside and out on their way to a 58-48 victory, which left Ross, at 6-7, just one win shy of a playoff berth.

    They were to have played at 2-11 Smithtown Christian yesterday, but McKee said a win was by no means assured, noting that “Smithtown Christian beat the Bees at home in overtime.”

    Bridgehampton was to have finished up the regular season at the Beehive yesterday with league-leading Stony Brook, but a loss to the Bears (10-3 as of Tuesday) would have been moot given the fact the Bees were 7-6 going in.

    After Ross’s heady win, McKee said he thought Bridgehampton and Ross would play at a neutral site either tomorrow or Saturday to determine which team is to face Greenport (9-4 as of Tuesday) in the county Class D championship game Monday at 4 p.m. at Suffolk Community College-Selden. The seeding meeting, McKee said, is to be held this morning. “That’s when we’ll find out what’s going to happen,” he said.

    It’s a perfect storm insofar as these three playoff-bound teams are concerned. The Bees and Ross have split wins; the Bees and Greenport have split wins, and though Greenport has two wins over Ross, the first, on Dec. 12, was by forfeit, and the second, on Jan. 27, was by 1 point.

    Getting back to Monday’s game, Bridgehampton, which trailed 28-20 at the half, looked as if it might come back when Roosevelt Odidi, one of Ross’s two big men, was forced to the sidelines after committing his fourth foul two minutes into the period.

    With Odidi looking on from the bench, Josh Lamison, whom he had fouled, canned both free throws, for 28-24, and after Yoshida came up empty following a timeout, Caanan Campbell, Bridgehampton’s star, hit a 3-pointer for 28-27.

    Moments later, Campbell swatted the ball away from Aldredge, who was trying to put up a shot underneath, but was called for a foul, and Aldredge, who is a great rebounder but not a great foul-shooter, made his second try for 29-27.

    And so it went. With about four minutes remaining in the quarter, Rowen and Chaskey knocked down successive 3s from the left corner to reassert Ross’s margin, but the Bees, by virtue of Campbell’s drive around Aldredge and a 3 by Jason Hopson, pulled to within a basket once again. Going into the fourth quarter, the game was still up in the air, with the Cosmos nursing a 40-37 lead.

    Odidi re-entered the game at this point, and before a minute had elapsed, Ross, first with Odidi and then with Yoshida, cashed in on two fast-break layups, prompting Carl Johnson, Bridgehampton’s coach, to call for a timeout.

    Once play resumed, Tylik Furman, the Bees’ eighth-grade guard, drove the baseline for 44-39, but Aldredge replied, driving into the paint and dumping off to Odidi for 46-39. The Bees were not able to get any closer after that.

    Campbell was the sole Bee in double figures, with 21. For Ross, Odidi had 19, Chaskey, 15, and Yoshida, 11.

   In only its third year, East Hampton High School’s boys swimming team has finished a season with a winning record.

    Jeff Thompson’s charges have finished at 3-2 in League III, good for third place, behind 5-0 Hauppauge and 3-1 Harborfields, and ahead of 2-3 Deer Park, 1-3 Huntington, and 0-5 North Babylon. The team went 3-4 over all.

    As for the postseason, Thompson’s goal is to have six individuals and all three relay teams — 200 medley and 200 and 400 free — compete in the county meet on Feb. 18. Four of his swimmers, Thomas Brierley, Trevor Mott, Dan Hartner, and Rob Rewinski, have already posted county-qualifying times — Brierley in 500 freestyle and 100 backstroke, Mott in the 500 and 200 freestyle races, Hartner in the 100 back and 50 free, and Rewinski in the 100 free. “A couple of others are on the cusp in the 50 and 100,” said the coach during a conversation following Monday’s practice at the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter.

    When it comes to the relays, he can, because of the team’s great depth, “mix and match.”

    The league meet is to be contested today at Hauppauge, and Thompson is hoping to “take Harborfields down.” The Tornadoes bested the Bonackers 87-83 in a recent dual meet that went down to the wire.

    “The team did phenomenal this year,” said Thompson’s assistant, Craig Brierley. “We’re so pleased. From top to bottom.”

    East Hampton lost 89-80 here on Feb. 1 in a nonleague meet with Smithtown — East Hampton’s last home meet of the season — though the visitors exhibitioned in the finale, the 400 freestyle relay.

    “It was a good matchup,” said Thompson, “a good test for us going into the postseason. Smithtown was a little stronger — they had two guys I didn’t know about.”

    The Bonackers had many seconds and thirds and a couple of firsts — Mott in the 200 free and the 200 freestyle relay team of Hartner, Brierley, Paul Dorego, and Mott — and, said Thompson, “a lot of lifetime bests.”

    Among them, he said, were Mott’s time of 1 minute and 54.16 seconds in the 200 free; Kyle Sturmann’s 1:07.75 in the 100 butterfly; Rewinski’s 54.81 in the 100 free; Jeremy Pepper’s 2:10.76 in the 200 free, and Adam Heller’s 2:27.74, Thomas Paradiso’s 2:28.21, and Rob Anderson’s 2:28.62 in the 200 individual medley; Dorego’s 25.21 in the 50, and Ryan Lewis’s 1:17.39 and Paradiso’s 1:18.18 in the 100 breaststroke. Moreover, Hartner had missed breaking one minute in the 100 backstroke “by five-tenths of a second. Trevor was out-touched by three milliseconds in the 500.”

    “We were popping,” said Thompson. “Their coach didn’t soften his lineup. It was the last home meet for our seniors — everyone was inspired.”

    “We’re resting up this week,” he added. When asked how many football fields had been swum thus far, Thompson, after consulting his iPhone, said, “We’re in the Pacific, about midway to Hawaii. They’ve done . . . 136 miles each . . . 3,264 miles if it were a baton relay.”