Point of View: The Sound of Athletes

“The fields are alive with the sound of athletes,” I sang, in my best Julie Andrews imitation, to Mary, who was happy the other day to hear it.

Girls and boys were playing soccer, and the football team was doing agility drills on the turf, and on the varsity baseball diamond it was East Hampton versus East Hampton — Vinnie Alversa’s gray team against Brian Turza and Mike Rodriguez’s maroons.

Alversa said that perhaps it’s been a dozen years since East Hampton had Senior (13-to-15-year-old) League teams. I don’t think I recall East Hampton High’s fields being so intensely used in the summertime. And that’s not to mention that three softball teams of seventh-through-12th graders, got together by Jason Biondo and Rich Swanson, are playing each other at East Hampton’s Herrick Park Tuesday and Thursday evenings. Or that cross-country runners meet at the track every Tuesday evening with John Conner, a former age-group recordholder in the mile.

When at a recent school board meeting Jim Nicoletti said he feared that the Bonac athletic program was, for various reasons, in a bad way, I worried that I might not have much to attract my attention hereafter. Nicoletti, to underline his case, had pointed out, for one, that three varsity coaches had been ousted as the result of parent-spearheaded drives that had outflanked the athletic director in the past 18 months, and that, consequently, at least some young teachers were reluctant to give coaching a try until tenure were accorded them.

He added, moreover, that the administration had in some cases he knew of passed over Bonac-born-and-bred applicants who had returned here to teach, and that given the fact most teachers now live up the Island, it stood to reason they would want to leave at 3 p.m. rather than coach a team.

And yet there is this seeming renaissance of sorts that greeted my eyes the other day. . . .

Obviously, inasmuch as it constitutes a great part of my life, I hope the ship of sport here will be righted. I’ve not had much of a spring in my step the past three springs. It hasn’t just been softball, but baseball and lacrosse as well.

It’s not so much the winning (though that is nice) I yearn for — it’s a competitive spirit. The Pierson girls basketball players had it, though they weren’t world-beaters. They — at least in the game I saw in Bridgehampton’s gym — were fiery and scrappy. What most spectators want to see is a good game. What most players want is a good game.

May we field teams again who, win or lose, give their opponents good games.