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Playoffs Nearing for Bonac Squads

Thu, 10/19/2023 - 10:39
Judah D’Andrea, going for a kill above, and his teammates on East Hampton High’s boys volleyball team had won five straight matches as of earlier this week.
Craig Macnaughton

East Hampton High’s girls tennis team, seeded 12th among 21 entrants in the Suffolk County team tournament, was to have played the last seed, Riverhead, here Monday, with the winner advancing to a second-round match at fifth-seeded Connetquot Tuesday.

Matt Shimkus’s roster includes Lyla Wilson, Audrey Monaco, Caleigh Barletta, Samantha Pillco, Colleen McKee, and Hailey Rigby. Wilson lost to Ross’s Olivia Caruso in the first round of the recent division individual tournament; Monaco won a match in that tourney. Barletta and Pillco, as a doubles team, made it to the division’s third round, finishing sixth; McKee and Rigby were eliminated in the second round. East Hampton finished the regular season with a 5-3 record.

Also on Monday, the boys soccer team was to have played host to Westhampton Beach, its final regular season opponent, with the knowledge that a win would clinch the League VI championship, and that a tie would clinch a share of it, with East Islip.

The girls soccer team, which is young but promising, won its second game of the fall here on Oct. 10, shutting out Amityville 2-0 before a sizable crowd.

As of earlier this week, the boys volleyball team was riding a five-game winning streak. Josh Brussell’s charges began the season at 1-5, but rebounded to 6-5 “with a couple of winnable matches left.”

The coach said during last Thursday’s practice session that “if we can beat Walt Whitman and Comsewogue, we’ll definitely make the playoffs. There are 11 small schools, and we’ve only lost to one of them, Eastport-South Manor. Five will make the postseason — we could be seeded as high as third or as low as fifth.”

As for cross-country, “We’ve got the best five, six, and seven Class B runners in the county,” Kevin Barry, the boys coach, said during last Thursday’s practice. Like boys volleyball, his team began slowly and picked up steam. As of that day, Barry’s boys had won five meets in a row after losing the first two.

As far as the top runner goes, “It changes every meet. Sometimes it’s Brayan Rivera, sometimes it’s Wyatt Smith, and sometimes it’s Benson Edman. We’ve got a pack of six or so kids who are all within 35 to 40 seconds of each other.”

“It’s such a great group,” the coach continued. “The senior captains — Liam Fowkes, Chase Siska, and Brayan — are the main reason. I’ve got 19 hard-working kids, you rarely have to take attendance.”

The 5-2 team’s last regular season meet was to have been at Sunken Meadow with Rocky Point Tuesday. The division meet for boys and girls is to be held at Sunken Meadow State Park Tuesday, Oct. 24, at 1 p.m.

When asked last Thursday how her team had been doing, Diane O’Donnell, the girls cross-country coach, said, “Okay . . . we’re 2-2. We lost to Westhampton Beach and to Hauppauge, by one point. If we’d gotten fourth rather than fifth we would have won. The difference was two seconds.”

Rocky Point (1-3) was to have run here in a league finale Tuesday.

In an emailed report Sunday, O’Donnell said that Dylan Cashin had run Sunken Meadow’s 5K course in 21 minutes and 34 seconds in Friday’s Suffolk Coaches meet, placing 12th over all, a creditable showing.

Likewise, the rest of the team had done well, she said, at the Manhattan College invitational meet in the Bronx’s Van Cortlandt Park Saturday, placing 10th in its 2.5-mile race.

Ryleigh O’Donnell led the way at 16:49, placing 19th over all, followed by Laura Martinez at 17:11, Zion Osei at 18:55, Leah Fromm at 19:30, Natalie Reininger at 19:31, Emma Tepan at 20:13, and Briana Chavez at 20:44.

The girls swimming team lost 93-77 here to the defending league champion, Sayville-Bayport, last Thursday, though Craig Brierley, East Hampton’s coach, said a number of his competitors swam best times. “Sayville proved to be the better team, though the Bonac girls never gave up and gave fantastic efforts in every race,” he said in an emailed report.

East Hampton’s 200 free relay team of Lizzy Daniels, Mia Luna, Maya Dias, and Lily Griffin won that day, as did Daniels in the 100-yard breaststroke.

In the leadoff event, the 200 medley relay, East Hampton placed second, with Vanessa Rizzo, Lily Griffin, Ava Castillo, and Daniels, and third, with Ruby Tyrrell, Luna, Ginger Griffin, and Izzy Caplin. In the 50 free, Bonac swimmers placed second (Lily Griffin), third (Dias), and fourth (Kate McMillan). And in the 100 butterfly East Hampton’s Ava Castillo placed second and Ginger Griffin placed third.

The League III swimming meet is to be at West Islip High School on Friday, Oct. 27, at 4:30 p.m.


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