It Will Be Rebuilding in Caps for Coach McKee
It will be rebuilding in capital letters, Joe McKee, East Hampton High’s football coach, agreed during a conversation at The Star Monday, though, buoyed by the likelihood that Bonac once again will field a varsity team, he’ll welcome the challenge.
“At the moment, it looks good as far as our being placed in Division IV,” a league with schools having smaller enrollments than East Hampton’s, “though it’s not a done deal yet. . . . We should know for sure in early March.”
In the alternative, assuming East Hampton is not placed in Division IV by the county’s powers-that-be, McKee said he’d like to play independently, along with such schools as Southampton, McGann-Mercy, Greenport, and Port Jefferson. That alignment appeals to him most, in fact, insofar as competitiveness and travel time go.
As for competitiveness, “It’s not going to be easy,” the coach said, despite East Hampton’s enrollment advantage.
“It will be a long process. We had four freshmen, five sophomores, and four juniors when we began practicing this past August,” numbers that dwindled even further, resulting in the plug being pulled on football here for the second time in the past four years. “And the middle school only had 20 kids on the seventh and eighth-grade team.”
The decision, made by the coaches, the school district’s athletic director, and the district’s administration, to forgo football last fall “was not an easy one to make,” he added.
Lower turnouts for the sport — not only here, but nationwide — can be traced in part to safety worries. McKee said he was “more than reasonably assured” concerning that question. “Our equipment is the best . . . we’re taking the head out of the game by teaching proper tackling techniques . . . we’re limited by Section XI to the number of days in which full contact is allowed. . . .”
Moreover, along that line, a flag football program he began here two years ago “has grown. We had 70 [kindergarten through sixth-grade] kids the first year and 125 this past fall.”
Those popular Friday night sessions at East Hampton’s Herrick Park are overseen by the varsity and junior varsity coaches — McKee and his varsity assistants Ed McGintee and Lorenzo Rodriguez among them.
All of the above urged the 24 ninth through 11th graders who attended a meeting at the high school in late January to get into the weight room posthaste, which, said McKee, the prospective players have done. “We’ve been having nice showings in the weight room, from 10 to 15,” he said.
In the coming weeks bridging the end of winter sports and the beginning of spring ones, “we’re going to be throwing the football outside, and we’ll be in the gym when we’re not able to get outside,” McKee said, adding that “in the summer we’ll be doing agility and football-related drills three days a week.”
Given the sense of urgency involved, he expects attendance at these sessions to be good.
Also at the above-mentioned January meeting, each of the attendees was asked by the coaches to recruit at least one friend — a request that apparently has met with some success. “The kids have been telling me there are others who are interested,” the coach said.
Asked to name some of the other Division IV teams, McKee said, “Southampton, Mercy, Greenport, Port Jefferson, Hampton Bays, Center Moriches, Babylon, John Glenn, Shoreham-Wading River. . . . Miller Place was in it last year, though they’ve been going back and forth between Division III and IV. . . .”
“We’d play an eight-game schedule, but we’d forgo the playoffs for the first two years. After that I’d hope we’d be able to contend for them.”
Ideally, he said, he’d like to have a junior varsity as well.