Bonac Football Will Go It Alone
Joe Vas, the East Hampton School District’s athletic director, said last Thursday that East Hampton would go it alone in the fall when it comes to football.
Joe McKee, who has been trying mightily for the past few years to revive Bonac’s program, which dates to 1923, was undoubtedly pleased with the turnout of 34 footballers at an after-school meeting held at the high school’s cafeteria on Feb. 5.
Vas said he wasn’t sure how many juniors, sophomores, and freshmen there were, “but it was a great turnout.” The current eighth graders, numbering about six, said the A.D., didn’t attend, “but we have their names.”
As reported last week, Vas and Southampton High’s athletic director, Darren Phillips, proposed to Section XI’s conference placement committee that East Hampton, with the Ross School also in the mix, combine with the Mariners (who already are combined with Pierson and Bridgehampton) and play in Conference IV, vying for the playoffs.
The placement committee said no to that, said Vas, whose sense of a recent convocation of 50 or so South Fork parents at Pierson High in Sag Harbor was that “Southampton’s parents and leadership weren’t interested in combining if it meant forgoing the playoffs.”
“So, we’re not going to combine,” he said. “We’re going to go it alone, as we did last year. Darren and I may revisit combining next year, but for the moment our goal is to field a varsity and a junior varsity if we can. We’ll play in Conference IV and forgo the playoffs. . . . At the worst, we’ll have a varsity with no jayvee, though, as I said, it would be good to have both.”
The football program here, as has been the case elsewhere on Long Island, has been skating on thin ice. The last time a Bonac football team made the playoffs was in the fall of 2012, when Bill Barbour was the coach. There was a varsity the next year, but then, owing to a lack of numbers, things began heading south.
There was no team in 2014 — only the fourth time in the school’s history that that had happened; there were varsities in 2015 and ’16, but no team in ’17, and no varsity this past fall either, though there was a junior varsity coached by McKee and his assistant, Lorenzo Rodriguez.
That team improved steadily after losing in its first two outings, to Hampton Bays and Bayport-Blue Point.
“For half the kids on the team that game at Hampton Bays was the first they’d ever played,” Bob Budd, a longtime volunteer coach, said at East Hampton’s homecoming game with William Floyd’s freshman team at the end of September.
Floyd, a football power, plays in Conference 1, a conference that, without dispensation of some sort, a combined South Fork team would be kicked up to if enrollment were the sole criterion.
The Bonackers beat Floyd freshmen — “as good as any jayvee team East Hampton will see this season,” according to Floyd’s A.D., Mark Mensch — 30-18.
And, in its final game of the season, at the end of October, the Bonackers lost 41-40 at Southampton, Bonac’s archrival since the early 1920s. McKee, following a 56-yard Topher Cullen to Christian Johnson touchdown pass play, went for the win, but Kevin Bunce was stopped just short of the goal line on an extra-point play in the final minute.
As for the recent player meeting, McKee said he definitely was pleased with the turnout of 34, “and there were even some more kids who for one reason or another weren’t able to come, not to mention the half-dozen football-playing eighth graders who didn’t attend.”
“My plan,” he added, “is to have a varsity and a jayvee. The next thing is to get them into the weight room with Lorenzo and my brother Kelly. Then, in late May or early June, we’ll begin informal workouts.”
As for combining, “The Section told us that if we wanted to combine we would go to Conference 1,” with schools like Floyd, Ward Melville, Connetquot, and Longwood. “We’re staying in Conference IV and forgoing the playoffs. . . . We have talent, no question about it.”