Two East Hampton High School coaches, Dan White and Kevin McConville, whose teams handily won league titles in the past school year — boys basketball in White’s case and boys tennis in McConville’s — are bowing out.
As was reported in these pages last week, White, who lives in North Sea, said he’d been asked to return to coach Pierson High’s boys basketball team in Sag Harbor by that school’s administration after Will Fujita (his predecessor there) took a teaching job in Southold, his hometown. That and the fact that his and his wife’s 4 and 6-year-old children attend schools in Southampton had led him to make the move, said White, who had been looking forward to coaching a talented group of incoming East Hampton sophomores this winter, along with his senior returnees Liam Fowkes and Mike Locascio.
It was a different story apparently with McConville, a popular teaching pro here, who said, after having given a lesson at East Hampton Indoor Tennis Saturday morning, that he was summoned to a meeting several weeks ago with the high school’s assistant principal, Ralph Naglieri, and the school district’s athletic director, Kathy Masterson, and was told, he said, “that they were going in a different direction.”
His not being rehired, after having coached the high school’s girls and boys tennis teams for six years, was, he said, “extremely disappointing. . . . I’ve coached the girls playing now since they were 7 and the boys since they were 10. I know them, I know their parents. . . . We’re hired on an annual basis. Every year you get an email. I never got it.”
“He was passionate about the job. He really cared about the kids,” said Scott Rubenstein, E.H.I.T.’s managing partner, who, when asked the day after the meeting referred to above if there were a tennis pro at the club he would recommend as a replacement for McConville, declined to do so.
Rubenstein added, however, “I don’t know the other side of the story . . . it’s true that not every coach’s system works for every child. . . .”
McConville began coaching girls and boys tennis at the high school in 2018. The last two boys’ seasons were the best East Hampton’s had since the Rubenstein brothers, Matt and Brian, played two decades ago. The back-to-back league-championship boys team, eight of whose top 10 players were all-county designees in 2022 and 2023, was seeded fourth in the 2022 county team tournament and third this year, the highest seed an East Hampton boys team has ever received. Max Astilean, the team’s number-one, won division singles titles last year and this, the first Bonacker to do so since Matt Rubenstein, a high school all-American, did so in 2002 and 2003.
As for White, the decision to leave East Hampton, after coaching for seven years here, was not an easy one to make, he said last week. “It’s a great job and, while there may be some growing pains initially, the future is bright. East Hampton basketball is on the rise. . . . I spoke with Liam and Mike, and they said they understood why I was making the move.”
White took the boys basketball team to the playoffs in three of his seven seasons. This year’s squad, with Luke Reese, Jack Dickinson, Fowkes, Finn Byrnes, Nick Cordone, and Locascio, which lost 57-51 to Amityville in a county Class A quarterfinal game played here, was arguably his best.
“This season has been the most fun I’ve had coaching a team in my 13 years of doing it,” White said at the season’s end. “Jack, Luke, Finn, Nick, and Jesse Cohen, my seniors, are all great kids. . . . I’ve never had three athletes on a team who have gone on to play in college,” he said of Reese, Dickinson, and Byrnes.
Masterson, whom a number of coaches have described recently as a superlative A.D., said this week that White had resigned, and that McConville had “stepped down.” The school board, she said, is to consider her recommendations for replacements — whose identities she wouldn’t divulge — at its next meeting, on Aug. 22.
