A number of East Hampton High School teams, boys soccer, boys volleyball, boys and girls cross-country, field hockey, and girls tennis among them, continued to be competitive last week, with the fall season nearing the midway mark.
With a 4-1 win here over Bayport-Blue Point Friday, the boys soccer team improved its record to 5-0-0 and clinched a playoff berth. Earlier in the week, the team, coached by Don McGovern, defeated Miller Place 6-1, also in a home game half of which was played under the lights.
Miller Place and Bayport tried to stay behind the ball, faced, as they were, with East Hampton’s relentless short-passing attacks, “though Bayport came out higher,” said McGovern, adding that his team led only 1-0 at the half of Friday’s game. “We scored three times inside the box in the second half,” he said. Today’s game at Comsewogue, which also is undefeated in league play, “ought to give us a good indication of where we are.”
Going into this week, 10 different players had scored goals for the team, though Eric Armijos, who had three on Friday, Michael Figueroa, John Bustamente, and Gary Gutama remain the chief threats.
The field hockey team on Friday improved its record to 5-2, edging Pierson in a shootout that followed 70 minutes of fierce, scoreless play on the Sag Harbor team’s grass field at Mashashimuet Park. The teams’ center backs, Meredith Spolarich of the Whalers and Chloe Coleman of the Bonackers, frequently led the charge with strong free hits to their forwards, but neither goalie, Caeleigh Schuster of East Hampton and Cali Wilson of Pierson, was called on to make a save in the 60 minutes of regulation time.
Schuster parried two shots early in the 10-minute 7-on-7 overtime period, after which the Whalers came up empty on two successive corner plays. East Hampton, likewise, was awarded back-to-back penalty corners near the end of overtime, but to no avail. Coleman, with Lily Perello defending, was dribbling the ball into Pierson’s circle when time expired.
The shootout, a one-on-one 10-second duel in which a shooter from one team, dribbling in from the 25-yard line, vied with the other team’s onrushing goalie, was rendered all the more dramatic by the fact that the sun was getting lower in the sky and 60 spectators were hovering anxiously in the shadows along the right sideline.
First up for East Hampton was Melina Sarlo, who easily put a shot past the advancing Wilson. The first to go for Pierson, Eleana Merola, was blanked as Schuster made a sliding save. Wilson saved the first shot that Bonac’s Emma McGrory got off, but McGrory niftily backhanded the rebound over Wilson’s pads into Pierson’s cage for a 2-0 East Hampton lead, after which Schuster rushed out to parry successive tries by Spolarich and Eva McKelvey, assuring East Hampton of a hard-earned 2-0 win.
Samantha James, East Hampton’s coach, said amid the postgame celebration that “the same thing happened to us at Shoreham-Wading River two days ago, but there were two shootout rounds in that one.”
“Fabulous,” said Josh Brussell, when asked by phone Sunday how his boys volleyball team had been doing. “We’re 5-2 and haven’t lost yet to a small school.”
East Hampton swept a good Westhampton Beach team 3-0 here last Thursday, a game in which Cash Muse, a powerful hitter, played despite a sore hip. Brussell added that East Hampton had a win over Connetquot, a large school and one of the division’s top three, in a set played at a recent invitational tournament at Smithtown West High School. East Hampton and Connetquot are to play a best-of-five match at Connetquot Monday.
East Hampton’s cross-country teams were undefeated — the boys at 3-0 and the girls at 2-0 — going into this week. The boys defeated Rocky Point 24-34 at Sunken Meadow State Park in Kings Park on Sept. 20. “It was the same as it was with Hills West,” said East Hampton’s coach, Kevin Barry. “Rocky Point had the first and second runners, we had the next six — Brayan Rivera, Liam Fowkes, Wyatt Smith, Liam Knight, Benson Edman, and Diego Rojas. Mikey Gilbert wasn’t there.”
The boys and girls teams ran at the Ocean State Invitational in Warwick, R.I., Saturday, a trip that the Old Montauk Athletic Club financed with proceeds from the summer’s Montauk Mile. Knight was fourth and Evan Schaefer 25th among the 150 or so contestants in the 2.5-mile freshman race. Diane O’Donnell’s charges placed 13th out of 51 teams in the small schools varsity girls 5K race, and the varsity boys, without Gilbert and Fowkes, were 18th. Dylan Cashin, the girls team’s top runner, placed 10th over all in a personal best 5K time of 19 minutes and 45 seconds.
The girls swimming team evened its record at 1-1-1 with a 55-39 win at the Stony Brook School last Thursday. Stony Brook led until Cami Hatch and Izzy Caplin, by finishing one-three in the 100 backstroke, and Jane Brierley and Lily Griffin doing the same in the 100 breaststroke, put East Hampton up for good. Brierley’s time of 1 minute and 8.38 seconds in the breaststroke qualified her for the state meet.
The girls volleyball team, coached by Alex Choi, was 3-5 going into this week. “If we play the way we have in the games we’ve won we’ll make the playoffs,” he said. East Islip, Sayville, and Westhampton Beach defeated East Hampton in recent games. The 3-1 loss on Sept. 19 to East Islip was, Choi said, “a hiccup — the girls just weren’t in sync. Sayville and Westhampton are strong teams. We’re about to play at least three teams that we can beat, beginning Friday with Miller Place.”
Rich King, the golf team’s coach, said in an email that East Hampton, with a lineup that comprises Nico Horan-Puglia, a junior, Trevor Stachecki, a senior, J.P. Amaden, a senior, Juan Palacios, a junior, Egan Barzilay, a senior, and Lucas Centalonza, a ninth grader, is vying with Southampton and Westhampton for the league championship. James Bradley, the county champion two years ago as a freshman, is now at the Altitude Golf Academy in Port St. Lucie, Fla. An injury has kept Carter Dickinson from playing this fall, King said.
The girls tennis team in recent matches was bageled 7-0 by Westhampton, and bageled Southold-Greenport and Mattituck, which seems to have been the way it’s gone this fall, with the team either defeating its opponent 7-0 or 6-1 or losing 7-0 or 6-1. At 7-3, East Hampton was in fourth place, behind Westhampton, the Ross School, and William Floyd, each of which had one loss, going into this week. This season’s schedule is a regional one, though Kevin McConville, East Hampton’s coach, said he would “prefer a power-rated league in which we could play the toughest teams — I don’t care if we lose.”
East Hampton’s football team lost 49-13 Friday night at Westhampton, a game that the team’s head coach, Joe McKee, missed because he had Covid. Matt Fulham and Joe’s brother, Kelly, coached the Bonackers that night. Westhampton’s defensive and offensive lines pretty much had their way, though McKee said that East Hampton’s linemen were improving. Westhampton led 28-0 after the first quarter and went on from there, racking up the yards. Charlie Corwin, East Hampton’s quarterback, ran for one touchdown and passed to Danny Lester for the other.
Hauppauge, where East Hampton is to play Saturday, “will be another tough one,” McKee said, adding that the good news was that East Hampton’s junior varsity had played Westhampton’s jayvee to a 20-20 tie here Saturday morning.