Cole Brauer, who recently became the first American woman to sail solo around the world; Ashley West Harvey, who still holds Susquehanna University records in the 800 and 1,500-meter races, and the 1995 county small schools championship baseball team are to be inducted into East Hampton High School’s Hall of Fame Saturday morning following a breakfast at 9 in the school’s cafeteria.
Afterward, the fire department and band will lead a homecoming parade down Newtown Lane to Herrick Park — the site of football games for half a century before the Long Lane field was built — where a family festival begins at 11:30 and a football game with Amityville is to be played at 1.
Tomorrow morning, at 11 a.m., the football team’s coach, Joe McKee, is to be honored with a proclamation citing his leadership in reviving the sport here over the past decade at East Hampton Village’s emergency services building on Cedar Street. Mayor Jerry Larsen and the village administrator, Marcos Baladron, have invited Bonac football players past and present to attend the ceremony.
Tomorrow evening at 7, Jim Nicoletti, who coached the winning 1995 baseball team, has invited players past and present to a Bonac Baseball Through the Ages gathering at the Clubhouse on Daniel’s Hole Road in Wainscott.
In issuing an open invitation last week to “anyone who played for Fran Kiernan, Carl Johanson, Jack Lillie, Bob Koppelman, Bob Budd, David MacGarva, me, or Ed Bahns, and anyone who has played for or is playing for Vinny Alversa and Henry Meyer, Nicoletti added that “this is the 30th anniversary of that 1995 team and the 40th anniversary of the 1985 team that traveled to Cooperstown and played on Doubleday Field. That team also won a county championship.” In addition, “We’ll have a moment of silence in memory of its recently deceased captain and catcher, Rick Spero,” Nicoletti said.
Looking back at Brauer and West Harvey’s time at the high school, “You could see they both had that drive,” said Yani Cuesta, who coached both of them on East Hampton’s girls track team in their senior year, 2012. “Cole was looking for something to be really, really good at, and she was to find it in sailing at the University of Hawaii. Ashley found her passion in high school.”
The 30-year-old Brauer was the sole female among the 16 sailors who recently vied in the Global Solo Challenge around the world’s three great capes race, beginning and ending in Spain. She inspired thousands — Cuesta among them — with her frequent Instagram reports on her 130-day circumnavigation, during which she sustained a broken rib and suffered from dehydration, a setback she treated with self-administered IV fluids.
One commentator wrote, following her second-place finish, that Brauer “should be the International Person of the World.”
After having arrived in March at the finish line in A Coruna, Spain, Brauer was thanked by her myriad social media followers for not only having inspired a generation of young women who might not otherwise have taken up a historically male-dominated sport, but also for having inspired everyone — young and old, male and female.
West Harvey, who teaches high school math in Connecticut, Cuesta said, ran everything from the 400 on up at Susquehanna University, earning repeated Landmark Conference honors following an all-state, all-county high school track and cross-country career here. “She was a sprinter too,” said her former coach.
