Katy Stewart, the late daughter of Brigid Collins and Jim Stewart, who died 14 years ago, at the age of 12, was remembered Saturday at an all-day fund-raiser at the Buckskill Winter Club that included an evening ice show and a youth hockey game, the first one to be played at the club this winter.
The fund-raiser was begun in 2012 at the urging of two of Katy’s friends, Annabel and Harriet De Groot, whose parents, Kathryn and Doug, own the tennis and skating club.
Nick Lombardo, one of Buckskill’s hockey coaches, said he wished the opportunities availed South Fork youngsters at Buckskill, the Southampton Ice Rink, and at the Peconic Hockey Foundation’s bubble in Calverton had existed when he was, say, a 5-year-old, the age of his youngest students. For lack of a rink here, Lombardo, an East Hamptoner, didn’t begin playing the sport until he was 11 and then played as a high school student for Kings Park’s team in the county’s ice hockey league.
“Kids here have so much more in the way of opportunities now, a lot more are playing, and they’re playing a lot better,” he said, as under-12 teams from Dix Hills and the Southampton Ice Rink were getting ready to take the ice at 7:30, following a show in which four Ice Theatre of New York ice dancers, Milly Wasserman, a Buckskill figure skating instructor, and six of her students — Reese Fritz, Sydney Fritz, Kathrine Bowler, Emma McGonegal, Henrietta Wong, and Maxine Wong — performed.
Katy Stewart’s parents, with one of their sons, Christopher — their other son, Robert, is a student at Holy Cross University — made the six-hour trip down from upstate Andes, a small town surrounded by the Catskill Mountains where Collins is the superintendent of a school district that numbers 82 pre-K-through-12th-grade students. “It’s an interesting mix,” the former Montauk School assistant principal said. “We’ve got students whose families have farmed there for 10 generations and children of artists. Christopher’s in the third grade, which, with 14 students, is our biggest class. It’s a special little school. Sag Harbor” — where the Stewarts, who rent upstate, still own a house — “feels big by comparison.”
“Every Friday, the whole school skis and snowboards at Plattekill Mountain,” said Jim Stewart, whose retirement from a long teaching and coaching career at East Hampton High School prompted the move.
The family will return here for a Katy’s Courage tasting and dancing fund-raiser overseen by Peter Ambrose and Michael Variale at the Clubhouse in Wainscott on March 23, and for the Katy’s Courage 5K in Sag Harbor on April 13. Saturday’s fund-raiser at Buckskill reportedly took in about $6,000, which is to help fund pediatric cancer research and scholarships for Pierson and East Hampton High seniors.
That night’s hockey game matched U-12 teams from Dix Hills and the Southampton Ice Rink, whose roster included Hunter Harrington, Cam Minardi, Mateo Vergara, and Teddy Teriazos, all of East Hampton, Aidan D’Angelo, Evan Goldstein, and Grady Craig of Sag Harbor, Trey Armusewicz of Southampton, Laird Dera of Riverhead, and Mike Kessler of Westhampton Beach.
Bryan Wish, who coached the local team, said before the game that in the next school year he intends to revive a South Fork seventh-through-ninth-grade entry in the Suffolk County High School Hockey League. “We had a high school team a few years ago, but then Covid arrived,” he said.
What Lombardo said about the young hockey players of today was borne out that night as the locals bested Dix Hills 5-2, outshooting the visitors throughout the fray. Cam Minardi got Wish’s team on the board early, tapping in a rebound with barely two minutes gone. A minute later, the visitors tied the score, but the hard-charging South Forkers were unfazed. Minardi and Harrington, arguably the best player on the ice, scored goals in the second period, for a 3-1 lead, and Harrington and Minardi sandwiched goals around one by Dix Hills in the third for the 5-2 final. Minardi slipped a shot into an untended cage to cap his hat trick in the final minutes.
