January 6, 2000
Since the East Hampton RECenter opened about six weeks ago over 2,260 people have joined, 1,160 of whom are youth members. Since opening, the center has recorded 7,300 check-ins.
January 13, 2000
“Losing that game to Southold may have been the best thing that ever happened to us,” Carl Johnson, who coaches Bridgehampton High School’s boys basketball team, said yesterday as his charges were riding the crest of a four-game streak.
“They’re playing with a little fear and with increasing confidence — a good combination!”
The Bees powered by Pierson 68-45 on Friday and followed up with an 84-28 rout of LaSalle Center in the Beehive Tuesday. Daryl Fishburne led the team with 17 points in the win over Pierson.
January 20, 2000
Southampton College’s men’s and women’s basketball teams on Saturday won both ends of a doubleheader from Philadelphia University, formerly Philadelphia Textile — a “first” in Colonial history.
January 27, 2000
Kyle Russell, East Hampton High School’s 6-foot-3-inch senior center, scored his 1,000th point in the fourth quarter of Friday’s boys basketball game between the Bonackers and Miller Place, a highlight in what otherwise was a ho-hum 51-34 win.
Robyn Bramoff, the Pierson-Shelter Island girls’ star, is soon to follow suit.
. . . By halftime in Friday’s boys game, whose pace seemed almost narcoleptic in contrast to the Killer Bee-Greenport showdown that had preceded it, East Hampton led 28-6, having limited the visiting Panthers to just one basket from the floor in the first 16 minutes.
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How could a team that scored only 38 points against Southold turn around almost a month later and send highly touted Greenport, which had expected to go through the season undefeated, to a crushing 65-64 loss?
. . . Without the services of their leading scorer, Nick Dombkowski, who was sick, and still minus Pete Jeffers, a force in the paint who had suffered a back injury in a November auto accident, the Bees, facing a taller front line, more than held their own on the boards at both ends of the court and repeatedly drove the baseline for baskets.
. . . “I couldn’t think of a better afternoon of entertainment,” Joe Zucker, an artist and one of the Bees’ staunchest fans, said afterward. “Not even if I’d been given $1,000. It’s amazing what Carl has done with this team. Courtney Turner had a monster game with 15 points and 17 rebounds. Mikey Turner was great, and Daryl and Kwame [Opoku] . . . Ray Gilliam is so much better than he was at the beginning of the season. Carl has done a great job.”
“Yes,” Johnson said during an interview later in the week, “the magic is back.”
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It did not matter that heavy snow-swollen clouds blanketed the sky on Sunday, dashing any hope that the sun would heat the earth. Nor did it matter that fingertips and toes had no feeling, that faces, once rosy-cheeked, had become blood-red raw. When an intrepid soul goes iceboating, discomfort is ignored.
Some two dozen iceboaters were too pleased by the best iceboating conditions on Mecox Bay in several years — strong winds and a six-inch-thick sheet of ice — to bow to winter’s bite.
Whisking across the large, unsheltered bay at speeds that could earn them a ticket on the hamlet’s back roads, the iceboaters’ euphoria was palpable.
“This is a beautiful piece of ice,” said Tom Halsey, commodore of the Mecox Bay Ice Yacht Club, surveying the bay with an expert eye. Iceboating is a tradition on the South Fork, and the Halsey family has farmed the fields of Water Mill and gone iceboating for centuries.
. . . Iceboating is sailing, of course, but faster and fiercer. Tom Maran of Water Mill, who first hit the ice more than 20 years ago, said it differed from wet-water sailing in that “you’re sailing at more than the speed of wind” — three times faster, Halsey added.
