March 23, 2000
The Montauk Rugby Club looked as if it were on its way to defeating White Plains, its first Major League Rugby opponent, here on Saturday, but the visitors scored twice in the final seven and a half minutes to tie the Sharks at 34.
Most in the goodly-sized crowd anticipated an overtime period, but the referee — mistakenly, according to Montauk’s spokesman, Frank Bistrian — ruled that the hard-fought contest should remain a draw.
. . . Bistrian added that the rules of Major League Rugby, the new largely Division I league that is hoped to be the precursor to professional rugby in this country, allows for a 10-minute sudden-death overtime to break ties. “But the referee didn’t know this. He thought it was the same as in Met Union games, which can end in draws.”
Andy Reilly, who directed Montauk’s attack, was voted the match’s most outstanding player by his teammates.
March 30, 2000
Mylan Le and Melanie Anderson, former East Hampton High School softball stars, have helped the Bloomsburg (Pa.) University Huskies to a 19-4 record thus far. Anderson and Le both had multi-hit games in a recent doubleheader sweep of Philadelphia University.
Bailey Thompson, a Colby-Sawyer College freshman from Montauk, won a blue ribbon in the intermediate flat class for the college’s equestrian team, helping it to place second among 12 schools competing recently in Lewiston, Me. Colby-Sawyer leads Zone 1, Region 2 of the Intercollegiate Horse Show Association, with 207 points after six regular-season competitions.
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Bill Herzog, the East Hampton High School boys track coach, met last week with six or seven tracksters who also play for the East Hampton under-19 rugby side to reiterate his distaste for “anything — I have nothing in particular against rugby — that interferes with high school sports.”
While he had not proscribed play with the youth rugby side, Herzog said, “If they start getting hurt, they’re out.”
He added, however, that “no matter what happens as far as attrition goes, we’ll be all right. I’ve got a squad of around 55, but we can get by with 20 guys if need be.”
. . . The next tough meet would be with Sayville on May 1, Herzog said. “They’ve got a pentathlon guy who will win four events and a good long-distance running group. Still, we should be able to beat them. We’ll need everyone for Amityville, on May 9. If they’re not dead, they’ll be there!”
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Chris Carney, a Montauk Rugby Club winger, was named “man of the match” after the Sharks defeated Mystic River 31-17 in a Major League Rugby game played here Saturday. Jay Short finished with two tries, and Carney had one, as did Garth Wakeford, the number-eight and the team’s leader, who is from South Africa.
“He had a tremendous game,” Frank Bistrian, the side’s spokesman, said of Carney, “but mostly on defense. Chris stopped them from scoring two times.”
The win, coupled with the tie the week before here with White Plains, puts Montauk in the driver’s seat in its pool. . . . “We control our destiny,” said Bistrian.
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One of Dick Cooney’s recent hires to run the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter, Robin Streck, a 1992 graduate of East Hampton High School and a graduate of Boston University, has worked with youngsters for the past half-dozen years as a scuba diving instructor in Florida, the Caribbean, and Egypt — “the Red Sea, which was incredible,” she told this writer, “not the Dead Sea!”
