East Hampton High’s girls swimming team went up against the defending league champion, Connetquot, and the state runner-up, Hauppauge-Smithtown, in meets last week, losing both but by creditable scores.
The Connetquot meet, held at the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter on Sept. 17, was particularly close, with one-two finishes in the 500-meter race and first-place finishes in the backstroke and breaststroke giving Craig Brierley’s 400-meter relay team, which was to finish second, a chance to win it.
In other recent sports action, the girls tennis team, which has a solid four or five players including Hailey Rigby, Caleigh Barletta, Colleen McKee, and Ella Menu, took a 7-0 league record into a match at the Ross School on Monday. A match with Westhampton Beach (which edged Ross 4-3 on Friday) was to have been played here yesterday, and William Floyd, another strong team, is to play here on Oct. 5.
The girls’ coach, Pablo Montesi, said during the Sept. 18 practice that he would be happy if all his players become confident second-servers this fall. To that end, he had them serving from their knees that day to get them to brush up on the ball. It would be a drill they’d remember when they were 25, he said.
The team’s wins going into this week have been by lopsided margins, the victims being Mattituck, Riverhead, Eastport South-Manor, Elwood-John Glenn, Center Moriches, Hampton Bays, and, on Friday, Southampton. Ross, Westhampton Beach, and Floyd loomed as serious threats, however.
The girls cross-country team defeated its Westhampton Beach counterparts on the 17th at Red Creek Park in Hampton Bays, a particularly pleasing result given that Dylan Cashin and Ryleigh O’Donnell, the team-leading performers in the past few years, have graduated. The boys lost to their Hurricane rivals by a narrow 26-29. Kevin Barry, the boys’ coach, said Westhampton had the top two finishers, that East Hampton had the next three (Benson Edman, Liam Knight, and Jasper Samuelson), but that Westhampton runners edged Wyatt Smith and Watts Comly-Bolick for the sixth and seventh spots.
In Saturday’s Bob Pratt invitational meet at Sunken Meadow, a meet that drew entries from public and parochial schools on Long Island, and in Westchester and New York City, Samuelson placed second — by one second — to New Rochelle’s Jonas Krasner in the freshman race contested by over 100 runners. Krasner covered the two-mile course in 10 minutes and 48.99 seconds; Samuelson ran it in 10:50.22.
“Jasper was phenomenal,” said Barry, adding that Comly-Bolick, Augie Swain, and Teddy Rattray were also in the freshman race. As for the varsity race, “We finished 15th among 23 schools, but obviously we would have done better had Jasper and Watts, who are in our top five, ran it,” Barry said.
