Coaches on Making Good Teams Better

Don McGovern and Kevin McConville, East Hampton High’s boys soccer and girls tennis coaches, have good teams, but they were thinking this week of ways in which they could become even better.

Girls tennis, which was to have had a showdown here with Westhampton Beach Monday, was 6-0 over all as of earlier that day, while boys soccer, at 3-1, was in second place in its league, behind only Amityville, which was 4-0.

During the halftime break in Saturday’s soccer game here with Rocky Point, McGovern told his players, a number of whom are familiar with futsal, soccer’s indoor version, that the outdoor game was different, that instead of playing the ball up in the air, they should bring it quickly down for passing on the ground. Leaving the ball in the air, McGovern said, was “a defender’s dream. . . . They get to play the ball and your body.”

The team’s 1-0 win was thanks to a perfect left-to-right cross by Sebastian Fuquen onto an onrushing Liam Leach, who buried it in the 50th minute of play. Asked afterward if the Bonackers had heeded his halftime advice, McGovern said, “Not all that much, but they’re improving. . . . I’m optimistic. Their ball-handling skills are superior, and they seem to be learning how to deal with these less-skilled, physical teams, which try everything they can to be disruptive and to score on counters and set plays where they can take advantage of their height. You saw how it was in that game with Sayville. Since then we’ve beaten Miller Place and now Rocky Point.”

Though McConville’s team was 6-0 going into Monday afternoon’s match, the opposition had not been all that great, he said earlier that day at the Hampton Racquet club, where he is the head pro.

When this writer said he thought the girls’ second serves could be improved pretty much across the board, the coach agreed, saying that in his opinion the second serve was “the most important shot in tennis. . . . They’re reluctant to accelerate the racket head across the ball. They’d rather swing slow than fast, and so they tap it. Becca [Kuperschmid, his senior number-one] and Juliana [Barahona, his sophomore number-two] have good second serves, but that’s about it. We’re working on it.”

With Kuperschmid, Barahona (a recent arrival from Colombia), Caroline Micallif, and Katie Annicelli, as its singles players, and with the doubles pairings of Olivia Baris and Chiara Bedini, Kaylee Mendelman and Samantha Schurr, and Annelise Mendelman and Eva Wojtusiak, East Hampton has been winning by lopsided margins, but McConville — who, in his first season here coached the boys to a share of the league title last spring — is not willing to let matters rest. “I’ve been working with a lot of them here” at the Racquet club, he said, “and I’ll continue to.”

The doubles teams, he said, had bought into the stagger system he’d taught to the boys last spring, with the teams’ players positioning themselves so as to take advantage of opportunities to close out points at the net, rather than contenting themselves with one player covering the baseline while the other stands statue-like at the net.

His first, third, and fourth singles players had been “rock solid,” McConville said, and the second, Barahona, who as yet speaks little English, has great potential.

He first became aware of her “on our first day of tryouts. . . . She was playing with the jayvee. . . . I heard sneakers squeak squeaking — ah, the sign of an athlete! I called her over to play in our tiebreaker winner-learner matches that we have. If you’re up in the tiebreaker when I blow the whistle, you stay on the court, if you’re trailing, you move down one. Juliana started out on the last court and moved all the way up to the top one where Becca beat her.”

McConville was told that Barahona’s father, Julian, who has played with the topflight men’s soccer teams here, “was a semipro player in Colombia.” “When I asked her if she was a ninth grader or a 10th grader, I said I was hoping she was a ninth grader, for then I’d have her for four years. She hits good topspin groundstrokes from the baseline, and she can slice her backhand too. She’s a fighter and she can move. We’re working on down-the-line, forcing approach shots and dropshots that take her opponent out of her comfort zone when she gets short balls.”

Similarly, Bedini has been working her way up in the doubles lineup, starting as a member of the third team.

The coach said he was thinking of reconstituting his first doubles team Monday, given its disappointing loss to Eastport-South Manor, the result of being sucked into too many moon ball exchanges. “The other team had nothing to hurt my girls. . . . We weren’t picking the right ball to attack. We’d either get into playing their game or get impatient and hit everything hard . . . and either bury our shots in the net or hit them out.”

East Hampton has two sister pairings, the Annicellis, Katie being a junior and Casey being a ninth grader, and the Mendelmans, Kaylee being a junior and Annelise being a senior. 

Cathrine Lefevre, a sophomore, is also on the roster, as are Nicole Lopez, Eve Marsden, and Sara Morgan, who have largely been playing on Fausto Hinojosa’s junior varsity team.

Back to boys soccer, Leach’s goal, a career-first, which proved to be all the team needed to beat Rocky Point, was picture-perfect as he deposited the low cross from Fuquen into the lower right corner of the nets with 30 minutes left to play in the game. Zane Musnicki, a wide-roaming senior defender, a force on both defense and offense, had a number of good opportunities thereafter, but could not finish.

The senior goalie, Kurt Matthews, was his usual staunch self, punching out free kicks and corner kicks. He was downed in so doing in the 56th minute, but after lying on the ground for a while, remained in the game. His best save was his last, when, with a half-minute left, Matthews foiled a Rocky Pointer’s credible bid for a tie.

“It was a great effort,” McGovern told the team afterward. “It came down to who wanted it more. Liam buried that shot. Who’s it going to be in the next game? It takes a team.”

McGovern agreed that East Hampton did not have a scorer along the lines of Mario Olaya, Ernesto or Esteban Valverde, or Nick West this fall, “but there are guys who are stepping up. We’re beginning to play well as a team, I think we’ll continue to grow.”

Musnicki, off a throw-in, Fuquen, with an assist from Musnicki, and Brian Gonzalez, with an assist from Christopher Pintado, had scored in the win over Miller Place, the coach said.