Three Other Teams Celebrated Homecoming Victories
Besides football, three other Bonac teams — field hockey, boys soccer, and girls volleyball — celebrated homecoming victories this past weekend.
The boys soccer team, which is the defending county Class A champion, bested Miller Place 2-1 Saturday afternoon, a nice lead-in to the rout in football of Southampton. The girls volleyball team swept Rocky Point in three, and the field hockey team, in a Friday game whose second half was played under the lights, defeated Port Jefferson 2-1 thanks to a corner play goal by Amanda Calabrese in the final minutes.
When Rich King, the boys soccer coach, was told by an observer that his charges seemed “relentless” in the second half, he agreed, but added that “we weren’t relentless in the first half. . . . We were lucky to come out of it with a scoreless tie.”
Miller Place drew first blood, early in the second half, thanks to a defensive lapse in the goal mouth which allowed an unmarked player to tap in a cross from the right side, but the Bonackers came back — a 25-yard free kick by Nick West with 18 minutes left to play and a close-in blast by Donte Donegal six minutes later putting East Hampton over the top.
With three minutes to go, a puzzling call by the referees resulted in a dropped ball inside of East Hampton’s penalty box, but disaster was avoided, and as Gary Zay was in the midst of his final 10-second countdown, Denis Espana lofted a long clearing kick down the field.
Afterward, King, whose team recently played to a 1-1 tie with Jericho in a rematch of last year’s Long Island Class A championship game (from which Mario Olaya was absent owing to an erroneous red-carding), said that “any league win is very good, and the fact that it’s homecoming makes it all the nicer. I’m happy with our effort, and that we came from behind. These kids don’t like to lose — we’ve got a home winning streak going and that’s always on their minds.”
King lost six starters to graduation in June, and has only two seniors — J.C. Barrientos and Alex Serna — starting now. The rest are juniors and sophomores.
What we’ve got to do now,” the coach said, “is play the entire game the way we played today in the second half.”
As is the case with boys soccer, East Hampton’s field hockey team is quick and skilled, though as of Monday it was 2-2, the losses having come to Shoreham-Wading River and (a surprise) to Riverhead.
“We were right in the Shoreham game to the end,” said Becky Schwartz, the coach. “We had the ball in their circle for the entire final 10 minutes, one of our shots bounced off the post. I don’t know what happened against Riverhead — we were like a deer in headlights.”
Schwartz’s charges, with the former longtime coach Ellen Cooper and several of her 1989 Hall Of Fame field hockey players looking on, had 12 shots on Port Jeff’s goal in the first half — with Annie Kiley making good on one of them — and had eight corner plays to the visitors’ one.
Tammy Serabian, Port Jeff’s agile goalie, was the main reason the Bonackers didn’t score more.
Sophia DePasquale, a tall sophomore, was credited with assists on Kiley and Calabrese’s goals.
Schwartz and her assistant, Kalie Peters, only have three seniors on the squad. The rest are juniors and sophomores. Besides Kiley, Calabrese, and DePasquale, Katherine Wood, Alyssa Bahel, and Shannon McCaffrey were also notable that evening.
As East Hampton High School’s inaugural Hall of Fame class was being inducted in the school’s auditorium Saturday morning, the girls volleyball team, coached by Kathy McGeehan, was sweeping Rocky Point in the gym next door, 25-23, 25-22, 25-12.
Melanie Mackin and the setter, Raya O’Neal, led the way with 14 and 11 kills. O’Neal had 19 assists and Lydia Budd had 12. Those with the top serving percentages were Budd, Mackin, and O’Neal. Budd had nine digs, and Katie Brierley had eight.
As of Monday, East Hampton was in second place (as was Rocky Point) in League VI with a 2-1 record, behind Elwood-John Glenn, which was undefeated. Glenn recently swept the Bonackers, but McGeehan said her charges are looking forward to the rematch.