Tennis and Softball May Do Well

“It’s going to be so good this year,” Kathy Amicucci, coach of East Hampton High’s softball team, said at Friday’s indoor practice session when asked if the playoffs were in the offing.

Last year, her team came within one game of making them, finishing at 8-10, though the team, she said at the time, had been a joy to coach.

Among East Hampton’s returnees are its pitcher, Sam Merritt, its catcher, Maddie Schenck, its shortstop, Isabella Swanson, its center fielder, Rebecca Kuperschmid, and its first baseman, Ella Gurney. 

Merritt and Schenck have been battery mates the past four years. “She’s got all the pitches now, including a riser,” a frequent strikeout pitch in softball, Schenck said of Merritt, during Friday’s practice. 

Merritt, as a review of last year’s stories show, is also a heavy hitter at the plate. Her walk-off blast to the fence, which chased three runners home, enabled the Bonackers to beat Southampton 6-5 and put them within one game of the 2017 playoffs. 

Unfortunately, the ultimate regular-season opponent was league-leading Shoreham-Wading River, which dashed Bonac’s dreams by a score of 10-4.

With better pitching, and, presumably, even better hitting — Kuperschmid, Schenck, Gurney, and Merritt were the heart of last year’s lineup, in the third through sixth spots — Amicucci’s charges bid fair to avenge themselves on teams they lost to last year.

A scrimmage that was to have been held here with Southampton on March 13 was snowed out. A nonleague game with Bayport-Blue Point that was to have been played here Friday was scratched too. “We would have played there — they’ve got  a turf field — tomorrow,” Amicucci said, “but it’s going to be my son’s birthday.”

Assuming its field was playable — Amicucci and Schenck shoveled snow off the infield last Thursday — the Bonackers were to have had their initial outing in a scrimmage at Hampton Bays Tuesday. The league opener, at Port Jefferson, is to be played today. A game at Miller Place is scheduled for tomorrow. The team is to play at Mount Sinai Wednesday. Its first appearance at home is to be on Tuesday, April 3, with John Glenn, a game that is to begin at 10 a.m. Sayville is to play here on April 6, the day before the spring break ends.

Isabella Swanson, a senior — as are Merritt, Schenck, and Sophia Ledda — is also in her fifth year on the varsity. Gurney, Kuperschmid, Raven Biondo, Erin Decker, who’s up from the junior varsity, and Mary McDonald, also up from the jayvee, are juniors. A freshman from Springs, Katherine Osterberg, a catcher there, has been slotted in as a third baseman on the varsity.

Randi Cherill, East Hampton’s trainer, suggested that Amicucci ask Kim Hren, one of the best female ballplayers to come out of East Hampton, if she’d be her assistant. “I asked her and she said yes,” said the coach, who also may avail herself of the assistance of a slow-pitch softball teammate, Virginia McGovern, who coached for a time last year in Southampton.

Amicucci said she was hoping to get outside soon. “There’s only so much you can do inside,” she said.

The first Bonac team to see action this “spring” was boys tennis, which lost its league opener to Westhampton Beach here Monday by a score of 4-3 — in the absence of its third singles player, Luke Louchheim, who was sick, it should be noted.

Jonny De Groot, at one (as the result of besting Ravi MacGurn in an eight-game pro set ladder match), took a tough left-handed opponent, Danny Tucco, an all-state doubles player, to three sets, using a booming serve and some deft shot-making to his advantage. MacGurn, Jaedon Glasstein, and (by a hair) Brad Drubych won at second, third, and fourth singles, but all three doubles teams lost, making it clear where Kevin McConville, East Hampton’s new coach, should concentrate his effort.

At first doubles, Alex Wesley and Josh Kaplan lost 7-5, 6-2; James Fairchild and Mathew McGovern lost 6-3, 6-1 at two, and Hunter Medler and John Jimenez lost 6-3, 2-6, 6-1 at three.

With Louchheim in the lineup, the match could well have gone the other way. 

“We’ll get ’em next time,” McConville said.

The tennis team was to have played at Shoreham-Wading River yesterday, but yet another storm was predicted.