Look Again, Section XI

A fan at Saturday's East Hampton High School football game observed at halftime that it somehow wasn't right that East Hampton was playing the likes of North Babylon, Comsewogue, and Harborfields. "They should be playing in the league they always played in, an East End league with Southampton and Greenport and Hampton Bays," he said.

Unfortunately, with combined high school sports, things have changed. East Hampton is now joined in a number of sports, including football, with Pierson (Sag Harbor) and Bridgehampton High Schools. The idea was to open up sports participation to more students, and that, of course, is a good idea. But, with East Hampton's increasing enrollment, and with Section XI's apparent failure to take into account how few athletes the grade schools feed into the high schools, Bonac sports programs can apparently look forward in the near future to an absurd elevation to Class A competition reserved for schools with enrollments exceeding 801 students. Spring track got the word this week.

Lest a double-bind be created in which youngsters are encouraged to come out for teams that continually get pounded by behemoths and in which the teams must content themselves at best with .500 seasons, Section XI should look again at the numbers.