Spirits Unbowed Though W’s Few
The East Hampton High School baseball team was to have gotten one more chance at a nonleague win at Bayport-Blue Point Tuesday as it heads into league play, with Westhampton Beach, next week.
Despite the three losses, to Mattituck, Southampton, and Shoreham-Wading River — the latter a Long Island champion in three of the past four years — Vinny Alversa, the Bonackers’ head coach, was upbeat. “We’re scoring more, we’re hitting more, and our strikeouts are down,” he said during a telephone conversation Tuesday morning.
Though blanked 8-0 at Shoreham on March 27, Alversa said that “it was much closer than the score indicated. It shoulda been 4-0 if we’d played better defense, if some fly balls hadn’t been misjudged.”
Jackson Baris, his starter, “pitched great — he only gave up three earned runs. It was 7-0 when he came out after five innings. Colin Ruddy [the freshman first baseman] finished up.”
“We were swinging the bat,” the coach said in reply to a question. “There were no strikeouts.”
Shoreham, he said, scored in three of the game’s seven innings. It had been, he said, a decent ballgame all in all.
The Bonackers also lost last week to Southampton, a League VIII team like Mattituck — Shoreham and Bayport are League VII teams, East Hampton is in League VI.
“I’d like to have that one back,” Alversa said of the 18-4 loss. “When you walk 15 or 16 people, it’s hard to win.”
Elian Abreu, who otherwise plays third base, started, but “could not find the strike zone, which isn’t typical of him — he only walked 11 in 41 innings in summer ball.”
Westhampton Beach is to open the league season here Tuesday. Game time is 4:30 p.m.
East Hampton’s softball team as of Monday had one win, over Elwood-John Glenn, and had lost three, the latest a 15-0 shellacking on Monday at Miller Place, the League V leader at the moment.
A nonleague game with Mattituck here Friday went down to the wire, however, with the Tuckers winning it 10-8 as the result of a three-run home run to center field by Jaden Thompson with two outs in the top of the seventh.
Annemarie Cangiolosi Brown, who was not immediately available for comment, and her fellow coach, Melanie Anderson, are in the midst of rebuilding the program.
As is the case also when it comes to girls lacrosse, whose head coach, Jessica Sanna, has a physical education job now in the district, at the John M. Marshall Elementary School. That, she said during a conversation this week, ought to bring some stability to the program, which has had several head coaches in the past several years.
East Hampton, she said, received a preseason ranking of 24 among Division II’s 25 schools, and thus could expect a number of mismatches. “It’s a tough league,” Sanna said.
But the good news is that the team, which includes four players from Pierson — Sophia Bitis, an attack who was forced by anterior cruciate ligament surgery to sit out last season, Grace Perello, a sophomore who handles the draws, Emma Rascelles, a precocious eighth grader, and Kristin Pettigrew — has often been finding the nets, a recent 18-8 loss to Longwood and an 18-7 loss to Hauppauge providing evidence of that.
Others on Bonac’s squad are Ella Bistrian, a ninth grader, Stella McCormack, Rorey Murphy, the goalie, Anna Hugo, Tiffany Taylor, Lucy Short, Asha Hokanson, and Marilyn Bruehl, all sophomores, Tiana Treadwell, a junior, and Emily Lupercio and Kenverly Munoz, seniors.
The boys and girls track seasons began last week, with both teams losing to their Westhampton Beach counterparts — the boys by 81-60 and the girls by 87-56.
Concerning the latter loss, Yani Cuesta, the girls coach, said that, given the fact she had a lot of new kids (as apparently is the case too with Ben Turnbull’s boys team) and was still trying to assess their strengths, it had been a pretty good showing.
“We did extremely well in the field events,” Cuesta said. “Jen Ortiz P.R.’d and was third in the triple jump at 31 feet 5 inches. In the shot-put Paige Schaeferwas was second and Helen Barranco was third. They reversed those positions in the discus, with Helen second at 73-11 and Paige third at 70-1. Bella Espinoza won the pole vault, at 8-0, Grace Brosnan was second in the high jump, at 4-6, and Lillie Minskoff won the long jump, at 14-4, with Ortiz third, at 13-6.”
On the track, said Cuesta, Ava Engstrom won the 3,000-meter and 800-meter races; Mimi Fowkes and Jiji Kramer were second and third in the 1,500-meter racewalk, behind Westhampton’s Natalie Ehlers, the fifth-ranked racewalker in the nation; Bella Tarbet was second in the 1,500; Brosnan was second in the 400 intermediate hurdles, and Minskoff was third in the 100 and 200.
“We’re very, very excited about the season,” Cuesta said in signing off.