25 Years Ago in Bonac Sports: 11.29.18

November 18, 1993

Ellamae Gurney, the right wing, whose goal enabled East Hampton High’s field hockey team to upset the high-riding Miller Place Panthers in the county small schools final, came through again in Saturday’s Long Island championship game with Carle Place, netting a corner-play shot five minutes before halftime. And that proved to be all Bonac needed to keep the Frogs from turning into a Final Four team.

Tom McGlade, a 29-year-old triathlete who lives part time in Amagansett, made a notable marathon debut in New York on Sunday.

Despite an inevitably slow start amid the crush of 27,000-plus bodies coming off the Verrazano Bridge into Brooklyn, McGlade wound up finishing 347th (330th male) in 2 hours, 51 minutes, and 54 seconds.

. . . It was not the fastest New York marathon run by a South Forker — Ray Charron, who now lives in Hawaii, holds the unofficial record at 2:37:33. But McGlade’s time drew plaudits from two veterans: John Conner, a Springs developer who holds the world 55-to-59-year-old indoor mile record (4:53.02), and Cliff Clark of Shelter Island, who trains just about every serious runner out here, of whatever age.

“Spectacular,” said Conner, “considering it probably took him five minutes to get to the line, and considering the heat. When Ray did it, there were about half the people they have now. When I ran, in ’78 and ’79, there were 11,000 and that was a zoo.”

. . . Asked to compare marathoning with triathloning, McGlade said, “A marathon breaks your body down. In a triathlon run, even in the half-Ironman I did, you’re not pounding away at a six-minute pace. It’s a totally different feeling.”

It took McGlade “about 10 minutes to get through the first mile,” and after that, he knew he wouldn’t be able to meet his 2:45 goal. It wasn’t until the second mile that he got into a 6:00-to-6:15 pace.

November 25, 1993

With 29 seconds to go in the first overtime period in a New York State Class C field hockey semifinal played Friday under the lights on Hartwick College’s AstroTurf field, Akron’s Andrea Zurio’s corner-play shot caromed sharply off a defender’s stick, beating Erika Vargas to the right side of the cage, leaving Bonac’s players and faithful (over 200 East Hampton students and parents had made the trip upstate) stunned. 

Sudden victory, sudden death . . . call it what you will, East Hampton’s season was suddenly over.

Bridget Behan’s goal, which tied the score at 1-1 with little more than a minute left in regulation, was her 15th of the season, one shy of Jennifer Vish’s school record. That goal and her “terrific all-around play” that night earned her a berth on the all-state tournament team.

“We played with a lot of heart,” Ellen Cooper, East Hampton’s coach, said. “One thing we have is guts — you can’t take that away from a team. They showed me they had it when they came back. If we’d lost 1-0 in regulation, it would have been devastating, but that goal made everything okay. We dominated the [10-minute] overtime, and lost on a stupid penalty corner. What are you gonna do? In my book, we won.”