Last Thursday’s field hockey season-opener here with Shoreham-Wading River was not as close as the 3-0 score indicated. The visitors were relentless, firing away at Bonac’s highly rated junior goalie, Caeleigh Schuster, who finished with 31 saves, from the very beginning.
“Thank God, we had Caeleigh,” her mother, and the team’s head coach, Danielle Schuster, said afterward.
After 11 corner plays had been parried, either by East Hampton’s backs or Schuster, Shoreham finally put one in in the last minute of the second quarter, a cherry-picker at the left post converting the rebound of a waist-high shot from the top of the circle that Bonac’s agile goaltender had blocked.
The aptly named Wildcats continued their assault in the third and fourth quarters, putting two more past Schuster, the first in the opening minutes of the third, the ball caroming off the stick she held out to parry a cross that had been smacked from the endline to her left, and the other — Shoreham’s third goal of the afternoon — in the period’s final minute, an angled corner-play ground-hugger that Schuster dove flat-out to her right for but could not stop.
In all, the winners were awarded 19 corner plays that day; East Hampton had none, which pretty much told the tale, though the home team showed some signs of offensive life in the second half after the elder Schuster and Nicole Ficeto, Bonac’s coaches, moved some of their strong defenders up to provide some offensive punch.
When the team took the field here Saturday afternoon against Greenport-Southold, winning 6-0, the lineup looked a lot different: Ava Tintle and Kerri O’Donnell were up with Hailey Welsch, arguably East Hampton’s best ball-handler, on the midfield line, and two sets of three forwards shared playing time so that their legs would be fresh.
The results were pleasing as six different players scored goals — Emily Anderson, Olivia Walsh, Carly Fromm, O’Donnell, Brynley Lys, and Tintle — that afternoon, and Schuster was called upon to make only one save, a sliding one that foiled a breakaway midway through the third quarter. Moreover, East Hampton was awarded 13 penalty corner plays, three of which were converted. The visitors had no corner plays.
When it came to assists, Welsch had three and Tintle two.
