East Hampton High’s golf team, which plays in the top league in Suffolk County, along with Southampton and Westhampton Beach, is to play host this afternoon to Hauppauge in a first-round county team tournament match at the South Fork Country Club in Amagansett.
The Bonackers, coached by Rich King, are seeded 14th among the 23 entrants; Hauppauge is seeded 19th. Hereafter, matches will continue to be played at the higher seeds’ courses until the Nov. 6 county final, which is to be played at the tree-lined Spring Lake Golf Club in Middle Island.
East Hampton, which, at 7-3, finished the regular season in a tie with Westhampton Beach for second place in League VIII behind undefeated Southampton, recently qualified for the county team tournament by virtue of its top five having shot an aggregate 400 in the recent Conference IV tournament at Spring Lake. Riverhead, the county’s top-seeded team, won it, with Southampton (399) placing second. Southampton is seeded fifth in the team tourney, and thus has a first-round bye. Westhampton is seeded 11th.
The conference tournament’s field was topped by Westhampton Beach’s Owen Jessop, who shot a 71. Nico Horan-Puglia, Bonac’s number-one, was the runner-up, at 72, as the result of a missed putt on the 18th green.
The rounds that Horan-Puglia and three of his teammates — Juan Palacios, a fellow senior, Cole DeLand, a seventh grader, and Carter Dickinson, a sophomore — shot in conference competition qualified them to play in the county’s individual tournament, which was to have been contested at Spring Lake Monday. The top nine are to go on to the state tournament in Elmira in June.
Because of their conference tournament scores, Horan-Puglia (for the third year in a row) and Palacios qualified to play in the states. Horan-Puglia and Trevor Stachecki represented East Hampton in the state tourney last year, and the year before that, said King, it was Horan-Puglia and James Bradley, the county champion as a freshman in the spring of 2021.
East Hampton High School has produced three county champions in recent years, Bradley, who is honing his game at the Altitude Academy in Port St. Lucie, Fla., Turner Foster, who is playing at Loyola University Maryland, and Zach Grossman, a Skidmore College graduate who is a South Fork Country Club member.
As for the regular season, East Hampton lost its first two matches, to Southampton and Westhampton Beach, and then proceeded to win seven of its remaining eight, avenging itself on Westhampton along the way. In the second match with Southampton, which the Mariners won 6-3, Andrew Brown, a sophomore, had a hole in one on South Fork’s par-3, 134-yard second hole, one that has been described as “a very challenging short hole surrounded by bunkers and with an undulating green.”
“He was thrilled,” King said when asked about it the other day. He added that “a hole in one has been a lifetime goal of mine, a lifetime goal for anyone who plays golf, for that matter.”
Horan-Puglia at one and Palacios at two were in those positions throughout the fall, King said, with DeLand and Dickinson settling in at three and four. Several players, including Brown, Colin Kelly, a sophomore, and Lucas Centalonza, also a sophomore, alternated at five.