While it’s largely the shoulder season insofar as high school sports here go, there are a couple of things on the athletic front this weekend, namely the New York State wrestling tournament, in which Bronco Campsey will be vying for a state title at 108 pounds, and the county Class D championship boys basketball game matching top-seeded Bridgehampton’s Killer Bees and St. Pius V of Melville.
The Bees have defeated St. Pius three times this winter — by 30 points the last time they met — but Carl Johnson, Bridgehampton’s veteran coach, said Friday that “we’re going in at 0-0.” The championship game is to be played at St. Joseph’s College in Patchogue Sunday at 3:30 p.m. Earlier that day at St. Joe’s, at 11, top-seeded Babylon will play Mattituck in the county Class B girls basketball championship game (Mattituck having beaten Pierson of Sag Harbor 48-46 on Monday night).
“We had a great week of practice and scrimmages,” Johnson said of the February break. “We scrimmaged Bayport, Riverhead, and East Islip, all of them on the road. We might as well get used to it.”
Assuming Bridgehampton, whose eyes are on yet another state championship, which would be the tiny school’s 10th, defeats St. Pius Sunday, the Bees will play the Section I/IX winner in the regional final at Center Moriches High School at 4:30 on March 15. The state’s Final Four tourney is to be contested at Binghamton’s Veterans Memorial Arena over the March 21-22 weekend, with the Class D semifinals at 10 and 11:45 a.m. on the 21st, and the D final at 6 p.m. on the 22nd.
The Bees, who won League VIII with an 18-0 record, are 19-1 over all at the moment, their sole loss, by a score of 52-42, coming at the hands of East Hampton, an AA school, in the Kendall Madison tournament final on Dec. 14.
Bridgehampton last won a state title in 2015, when, led by Charles Manning Jr., the Bees breezed by New York Mills, the defending state champ, 62-49.
Back to wrestling, Campsey, a sophomore on East Hampton High’s team, is said to be the first Pierson High School student to win a county wrestling championship. He did it by running through four opponents at Stony Brook University recently, besting two by margins of at least 15 points and decisioning his semifinal and final round opponents, the latter a defending county champion, by 7-1 and 6-1 scores. The state tournament is being held tomorrow and Saturday at the MVP Arena in Albany. Campsey is his division’s third seed.
Questioned at the Fairway restaurant at the Poxabogue Golf Center in Sagaponack the day after his feat, Campsey, who trains the year round at the Barn Brothers Wrestling Club in Manorville, and whose chief strength, his father, Beau, says, is his head, said he was confident he could win the state title.
“People have no idea how hard it is to win a county championship,” the elder Campsey said. “There are only 13 county champions.”
Looking a little further ahead, Liam Knight, an East Hampton High junior who competed for the U.S. in the world lifesaving championships in Australia last fall, is to compete in the state swimming meet’s 200 freestyle race at Ithaca College on March 8.
