East Hampton High School’s softball team, which did not begin the season well, was sitting in first place in League V with a 5-0 record as of Monday, having “mercied” Amityville twice in games played here Saturday.
Still, said the coach, Annemarie Cangiolosi Brown, “we’re 7-8 over all, and so we have to win out to make the playoffs. We’re capable of doing that.”
East Hampton was to have played Hauppauge here on Monday, Westhampton Beach here Tuesday, and was to have finished the regular season at Rocky Point yesterday. Going into the week, the young Bonackers had wins over all of these teams, having beaten Hauppauge 23-5 on April 24, Rocky Point 10-7 on April 19, and Westhampton Beach 10-7 on April 17.
Both of Saturday’s games -- Katie Kuneth pitched in the first and Lydia Rowan in the second -- were halted in the fifth inning. East Hampton won the opener 14-1 and the second 21-3.
Kuneth, who pitched a no-hitter, struck out nine in the four innings she worked in game one; Rowan struck out eight in that span. In the first game, Colleen McKee, the leadoff hitter, drove in three runs, and Kuneth, Emily Hurtado, and Susie DiSunno, the catcher, each drove in one.
The team’s seniors, Kuneth, Gaby Payne, and Brighton Lys, were to have been honored before Monday’s game here. Kuneth, Payne, and DiSunno, who is a junior, played on East Hampton’s 9-to-11-year-old Little League state-finalist softball team in 2018.
Other big news here this week was the South Fork Islanders’ 13-11 defeat of Huntington in a boys lacrosse game played at Southampton High School Friday. Matt Babb, the coach, said in an email Sunday that “Huntington is the current fourth seed, and the highest-ranked team we’ve beaten since the South Fork program was started. Headed into Friday’s game, it looked as if we just might miss the playoffs, but now I believe this victory positions us to make a postseason run. Though with four games left, we need to stay focused.”
South Fork’s record as of Monday was 6-4 (8-4 over all). On Tuesday, Babb’s team was to have played at Half Hollow Hills, Division I’s second-place team. Brentwood, which was winless as of Monday, is to play here today at 4:30 p.m.
East Hampton’s baseball team, after having defeated Rocky Point 9-2 in an away game on April 19, dropped the next two, by scores of 4-1 and 8-1. As of Monday, Vinny Alversa and Henry Meyer’s squad was 7-8, with two nonleaguers, with Shoreham-Wading River and William Floyd, and a regular-season-ending series with East Islip yet to come.
The Bonackers could get nothing going in last Thursday’s 4-1 loss here. Trailing 3-0 in the top of the fifth inning and with one out and runners at first and third base, Zach Dodge, the starting pitcher, gave way to Finn O’Rourke, who, after getting Rocky Point’s pitcher, Vito Spadafina, to pop out, was charged with a balk, resulting in the visitors’ fourth run. O’Rourke didn’t allow a run after that.
Victoreddy Diaz, with Tyler Hansen, who had singled, on second, and Nico Horan-Puglia, East Hampton’s cleanup hitter, on first, drove in Hansen with a two-out line-drive single to left field, but Trevor Meehan flied out to left to end the inning.
O’Rourke struck out the first batter to face him in the top of the seventh, retired the second on a 4-3 groundout, and, after giving up a single, threw a third-strike fastball past the Eagles’ cleanup hitter. But in the bottom of the seventh, East Hampton went down quietly one-two-three.
“Everything that should have happened didn’t happen,” Alversa said in summing up afterward. “We’ve got four games left,” one of which was the following day’s 8-1 loss at Rocky Point. “We’ve got to win 10. . . . It’s doable.”
Meehan, he said, had gone all the way on the mound in the 9-2 win at Rocky Point, striking out nine. “We scored eight runs in the seventh,” he added.
Jeremy Graham, Rocky Point’s starter in Friday’s game, gave up one hit during the course of the six and a third innings he worked, and struck out nine.
