The Year in Sports: On the Move Again in 2022

Covid continued clinging when the 2022 winter sports season began here — because of it East Hampton High School’s basketball teams were paused in January, which resulted in the boys playing an exhausting eight games in 10 days at the season’s end — but soon thereafter the constraints of the past two years were shrugged off as local athletes went toe-to-toe again in scholastic competitions, rubbed elbows again in road races, which attracted unusually high turnouts, and, when it came to athletic ambitions, frequently put their best feet forward.

As for firsts in 2022, a few things come immediately to mind: Lori King’s 23.9-mile swim between Block Island and Montauk, the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter Hurricane youth swim team’s Y state championship, Jane Brierley’s state championship in the 100-yard breaststroke, the East Hampton High School girls cross-country team’s league championship, and the 45-year-old teaching pro Paul Dickinson’s appearance in a major professional golf tournament, the P.G.A. championship.

King’s feat was called “the local Everest of swimming” by Sinead FitzGibbon, one of 14 in the 47-year-old Amagansetter’s crew. King, who has a Catalina Channel crossing to her credit among many other long-distance swims, said afterward that she could not have done it without them. “When you see everyone who has worked so hard so you can get there, you just can’t give up.”

Asked about her state championship swim, Jane Brierley said, “Honestly, when I touched the finish pad I had to look up at the board to see who won. There were three of us ahead of the pack, neck and neck the whole way. My legs felt like they’d fallen off. I could hardly walk up to the podium.” Swimming, especially the breaststroke, “which you have to be born to, I guess,” made her sore, she said, “but I like being sore because, hopefully, it means I’m making progress.”

In her 31 years of coaching girls cross-country here, Diane O’Donnell said she thought at least a half-dozen of her teams were capable of winning league championships, but none had until 2022 — by 1 point over Westhampton Beach, as it turned out, a 27-28 victory assured by East Hampton’s third (Zion Osei), fourth (Emma Tepan), and fifth (Briana Chavez) runners, all of whom outdid themselves by at least 20 seconds.

Asked in May if he were thrilled to have qualified for the P.G.A. Championship,  Dickinson, a popular teaching pro at the Atlantic Golf Club in Bridgehampton and Montauk Downs, said, with a smile, “Absolutely — I’ve been trying for 30 years.”

The fact that he gave so many lessons didn’t give Dickinson much time to work on his game, one of his playing partners, John Kernell, said when the news became known. “That makes qualifying for a major even harder and even more noteworthy. For a P.G.A. teaching pro to qualify for the P.G.A. Championship is a great achievement.”

There were other notable individual performances here in the year past.

Ryan Fowkes, who has been setting long-distance records at George Washington University, set two records, winning the Montauk Mile in four minutes and 26.77 seconds, and winning the Thanksgiving Day Turkey Trots’ six-miler in 29:25.04.

Noah Avallone, 15, a part-time Montauker, was named to the United States’s 2022-23 snowboarding rookie team in half-pipe, furthering his ambitions to compete in the 2026 Olympics in Cortina, Italy.

Crystal Winter, a 2002 East Hampton High graduate, played on the silver-medal-winning women’s flag football team in the World Games, a showcase for sports that may be Olympic ones in the future.

Amanda Calabrese, in her eighth world lifesaving competition, in Riccione, Italy, enjoyed three top-10 finishes.

Eric Armijos, an East Hampton senior, was named to the all-region, all-state, all-county, all-conference, and all-league boys soccer teams, the first East Hampton soccer player to be so honored since Nick West, who went on to lead the country in scoring when he played for Messiah University.

Caeleigh Schuster, an East Hampton ninth grader, was named as Division II’s field hockey goalie-of-the-year.

And Alan Patricof, 88, who walked the 26.2 miles at a brisk pace — and who, because of an old hamstring injury that flared up, hopped between mile 20 and 22 — was told he was the oldest finisher at the New York City Marathon in November.

When it came to teams in 2022, eight of the 11 that East Hampton High fields in the fall made the postseason, seven of them with winning records. The boys soccer team, coached by Don McGovern, won its first league title in eight years. Max Astilean, the 17-2 boys tennis team’s number-one, won the division singles title, the first time since Matt Rubenstein did so in 2004. The field hockey team, coached by Samantha James, was a county finalist, losing 4-3 to Rocky Point in overtime. The baseball team, coached by Vinny Alversa, made the playoffs for the first time since 2011. Bridgehampton High, coached by Lou Liberatore, fielded a varsity baseball team for the first time in 43 years. And the Pierson (Sag Harbor) High School boys basketball team, coached by Will Fujita, played in a state Final Four for the first time in 44 years.

Oh, and the Writers erased a 16-run deficit in the bottom of the ninth inning of the Artists and Writers Softball Game to win 19-18, a comeback for the ages, one without precedent in Major League history. Rabbi Josh Franklin’s bases-loaded ground-rule double, “the shot heard ’round the Reutershan Parking Lot,” wrote finis to the most bizarre Artists and Writers Game ever played.  

Afterward, Leif Hope, the Game’s 93-year-old impresario, called down a plague on both houses, on the Writers for having wanted to throw in the towel in the eighth, and on the Artists for having played egregiously in crunch time.