East Hampton High’s homecoming football win over Eastport-South Manor Saturday afternoon was rendered all the more dramatic owing to the fact that the team’s head coach, Joe McKee, was struck by a truck that morning as he was walking across Newtown Lane. He had been headed from Wittendale’s to his truck, which was parked in front of the middle school, with flowers that his seniors were to give to their mothers before the game began.
“He was a lucky boy,” one of his brothers, Bill McKee, said by phone Sunday morning. “He jumped up at the last second, so he wasn’t dragged under.”
At noon that day, on the way home from Stony Brook Southampton Hospital, where he’d spent the night, McKee agreed that he had been lucky. “It could have been a lot worse,” he said. “I dodged a bullet.” No bones had been broken, he added, “though I’m bruised all over. I was tossed a good distance.” The driver, who reportedly had turned left onto Newtown from Osborne Lane, “wasn’t paying attention,” he said.
As for the exciting 35-14 homecoming win, McKee said, “I’m 100-percent proud of them — they’re a good group of kids.” The game was played in front of a large crowd, including many of the players’ schoolmates.
In his absence, Jason Menu, Jaron Greenidge, and Kelly McKee coached the team, which saved its best for last, scoring three touchdowns in the fourth quarter to send Bonac’s partisans home happy. A love fest ensued. It seemed that no one wanted to leave the field, that the coaches, players, and fans wanted to savor the victory as long as they could, a victory in which Charlie Corwin, Alex Davis, Emmanuel Morales, Eddie Cobb, Jai Feaster, William McGuire, Charlie Stern, Thinley Edwards, Bowie Pipino, Mikhail Feaster, and Michael Mejia Coronel, among others, played major roles.
An interception led to the visitors getting on the scoreboard first, as the result of a 4-yard touchdown run with a couple of minutes left to play in the first quarter. But before the period ended, Davis, a sophomore running back and linebacker from Bridgehampton, electrified the crowd with a touchdown run of his own after he seemed to be stopped by several would-be tacklers at East Hampton’s 25-yard line. Morales’s point-after kick evened things at 7-7.
An interception by Davis at Eastport’s 38 as the second quarter began presented the Bonackers with a scoring opportunity, but nothing came of it. With a minute to play until the break, a 46-yard touchdown pass and extra-point kick put the Sharks up again, at 14-7. But again Davis stepped up, returning the subsequent kickoff 75 yards for his second quarter-capping touchdown, to which Morales added the extra point.
When the third quarter began, Mikhail Feaster caught up with Eastport’s power-running back and brought him down at East Hampton’s 38, thus saving a touchdown. About midway through the period it appeared that the visitors had taken the lead for the third time that afternoon, but the receiver dropped a floater in the end zone after Corwin had been intercepted at East Hampton’s 30. The senior quarterback’s subsequent block of an Eastport-South Manor field goal attempt, with about five minutes left in the period, proved to be the tide-turning play.
The fourth quarter was all East Hampton — a 21-yard Corwin-to-Stern touchdown pass, a 60-yard Davis score, his third TD of the day, and a 10-yard rush into the end zone by Corwin effectively finishing the Sharks off.
Amid the celebrating afterward, Kathy Masterson, the school district’s athletic director, who had been keeping East Hampton’s hospitalized coach informed periodically as to how things were going, took a photo of the jubilant players and sent it to him. A moment later, looking up from her phone, she said to them, “He says he’s so proud of you.”
While the team finished at 3-5, Menu and Greenidge said in postgame interviews that the players had fought hard all season, win or lose. Football, they said, alluding in part to Coach McKee’s narrow escape from serious injury or death that morning, mirrored life inasmuch as adversity needed to be faced. “You either fight or you lie down,” said Greenidge.
“The guys stepped up today. . . . It’s a testament to all the work Coach McKee has put in to rebuild the program over the years,” said Menu. “Football is back in East Hampton and it’s exciting.”