One couldn’t have wished for a better homecoming. The weather was wonderful, for one. The Hall of Fame inductees, one an international sensation for having recently become the first American female to sail solo nonstop around the world, and another an exemplar when it comes to resilience, were beguiling. And the football game, the first to be played at East Hampton Village’s Herrick Park in almost half a century, drawing an estimated 1,500 spectators — many, many more than watch the games on the high school’s turf field — went entirely Bonac’s way.
Cole Brauer and Ashley West Harvey, members of the high school’s class of 2012, were Hall of Fame inductees along with the county small schools championship 1995 baseball team.
Brauer, the Global Solo Challenge’s runner-up, and the sole female among its 16 sailors, only seven of whom finished the 27,000-plus-nautical-mile race, reminded the induction ceremony’s audience that often the students viewed as “weird” in high school, as she was, “are probably going to go around the world and end up on the ‘Today Show.’ ” And students in the audience at the ceremony who might have a hard time fitting in or find themselves being bullied for being different, she said, “Don’t be afraid to randomly try things.” In her quest to find sponsorship for her round-the-world journey, “I had hundreds of people telling me, ‘No, you can’t do this, you’re too short for this . . . you’re too small . . . you don’t have a legacy.’ ” But she persisted and got the sponsorship she needed “because I was crazy enough to even just try, and that’s how I ended up doing what I did. So just going out there and trying is what you’ve got to do.”
West Harvey, whose records in the 800, 1,500-meter, and mile races at Susquehanna University, and in the 400-meter race at East Hampton High, still stand, told of having persisted through serious injuries in her senior high school year and in her junior year in college.
“These injuries, the two stress fractures that I sustained in the fall of my senior year here, and the hip flexor issues I had in college drained me physically and mentally. There were times I thought I was done with running, but I had learned from running that you don’t stop when something gets challenging, that achieving goals takes hard work, and that you are stronger than you think. Losing a race doesn’t make you a loser — you can do the hard things. But the most important running lesson of all is that there are no shortcuts. To succeed, in sports, and in life, you have to put in the work to get what you want.”
Asked afterward what was next for her, Brauer said she’d teach the Australian woman who had recently bought her record-breaking Class40, First Light, how to sail, and then, in November, she would help her sail it from A Coruña, Spain (the Global Solo Challenge’s start-finish line) “half way around the world” to Australia.
As for the 1995 baseball team, Jim Nicoletti, its coach, who had come up from Bradenton, Fla., used the occasion to throw a Bonac Baseball Through the Ages party for all East Hampton High baseball players on Friday night at the Clubhouse in Wainscott, a gathering that he said had drawn players spanning eight decades.
That 1995 team — the second in a row to win a county small schools championship for East Hampton — began the season with only two returnees, Jake Katz, the second baseman, and Henry Meyer, the all-county catcher. Meyer now coaches the varsity baseball team along with his former teammate, Vinny Alversa, a fact that Nicoletti said made him proud. Joining Katz, Meyer, and Alversa Saturday morning were their teammates Keith Corso, R.J. Etzel, Robbie Peters, Steve Puglia, Alex Walter Jr., and Nicoletti’s then-assistant, Alex Walter Sr.
After the induction ceremony, West Harvey, who lives and teaches middle school math in Fairfield, Conn., and Brauer, who, according to her father, David, “lives in a van, wherever the work is,” joined the high school’s 80-piece marching band and fire department trucks for a spirited parade down Newtown Lane to the football field at Herrick Park.
