East End Sharks Taking to the Ice

Cory Lillie and Kyle Solomon, two recent college graduates who left East Hampton High School early to focus on ice hockey as they continued with their studies — Solomon at Portledge Academy in Nassau and Lillie with a big-time junior travel team in New Jersey — are to begin coaching in the coming weeks at the Buckskill Winter Club the first East Hampton-based travel hockey team since the 1940s. 

"We'll not play in the Suffolk high school league [based at the Rinx in Hauppauge] until the 2015-16 year," Lillie said this week, "but we're hoping to line up some exhibition games in January and February, some away, some home, to get things going. You can't expect kids to practice for three months and not get to play."

At an introductory meeting Lillie held at Buckskill on Nov. 3, "about a dozen kids showed up. We've got 17 at the moment -- 10 of them from Southampton, a couple from Sag Harbor, and several from East Hampton -- though we hope to have at least 20 by the time practices begin in the first week of December, weather permitting."

Lillie said he was confident other East Hamptoners would show up once the word got around.

"We'll be known as the East End Sharks, and we hope to make it as affordable as possible. The fee is $200, which will cover their jerseys and the first month of ice time, which Doug and Katharine De Groot [Buckskill's owners] are subsidizing."

Lillie hopes to obtain nonprofit status in order to encourage businesses to donate, and to fund-raise in other ways so that the sport will become accessible to all who want to play. At the moment, he estimates the costs could be $100 per month, "absent donations and money from fund-raisers, which we intend to pursue."

Among those interested thus far are some with roller hockey experience, which Lillie said does not necessarily translate given that ice hockey is the quicker, more complicated, and more physical game.

"Since we have a broad age range -- our youngest are 11 or 12 and our oldest are high school seniors -- we'll emphasize the fundamentals and safety," Lillie said.

Both his and Solomon's pro ice hockey ambitions took hits in college. Concussions ended Solomon's career at the University of Maine, where he matriculated after playing at Portledge and with the national-champion Boston Junior Bruins and the Cedar Rapids Rough Riders. He was being eyed by the Los Angeles Kings when his career at UMaine ended. That university, Solomon added, "is always in the top 10 and has one of the top winning percentages in N.C.A.A. tournament play. . . . Two of my teammates, Gustav Nyquist of the Detroit Red Wings, and Brian Flynn of the Buffalo Sabres, are now in the N.H.L., and my closest friend when I was with the Cedar Rapids team, Alec Martinez, scored the Stanley Cup-clinching goal against the Rangers this past winter."

Solomon and Lillie said they'd like to have some well-known N.H.L. players give clinics here in the future. 

Lillie's career on the ice -- "I had never thought I'd be able to play in the N.H.L., but I was looking forward to playing in Europe or Australia" -- was derailed by a periodically dislocated kneecap. "It wasn't the result of contact -- it happened several times, twice following months of rehabbing, so, in my sophomore year at Boston's Wentworth Institute of Technology, I packed it in."

A painful experience for him undoubtedly, as he was that Division III school's high-scorer among its 15 freshmen the previous year. 

Buckskill hired him in September, said Lillie, "with the idea in mind that I'd take over the hockey program, and I recruited Kyle, who was living in Utah. I like it that we, the two from here, who seriously pursued ice hockey careers, are running this program."

They'll also be assisted by Scott Rawson, an East Hamptoner who played ice hockey as a boy in Maine, and by Kelly Brennan, a Ross School teacher from upstate who played goalie at Berkshire Academy. She will work with Khloe Goncalves, a 16-year-old East Hampton High School student who already has made a name for herself tending goal for national-champion roller hockey teams.

Goncalves plays in the Sportime Arena's adult roller hockey league with Tyler Jarvis's Green team, which lost 4-3 to the Blue team in the fall final there on Nov. 11. Lillie and Solomon are also playing in that league, on Vinnie Alversa's Orange team, which went winless in this fall's regular season, but, with Lillie and Solomon aboard, ought to fare better this winter.