The year just past was an inspiring one when it came to sports here. The Instagram posts of Cole Brauer, a 2012 East Hampton High School graduate who in March became the first American female to have circumnavigated the world in a sailboat solo and nonstop, a feat considered one of the toughest sporting challenges imaginable, attracted thousands of followers, earning her praise, in particular for showing that women could reach the heights in what has traditionally been a male-dominated sport.
The 27,759-mile race’s runner-up, Brauer was the sole female competitor in the 16-boat fleet, and was, with her Class40 sailboat First Light, one of only seven to finish — in 130 days, 2 hours, 45 minutes, and 38 seconds in her case.
Don’t worry if you are viewed as “weird” in high school, she said during her Hall of Fame induction here in mid-October, you might end up on the “Today” show. One internet well-wisher said the then-29-year-old should be “International Person of the World.”
Brauer readily acknowledged that she couldn’t have succeeded in the arduous adventure without the team she had behind her. At her homecoming induction, she said the main thing was to persist.
Ashley West Harvey, Brauer’s fellow inductee and classmate, whose 800 and 1,500-meter track records at Susquehanna University — and her 400 one here — still stand, agreed. Success was owing to hard work, and if one worked hard, she said, you might well surprise yourself.
No one sees the hard work that elite athletes put in, the prizewinning Washington Post sports columnist Sally Jenkins said during an interview last February in Sag Harbor concerning her book “The Right Call: What Sports Teach Us About Work and Life.” She also said that great leaders begin as great teammates.
Nicole O’Donnell Photo
One need look no farther afield than East Hampton to find examples in 2024’s senior class: Dylan Cashin and Ryleigh O’Donnell, track teammates and record-setters, Paul Yuska award-winners and News 12 students of the month, have for the past two years overseen the popular May Day 5K, whose 2024 pre-race sign-up numbered 950, or Melina Sarlo, a rare multi-sport athlete now playing women’s lacrosse at Hofstra who captained the three teams on which she played, or Liam Fowkes, co-founder with Cashin of the Bonac Bolts track club for second through sixth graders. Sixty-one of them showed up for the first day of practice in March, and many ran in the May Day 5K, presumably surprising themselves when it came to the results of their hard work.
“Dylan and Ryleigh are rock stars,” Kathy Masterson, the East Hampton School District’s athletic director, said of Cashin and O’Donnell, to which Jenn Fowkes of the Old Montauk Athletic Club added, “They embody all the good things about a small community. Not only are they great athletes, they’re always thinking of others, always volunteering.”
Other athletes who inspired others were remembered in this small community in the year past, namely Roy Mabery, who in 1973, in the summer of his 18th year, drowned at Little Albert’s Landing, and Kenny Carter, a member of Ed Petrie’s 1977 state-championship boys basketball team who died in February at the age of 63, and whose life was celebrated at the Clubhouse in April at the suggestion of Scott Rubenstein, the East Hampton Indoor Tennis Club’s managing partner, who also played on that championship team.
Howard Wood, who played professionally in the N.B.A. and, for a decade, in Spain’s premier league, said that Carter was a magical player, way ahead of the curve when it came to such things as no-look passes and dribbling between the legs.
“When Kenny was in the fourth grade, you could tell he was different from the others,” said Rubenstein. “We were athletes and played hard, but Kenny had a gift. He had a gift, but he didn’t settle. You saw how hard he worked — you didn’t want to let him down.”
“That [1976-77] season it was standing room only at our games — there were bleachers behind the baskets. Kenny set an example for everyone. You never heard of him doing anything wrong or getting in trouble. Coach would yell at me and Howard, but he never yelled at Kenny. . . . He had the greatest smile, but when he had the ball you better be looking.”
Roy Mabery too played basketball for Ed Petrie, and had been offered scholarships to Rollins and Princeton, whose coach, Pete Carill, said of him in a letter to The Star’s editor following his untimely death: “He was the embodiment of everything that is good in this world — strong, hard-working, concerned, friendly, and honest in effort. . . . I’ll never forget him nor can anyone who knew him. . . .”
Two new blue and green basketball courts in Herrick Park built by the East Hampton Village administration opposite the East Hampton Middle School were dedicated in Roy Mabery’s name at the end of June with a crowd of 150, including four generations of the Mabery family, attending. William Hartwell, who for years has mentored youth here, and Ed Petrie Jr. spoke movingly of their teammate, as did Mark McKee. Hartwell said he would not have played basketball at Lincoln University had his best friend not urged him to do so.
The Rev. Michael Jackson, in blessing the courts, said it was a ceremony in which memory, love, and inspiration met. Roy Mabery, he said, had been and would continue to be an inspiration, and that his remembrance would inspire people to be friendly and kind to one another.
Then there was homecoming — one of the good things about a small community, Jenn Fowkes would probably say. A parade down Newtown Lane from the high school following the Oct. 19 Hall of Fame ceremony, a parade led by the high school’s 80-piece marching band, preceded the football game with Amityville at Herrick Park in the village, the scene of fall football games for half a century before their removal to the then-new high school on Long Lane in 1979. An estimated crowd of at least 1,500 under cloudless skies delighted in the Bonackers’ emphatic 34-8 win.
“This is the way it was every Saturday,” said Larry Cantwell, the former town supervisor and village administrator, who played for East Hampton in the late 1960s. “The whole town would turn out. . . .”
