J.V. Bonac Footballers Lit It Up

William Floyd’s junior varsity freshman football team, with about 40 suited up, probably thought that East Hampton’s jayvee would be easy pickings at Friday night’s homecoming game under the lights, but, as it turned out, the Bonackers lit up the place on their way to winning 30-18.

It was the first win of the season for Joe McKee’s team, which had lost 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 mainstay of East Hampton football program, said during the halftime break. 

Mark Mensch, Floyd’s athletic director, who used to be the trainer here, said, when questioned Monday, that the team Floyd sent was “an all-freshman team . . . we’ve also got an all-sophomore jayvee too, though our freshmen are as good as any jayvee East Hampton will see this fall, absolutely.”

Agreeing that it had been a big win for the Bonackers, Mensch added, “We’re happy to do anything we can to bring back Bonac football.”

The visitors were leading 18-8 going into the fourth quarter, after making good on an 11-play, 85-yard drive near the end of the third. But then things began to go East Hampton’s way as Bonac’s defenders, with Christian Johnson chief among them, began to strip the ball from Floyd’s rushers.

A fumble recovery led to the first of East Hampton’s three fourth-quarter scores, a 30-yard run by Danny Ortiz, and another strip not long afterward keyed an 85-yard fumble return by Santi Maya, a defensive back, that treated the home team to a 20-18 lead, to which Ortiz tacked on two extra points.

Maya’s was the second of three electrifying dashes that night, Johnson’s 90-yard carry down the home team’s sideline near the end of the first quarter being the first. Topher Cullen, the quarterback, added 2 points to Johnson’s score, for an 8-6 lead entering the second period, but East Hampton was not to lead again until the strip-and-run heroics of the fourth.

Maya’s score had the homecoming crowd cheering mightily, and slightly more than a minute later it was Kevin Bunce’s turn as he picked up the ball, which had been coughed up at East Hampton’s 25, and ran with it unmolested all the way into the Colonials’ end zone. East Hampton’s third 2-point conversion capped the wild comeback.

“The kids were thrilled,” McKee said during a conversation Monday. “William Floyd’s a big Conference 1 school. We’re definitely seeing improvement in every game.” 

Floyd had a very strong and fast running back who was hard to bring down, “but our defense, while it bent, didn’t break,” said McKee. “Then they began to make mistakes and we took advantage.”

While the game was played under the lights — on portable stanchions leased for the occasion — they were relatively low, which made passing difficult. There were only one or two open-field receptions during the course of the, for Bonac fans, joyous night.

Four Inducted

The next day, three former East Hampton football players, Justin Winter, Michael Sarlo, and Zach Brenneman, were inducted into the school’s Hall of Fame, along with Randi Cherill, who recently retired after a 16-year career as the school’s trainer.

Winter, who graduated in 1982, still holds the school’s 400-meter dash record, at 48.1 seconds, and, with three others, the 4-by-100 relay record of 44.4.

Bob Budd and the former track and football coach, Mike Burns, spoke for the Virgin Islands-born Winter, who lives in Riverhead now, where he heads an electrical contracting company, coaches youth football, and is an associate pastor of the House of Praise Christian Revival Center.

When Budd, in recounting East Hampton’s county championship win over Riverhead, said the Bonackers had won 27-7, Winter, from his seat in the audience, said, “Twenty-seven to six.”

“He had lightning speed,” Budd recalled. “He rushed for 100 or more yards in seven of our games, and 95 in the other, against Westhampton.”

Winter’s plaque says that after earning a full football scholarship to Syracuse, to which he’d transferred from Hobart, he was drafted as a wide receiver by the New York Giants, a stint cut short by injury. 

“You never, never had to ask Justin to work hard,” Burns said. “He never put himself first . . . you were unbelievable.”

Similar praise was rendered by Ralph Naglieri, who spoke for Brenneman, a former professional lacrosse player and collegiate all-American at Notre Dame, and by Jim Nicoletti, East Hampton’s former baseball coach, who spoke for Sarlo, now the town’s police chief.

Sarlo’s plaque says he was “a defensive standout in football, basketball, and baseball, captained the 1988 league-champion basketball and baseball teams, was a member of the National Honor Society, and, as the town’s police chief, continues to give back to this day.”

Nicoletti said it had taken a Major Leaguer — Ross Gload — to break the runs-batted-in record of 44 that Sarlo once held.

“There was never a day,” Cherill’s plaque says, “when her office wasn’t packed with kids, some of whom needed care, but most of whom simply wanted to hang out with Randi. . . . Though her nickname was ‘Part Time,’ she is truly full time in our hearts.”

Saturday’s inductions bring to 69 the number of the Hall’s individual members. Ten teams have been inducted, as well.