Boys Soccer Eyes Upset, McGeehan’s Girls Go for Title
Monday was an eventful day insofar as East Hampton High’s girls volleyball and boys soccer teams went.
The girls, by virtue of a 3-0 sweep of Miller Place here that night, clinched at least a share of the league title, and remained undefeated, at 12-0. Westhampton Beach, its chief rival for the crown, is to play here today at 4 p.m.
Boys soccer, which finished the regular season at 7-7, pulled off an upset of sorts in defeating sixth-seeded Kings Park 1-0 Monday in a first-round Class A playoff game, thanks to a goal 15 minutes into the contest by Sebastian Fuquen, who, in salvaging a broken corner kick play, beat the home team’s goalie from the edge of the penalty box, booting home the bouncing ball that he’d headed to the ground.
The win set up a quarterfinal match at undefeated Elwood-John Glenn, the third seed, today, also at 4. East Hampton, which was seeded 11th among the bracket’s 12 teams, has improved greatly of late.
Amityville, the top seed, took the Bonackers to school in a regular-season finale here on Oct. 17, by a score of 4-0, though the good news was that it was a 1-0 game with 12 and a half minutes left to play. And that goal, scored in the 30th minute by the Warriors’ Kymani Hines, had come as the result of a pass by a defender across the goal mouth, a no-no in soccer, a mistake that Hines, always a threat to score, quickly capitalized on.
The visitors’ final flurry featured goals by Juan Ponce, who put a shot by Kurt Matthews from the left post, Henry Martinez, on a breakaway, and Hines again, with an assist from Martinez, the latter two being Amityville’s chief threats.
“We weren’t creating, not anticipating,” Don McGovern, East Hampton’s coach, said afterward. “They [the Warriors] were a good team.”
Amityville won a state championship in 2015, was the Long Island and Suffolk County champion in 2016, losing in the state semifinals, and lost to Hauppauge in a county semifinal last year.
Getting back to girls volleyball, East Hampton’s coach, Kathy McGeehan, wished Miller Place, Monday’s opponent, had put up a stronger fight than it did. Nevertheless, a win is a win.
The high-flying Bonackers won the first set 25-13, a game during which Madyson Neff served five consecutive aces. The visitors made East Hampton work more in the second set, which the home team wound up winning 25-13 as well. A kill by Julia Kearney from the left side of the net ended it.
The Bonackers, with a number of subs in the lineup, capped the sweep with a 25-15 win. Of those who came off the bench, Hannah Hartsough, a sophomore, was the most prominent, serving seven straight winners that extended the lead to 16-7.
East Hampton faced plenty of stiff competition, however, in an upstate tournament in Horseheads over the past weekend.
McGeehan said the team, having won four sets and lost two in pool play, made it to the quarterfinals of the gold bracket, the top one, losing 25-21 to Section V’s Our Lady of Mercy. “It was a tough battle,” she said, adding that “we played great defense. Molly Mamay, in particular, was outstanding, but we shot ourselves in the foot with four service errors. That, in the end, was the difference.”
In pool play, East Hampton defeated Section II’s Galway, the sixth-ranked Class D team in the state, 25-18, 26-24; defeated Section VI’s City Honors, the state’s sixth-ranked Class C team, 27-25, 25-16, and lost to Section IV’s Owego, the state’s fourth-ranked Class B team, 25-18, 25-19.
In another league match played last week, at Islip, East Hampton won 26-24, 25-22, 25-9, having overcome an 8-16 deficit in the first set. “It was great to see us remain calm and continue to battle on every point in that first set,” said McGeehan, “but you never want to be a slow-starting team.”