In the Top 10

    Dana Cebulski, who as a freshman starred this fall on East Hampton High’s girls cross-country team, placed ninth Saturday in the regional (Maine to Delaware) Foot Locker championships’ freshman race at Sunken Meadow, in a time of 21 minutes and 30 seconds.

    She had run a 20:20.06 there in the county meet on Nov. 4, which enabled her to finish fifth among the Class B girls and to qualify for the state meet. But Cebulski’s coach, Diane O’Donnell, pointed out to her somewhat disappointed charge that she’d never had a runner finish in a Foot Locker top 10 before. “Next year,” said O’Donnell, “I told her we’d continue to train with the Foot Locker race in mind. I’m sure she’ll be able to qualify for the seeded race next year.”

    In other postseason action involving East Hampton competitors, Marina Preiss placed 12th in the 50 and 100-yard freestyle races in the recent state girls swimming championships.

Grilli Breaks Barrier

    Rodrigo Grilli, the former East Hampton Indoor-Outdoor Tennis Club pro who is being managed by Frank Ackley, broke a significant barrier this past weekend when he played in the doubles final of a $50,000 tournament in Guayaquil, Ecuador.

    “The guys who beat Rodrigo and his partner were Davis Cup players,” said Ackley, who added that “now, with a ranking of 199 in the world, Rodrigo’s in a good position. He’ll be able to get into the Challenger tournaments where the money ranges from $50,000 to $125,000. . . . Our goal now is to break 150.”

    A top-100 ranking in doubles, said Ackley, “would get you into some main tour A.T.P. tournaments, where, if you lose in the first round, you still get $2,000.”

    “Rodrigo’s back in Sao Paulo now. He’ll play in a couple of Futures tournaments in Brazil to see if he can’t pick up some more points. There’s a $125,000 Challenger in Sao Paulo after the new year where he’s got to defend 40 points. In the past two and a half months he’s had a lot of points come off, but he’s defended them and has moved ahead.”

    Ackley, himself, enjoyed a nice regional win recently at the Westbury Tennis Club, defeating the East’s number-two-ranked 60-and-over player, Al Chaskin, 6-1, 6-2. “We don’t have any tournaments out here where I could improve my ranking, and it’s a drag to play up the Island and beyond. It took me three hours to get home after my semifinal match on Saturday. The traffic was unbelievable. Still, it’s fun to go up there and whup these guys who only have to drive 20 minutes to get to the club where the matches are played.”

Thursday, December 1

BOYS BASKETBALL, Southold at East Hampton, scrimmage, 5 p.m.

Friday, December 2

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

BOYS BASKETBALL, Rocky Point at Pierson, Sag Harbor, scrimmage, 5 p.m.

RUGBY, Montauk Rugby Club holiday dinner, Beachhouse restaurant, Route 27, East Hampton, 6:30 p.m.

Saturday, December 3

BOYS BASKETBALL, East Hampton at Center Moriches, scrimmage, and Bridgehampton at Mattituck, scrimmage, 10 a.m.

GIRLS WINTER TRACK, East Hampton at crossover meet, Suffolk Community College-Brentwood, 11:45 a.m.

Sunday, December 4

BOYS WINTER TRACK, East Hampton at crossover meet, Suffolk Community College-Brentwood, 4:30 p.m.

Monday, December 5

BOYS BASKETBALL, Ross at East Hampton, scrimmage, 5:30 p.m.

OLD MONTAUK ATHLETIC CLUB, holiday dinner, Beachhouse restaurant, Route 27, East Hampton, 6 p.m.

Tuesday, December 6

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

GIRLS BASKETBALL, East Hampton at Pierson, scrimmage, 4:30 p.m.

BOYS BASKETBALL, Pierson at Southampton, scrimmage, 5:30 p.m.

Wednesday, December 7

BOYS BASKETBALL, Southampton at East Hampton, 4:30 p.m., and Ross at William Floyd tournament, 4 p.m.

Thursday, December 8

BOWLING, East Hampton vs. Eastport-South Manor, Shirley Bowl, 4:30 p.m.

    Luis Correa’s hat trick at East Hampton’s Herrick Park on Thanksgiving eve enabled his team, Maidstone Market, to take over sole possession of first place in Wednesday’s 7-on-7 soccer league and vaulted him into first place in the league’s “Golden Boot” goal-scoring competition, with seven.

    As a result of the loss, Bateman Painting, which had been in first by one point, dropped to second. The Market was to have played fourth-place Hamptons Arsenal, and Bateman was to have played third-seeded Tuxpan in semifinal matchups at Herrick Monday night. The fall final was to have been played last night.

    Correa scored early on in the showdown with Bateman, taking a pass from the center midfielder, Diego Marles, and putting a shot by Carlos Cardenas, who was subbing in the goal that night for Francisco Wazhima. (With Wazhima in the goal, Bateman and the Market played to a 1-1 tie on Nov. 14.)

    Correa followed up soon after, converting the rebound of a direct free kick taken by Marles, whose low rocket broke through a four-man “wall” set up about 10 yards from Bateman’s cage.

    But then, when things appeared well in hand for the Market, Bateman’s Carlos Torres came up big twice in succession to tie the score at 2-2 before the half. Juan Zuluaga assisted on Torres’s second goal.

    Because of the raw, rainy weather, the referee, Alex Ramirez, waived the halftime break, and play resumed after the teams switched sides.

    Midway through the second period, after a cross by Torres had zipped through the legs of a teammate, Julian Munoz, who had been in position to capitalize, Correa notched his third score of the night after having gathered in a long cross from Winson Elegolda near right post. Correa had other close chances that night, but the three goals he scored were enough to win the game for Maidstone 3-2.

    In other games played on the 23rd, Tuxpan, facing a must-win-or-tie situation, defeated Hamptons Arsenal 2-1, and Tortorella Pools defeated Espo 2-0.

    According to Leslie Czeladko, who oversees the league and its Web site, “Arsenal was missing several key players who, had they been there, would in all likelihood have made a difference.”

    Following a scoreless first half, Arsenal got on the scoreboard when a ball struck by Tony Shoshi went in off a defender Reynaldo Yanes’s back.

    “An Arsenal win would have enabled Tortorella [Czeladko’s team] to make the playoffs, but that did not happen,” Czeladko said. “Minutes after Arsenal’s score, Bernabe Hernandez tied up the match for Tuxpan and, sometime later, he scored again to give Tuxpan the win.”

    Tortorella Pools (3-5-2) wound up in fifth place, behind Maidstone Market (6-2-2), Bateman Painting (4-2-4), Tuxpan (4-4-2), and Hamptons Arsenal (2-2-6), thus missing the Final Four. Espo finished sixth at 1-5-4.

    Before the night’s action began, John Romero, who also coached Maidstone Market in a high-powered UpIsland Sunday league this fall in which he said a number of pros played, reported that the locals had finished with a 13-4-2 record and had placed third in the playoffs.

    In addition, Romero, who owns Maidstone Market (also known as the Red Deli) in Springs, was named the league’s coach of the year.

    Interestingly, the Market didn’t begin the 7-on-7 fall season well, losing the first two games it played, by scores of 1-0 to Tuxpan and Hamptons Arsenal.

    But then the Market righted itself, winning three straight before playing to a scoreless tie with Arsenal on Nov. 7.

    Last year, though it didn’t win much, the East Hampton High School boys basketball team made things interesting, and Bill McKee, Bonac’s coach, now in his second year at the helm since Ed Petrie’s retirement, hopes the 2011-12 team will make things interesting again this winter.

    Though McKee, who again will be assisted by Bobby Vacca, could do without the tragic third acts, which haunted the Bonackers in 2010-11.

    He’s got guards, that’s for sure, in Thomas King and Cameron Yusko, both returning starters, and in McKee’s son, Danny, a relentless competitor who’s up from the junior varsity. Besides King, a junior, and Yusko, a senior, the other returnees are Patrick McGuirk, a senior who is the tallest player on the squad at 6 feet 2 inches, Alex Munoz, a senior who saw some playing time last year coming off the bench, and Juan Cuevas, a junior who was sidelined for the greater part of the 2010-11 season with a broken collarbone.

    Besides McKee, who’s a sophomore, others up from the jayvee are Thomas Nelson, a sophomore, Michael Taveras, a senior, and four juniors — Rolando Garces, Donya Davis, Andre Cherrington, and Joey Sandoval. “They’re all of about the same ability,” said the elder McKee, who, because of the team’s depth, hopes to run players in and out this season and to score in transition, rather than out of a half-court offense.

     “Hopefully we’ll handle the ball well and thus get good shots — we’ll play an up-tempo game,” said the coach, who added, “We’re still in League V, the same schools as last year. I’d say Amityville and Bayport are the favorites. They’ve both got a lot of returnees, and I know Amityville had a very good jayvee.”

    As for East Hampton, “the kids have been working hard and they’re improving.”

    The Bonackers are to scrimmage Southold here at 5:30 p.m. today. The team’s to scrimmage at Center Moriches Saturday morning, and Ross is to scrimmage here on Monday at 5:30. “Our first home game will be on Dec. 9 with Pierson, at 6:15,” McKee said.

    During Friday morning’s practice session, McKee’s taller charges were put through some drills by Hayden Ward, a 6-foot-6-inch former Bonac star who is playing now for the State University at Oswego.

    “We were 24-4 last year,” Ward, a junior, said during a brief conversation, “and we went to the N.C.A.A. [Division III] tournament for the first time in our history. We’ve got most everyone back and hope to do even better this time. We lost to Wells College in the second round of the N.C.A.A.s last year.”

    Oswego, which was 3-1 going into Thanksgiving vacation, was ranked 18th in the nation at the moment, he said.

    The amiable Montauker, who’s majoring in business administration and minoring in coaching, averaged 10 points and 8 rebounds per game last season, and is averaging 12 and 10 thus far in this campaign. It’s the second year that he’s been a starter.

    Asked about the transition he had to make from high school to college ball, the quiet-spoken redhead smiled and said, “College basketball is definitely more intense — it’s a much quicker game. You don’t realize how much quicker it is until you’re there. It’s quicker, more physical. Everybody’s bigger. I played down low in high school, but our centers are between 6-9 and 7-0, so I’m more of a perimeter player now.”

    When this writer said he hoped there were some businesses to administrate when he graduated from college, Ward said, “Let’s hope so . . . I’d like to be a basketball coach, too.”

    Mario Olaya, the center midfielder on East Hampton High School’s boys soccer team and League VI’s player of the year, wound up a stellar four-year varsity career Saturday by scoring the winning goal in the exceptional senior Suffolk-Nassau all-star game played at Dowling College, the scene recently of East Hampton’s first-ever county championship.

    Rich King, East Hampton’s head coach, who attended the all-star game, said that “it was a thrill to have two of our kids starting. Mario played the same position as he does for us, center midfield, and played magnificently. He played the whole game. Milton started at forward and was later moved back to outside midfielder, which isn’t his usual position, but that’s the way it is in these all-star games. He played well too, though he didn’t play the whole game.”

    After Suffolk’s 2-1 win, King said that he, Olaya, and Farez talked with some college scouts. “I would guess there were from 15 to 30 scouts there, though it was hard to gauge. It was all very informal. We’re setting up recruiting trips now for Mario and Milton, and also for three other seniors — Jerjes Alban, Angel Garces, and Esteban Aguilar — who certainly were worthy insofar as the exceptional senior game was concerned, but who couldn’t play because schools are limited to no more than two representatives.”

    In all, it had been “a banner season” for East Hampton boys soccer, said King, who was voted League VI’s coach of the year, an award he said he shares with his assistant, Don McGovern, Pierson’s former coach.

    Bonac’s team, which defeated defending state champion Sayville 2-1 in the county title game, finished as the fifth-ranked Class A school in the state, “the highest ranking an East Hampton soccer team has ever had.” The team scored 58 goals during the course of the season, “the most ever scored by an East Hampton team in a single season,” and Olaya wound up as the school’s all-time career scorer with 49 goals. His 22 goals this fall puts him in third place all-time in the single season category, behind Jefferson Ramirez, with 29, and the late John Villaplana, with 27.

    Both Olaya and Farez, who was named the county championship game’s most valuable player, have made the all-county team. Farez has also been named to the all-county academic team.

    All-state announcements are to be made at the county dinner on Tuesday, King said.

    Garces, Alban, and Jean Carlos Barrientos, another standout senior starter, were named to the all-conference team, and Aguilar, the senior goalie, was named to the all-league team.

    Among the schools interested in Olaya, King said, are Dowling, C.W. Post, Molloy, the University of New Haven, Franklin Pierce, Keystone, and Plattsburgh State. The University of New Haven, Molloy, and Old Westbury are said to be interested in Farez. “Our other seniors have drawn interest from colleges with soccer programs as well,” said King.

    As for next year, “we’ve got the potential to do what we did this year,” King said, “but we’re losing six senior starters. We’ll have holes to fill. Mario and Milton accounted for 37 goals and 20 assists all told. Twenty of the 26 kids on our roster this fall will be coming back, and our jayvee [coached by Steve Tseperkas] went undefeated in league play and was 13-2 over all.”

    Neither he nor McGovern would enter any teams in off-season leagues, King said, “though some of them will be playing on club teams in weekend tournaments and indoors at Sportime. The next thing we’ll do as a team will be our annual 7-on-7 tournament here on March 4, with other East End teams like Westhampton, Hampton Bays, Southampton, Greenport, and Mattituck. There are plans for a number of them to attend a weeklong camp in the summer at UConn, in July or August. Meanwhile, we’ll try to get the kids who aren’t playing winter sports into the weight room — we’ve put a program together for them. We did this last winter too. . . . Absolutely it helped.”

    Gary Stanis, who brought traveling Police Athletic League football to East Hampton in 2008, said this week that to give the high school program a boost, the East Hampton P.A.L. organization hopes to put 20 to 25 seventh and eighth graders through a 12-week strength, speed, agility, and nutrition program at Sag Harbor’s Studio 89 this summer.

    “This won’t be play time — we’re only interested in getting kids who seriously want to improve their fitness and ability. This three-day-a-week program will improve their performance in all sports, not just in football,” said Stanis during a conversation this week.

    The cost of the program, which has yet to be reckoned, will be significantly lessened by the fact that Rich Decker, who manages Hampton Gym Corporation’s fitness centers in East Hampton, Southampton, and Sag Harbor, and who owns Studio 89, off Clay Pit Road in Sag Harbor, “the largest gym on Long Island,” will donate the space.

    Answering a question, Decker said that medical opinion had come around in recent years to support trainer-supervised strength training for 11 to 13-year-olds as a means of preventing injury. “It’s a myth that it stunts your growth,” Decker said.

Studio 89, he said, has 4,000 square feet of interior space and 20,000 square feet outside, comprising an obstacle course known as the Pit with cargo net walls, climbing and swinging ropes, jumbo tires, and the like. Body-weight training will take place there and inside, as well, using TRX suspension apparatuses. Weight training with dumbbells, he said, will be tailored to each student.

Stanis, who is now a member of the local P.A.L. organization, and Don Reese, who is its president, said that the need for earlier strength, speed, and agility training here has become painfully evident. East Hampton’s varsity, outnumbered, outmuscled, and less knowledgeable football-wise than its opponents, frequently facing foes who had played the game nine years, went 0-8 this fall.

“All the schools up the Island are doing this — by the time you get into the weight room at the high school it’s too late. Those linemen up there are all benching 300 to 350,” said Stanis, whose own example could serve as a teaching point. The 1978 Smithtown East team he captained won the Division III championship and went 8-1 after having gone 1-7 in his junior year.

    “We’re doing this from the bottom up — it has to start somewhere,” said Reese.

    “We’re calling this ‘the football revival project,’ ” said Stanis. “The trainers [Connor Miller, Avery Crocker, and Mike Roesch among them] are all excited about being part of this. They’d love to be part of a turnaround. . . . If we can feed 20 to 25 kids up to the varsity who are in good shape and know the game, they’ll be able to compete even if the other schools suit up more players.”

    There would be low-weight, high-repetition training at Studio 89, “no max weight, low rep lifting,” he emphasized, adding that “it’s a proven fact that if done the right way strength training prevents injuries rather than causes them. Professional trainers will be overseeing these kids.”

    Four hand-picked potential leaders from the targeted junior high group would embark, Stanis said, on a 10-week pilot program in March, and he expects that the visible results will persuade their peers to follow suit in June.

    “Our goal is to have 25 go through this program,” he said. “Any more than that would be a bonus, but we don’t want a whole lot of kids, only the ones who seriously want to improve themselves. We’re basically hand-picking them.”

    “Once this gets going,” said Reese, “we’re hoping that every year we’ll get kids to train with trainers for the entire year — they’ll get stronger and quicker faster that way.”

    The P.A.L. plans, moreover, to add a seventh-grade and an eighth-grade travel team next year, teams that Stanis said are to be outfitted with “the latest equipment, new uniforms and everything . . . the helmets alone cost $200 each. Which reminds me, we’d very much like to get some financial help from the community.”

    Also next fall, he said, “we’d like to bring in a couple of people who have played in the N.F.L. and live out here to give clinics on different aspects of the game.”

    Basketball has also been on Reese and Stanis’s minds lately.

    “For the first time we’re holding a holiday invitational basketball tournament for fifth and sixth-grade teams at the East Hampton Middle School, on Dec. 17 and 18. We’re looking for a sponsor for that. And, also for the first time, we’re going to take a fifth and sixth-grade team and a seventh and eighth-grade team to play in the Northport Classic,” said Reese.

    “There’s a new sheriff in town,” the Speed Channel announcer Greg Kramer said after Ryan Pilla drove an MX5 Spec Mazda to a win in a Sports Car Club of America race last month at the New Jersey Motorsports Park in Millville.

    From sheriff, Pilla soon ascended to attorney general status as he followed up the Jersey win with an American Road Racing Championship at Road Atlanta, a race for Mazdas that attracted “all the top drivers from Canada to California

. . . the best of the best.”

    Pilla had won that same race in 2003, though he hadn’t been back in the interim, rendering the successful defense of his eight-year-old title all the more satisfying.

    Sixty-four qualified (Pilla being third) and four, driving at speeds between 80 and 135 miles per hour, dueled for the top spot, with “the Car Doctor,” who avoided a wreck by veering onto the grass in the last lap, taking the checkered flag.

    “The accident was in the middle of the track. The other guy went right and I went left, onto the grass, pedal to the floor. People in the paddock were saying afterward that it was the ballsiest move they’d ever seen.”

    “The top four,” he added, “all finished within a couple of car lengths of each other. . . . It was like a swarm of bees at the start with those 64 cars going down the main straight.”

    Pilla, whose popular shop is on Scuttlehole Road in Water Mill, not far from the late lamented Bridgehampton Race Circuit, where he also used to compete, gave a lot of credit to his six-man crew. “There were two mandatory five-minute pit stops the drivers had to take. Even if you were ready to go in three minutes, you still had to wait the full five, behind the wall. The timing of these pit stops was important. After the second one, I came out 100 feet in front of the first-place car.”

    The ARRC championship crowned a singular season for Pilla that began when he and Harvey Siegel, who had commissioned him to convert the car temporarily into “a monster dragster,” broke the world MX5 Spec Mazda speed record at the Bonneville Flats in Utah.

    At the time, Pilla said, “Never before in history had this street car, which can only get up to 105 ordinarily, gone at such speeds [165 and change]. The record we broke was 157.9 miles per hour held by a factory Honda. . . . I’d be shocked if somebody tops our record.”

    To prepare for New Jersey and Road Atlanta — with a trip to a 13-hour Enduro in Virginia sandwiched in between — Pilla and his crew converted the sleek, flaming red-and-yellow sports car on whose hood his logo is emblazoned “from a straight-line dragster into a Spec road racer, redesigning the suspension and replacing the high-horsepower engine with a lower horsepower one because on road racing tracks you’re making lefts and rights and going up and downhill, not driving in a straight line.”

    His chief rival at the Motorsports Park, Yiannis Tsiounis, a Brazilian with whom he traded the lead many times before taking over on the final turn on the way to “a white-knuckle finish,” was reported to have said that Pilla had been the toughest opponent he’d ever raced against.

    He had just wanted to finish at the 13-hour Enduro at Siegel’s Virginia International Raceway in Danville, the Car Doctor said when asked how he’d done there. “There were four of us, though the others weren’t as fast as I was. Simply finishing — we were eighth over all, among 125 cars — was a huge accomplishment. I drove three stints of an hour and a half each.”

    Having done it all with his Mazda this summer and fall, Pilla said he and a couple of teammates would race this winter in Sebring, Fla., and Miami.

Thursday, November 24

RUNNING, Turkey Day races, 3 and 6 milers around Fort Pond, The Circle, Montauk, 10 and 10:10 a.m.

Saturday, November 26

RUNNING, Old Whalers Community House Fund 5K run-walk, West Water Street, Sag Harbor, 8:30 a.m.

Monday, November 28

GIRLS VOLLEYBALL, East End Waves tryouts for girls 11-through-18-years-old, Sportime at the Arena, Amagansett, 7-9 p.m.

Road Races

    Besides this morning’s 3 and 6-mile Turkey Day road races in Montauk, there will be a post-Thanksgiving 5K run-walk in Sag Harbor Saturday, starting and finishing at West Water Street in the village.

    The race, which is to benefit the Old Whalers Community House Fund, is to begin at 8:30 a.m. Registration will be held from 7:30.

Golf Champs

    Troy Smith recently won the men’s championship at the Sag Harbor Golf Club; Russell Miller was the senior men’s champion, and the men’s low qualifier was Mark Weinhardt.

    The women’s champion was Naree Dokjan. The senior women’s champion was Barbara Cirami.

    The following were elected as officers for the 2012 season: Bill Rozzi, president; Marshall Garypie III, vice president, and Read Vail, secretary-treasurer. Ed Early, Mark Vaughn, Paul Bailey, and Claire Blodorn were named to the board of governors.

    Steve Tseperkas, who coaches East Hampton High School’s wrestling team, is reasonably sure, with the exception of 285 pounds, “and possibly one or two other holes,” that he can fill most of the 15 weight classes this season, though, because the Bonackers are very young, he doesn’t expect much when it comes to the win column.

    Still, East Hampton, which lost eight seniors to graduation, Taylor Harned, Peter Johann, Cory Pawlukojc, and Kelly Kalbacher among them, has some interesting competitors this year as well, a group led by Mike Peralta, who, as a junior, was the sole underclassman from here to compete in the county tourney.

    Peralta, who weighs in at 145, as he did last year, “will be our go-to guy,” Tseperkas said during a practice session Friday.

    In the 2010 league tournament, Peralta defeated Rocky Point’s Matt Guerrisi in the quarterfinals, and, after getting pinned in the semis, wrestled back to third by decisioning Shoreham’s Joseph Bennett 6-3, thus avenging a loss by pin to Bennett in a dual meet.

    Peralta went on to lose in the first round of the counties to Bellport’s John Rose. At the time, Tseperkas said that of East Hampton’s county matches that one “was the biggest heartbreaker. . . . Mike was up 7-2 near the end of the second period when Rose got a reversal and put him on his back. That made it 7-6 going into the third period. Mike rode the kid out until the final 10 seconds when Rose hit a switch to win 8-7.”

    Peralta will get a chance to pay Rose back for that loss in the regular season, for East Hampton has moved up to League V with Islip, Bellport, Kings Park, Comsewogue, Huntington, Eastport-South Manor, and Harborfields. “We match up well with Harborfields,” Tseperkas said. “We’re wrestling them on Jan. 18, Senior Night.”

    Section XI, he added, has made the lightest and the heaviest weights — 99 and 285 — which used to be optional as far as dual meet scoring went, mandatory this season. “They’ve also increased the poundage by a bit, which should help kids make weight.” This year’s weights, he said, are 99, 106, 113, 120, 126, 132, 138, 145, 152, 160, 170, 182, 195, 220, and, as aforesaid, 285. They all go up by two more pounds on Christmas Day.

    “We’ve got 33 kids as of now, seven of them are new and nine of them are seniors, though three of those seniors [Milton Farez, Garrett Severance, from Pierson, and Deyvis Alvarez] have never wrestled before.”

    The seniors who have experience are Sawyer Bushman, at 120, Peralta, Christian Westergard, at 160, James Budd and Morgan Rojas, each at 170 for the moment, and Jacob Hands, at 182. Kevin Heim, a junior from Pierson who had “16 or 17 wins” last year, is also at 170 for the moment.

    Moreover, said Tseperkas, who coached the junior varsity boys soccer team to an undefeated season this fall, “we’ve got four kids from soccer — Denis Espana [a sophomore], Nelson Arcila [a sophomore], Bryan Ordonez [a junior], and Esteban Valverde [a freshman]. Valverde wrestled in junior high, the others are new, so they’ll be on the jayvee, but they’re picking it up quick — they’re strong kids.”

    Besides Peralta, Tseperkas is expecting Lucas Escobar, Bushman, and Budd to have good seasons as well. Bushman had 20-plus wins at 119 last winter and is expected to compete in the same class this time around. Escobar, a sophomore, went 26-6 at 106 pounds as a freshman.

    Tseperkas had hopes that Escobar and Bushman could win county tournament berths last year, but both lost in the league meet’s quarterfinal round. Escobar was upset 6-5 by Mount Sinai’s John Shlonsky, a wrestler he’d defeated twice before, and Bushman was caught in a cradle hold 20 seconds into his quarterfinal match with Shoreham’s T.J. Kluber.

    There’s a Kalbacher on this team as well, Colton, Kelly’s younger brother, who’s a ninth grader. He’ll probably wrestle at 126, said the coach. Kalbacher, Tseperkas added, had gone to “a 28-day wrestling camp at the University of Minnesota this summer.”

    Tseperkas took six others to a weeklong summer camp at Cornell — Peralta, Escobar, Heim, Hands, Rojas, and Gabe Vargas.

    The Frank (Sprig) Gardner tournament, named after the founder of collegiate-style wrestling, who began his career here and spent his retirement years here, is to be held at the high school on Dec. 10. “We’ll put all our varsity kids in it and some who wrestled in junior high last year who might wind up on the jayvee team,” said Tseperkas.

    Besides East Hampton, the tournament’s teams will be Westhampton Beach, Riverhead, Hauppauge, Ward Melville, Bayport-Blue Point, Southampton, St. John the Baptist, and Smithtown Christian.