Sports

The Bonackers, in “their best game of the season,” according to Joe McKee, their coach, won 41-20 at Eastport-South Manor Friday night, capping their return to Division III football with a 2-6 record. Plus more in local sports action.

Chris Miller at Westlake Marina in Montauk confirmed that the fishing has been good on several fronts. “The bass fishing is holding up,” he said. “Sea bass too have been cooperating, but many are focused on blackfish, which has been very good since the season opened two weeks ago.”

The best team did not win in a Class A semifinal soccer playoff game contested here with Half Hollow Hills West Monday. East Hampton's 1-0 loss left Don McGovern, his players, and a crowd that had filled the bleachers stunned.

Caeleigh Schuster, arguably the best field hockey goalie East Hampton High has had since the mid-1990s, came under fire right away in Saturday’s county Class B final between the Bonackers and Rocky Point. It was a battle that the Bonackers were eventually to lose 4-3 in overtime, but their gritty play throughout the fray could not be faulted.

Two of East Hampton High’s playoff teams, field hockey and boys soccer, advanced in the county playoffs this week, the field hockey team by way of a 2-1 win at Harborfields on Wednesday and the boys soccer team as the result of a 2-1 quarterfinal-round win here Thursday over a tough East Islip squad.

Eight of East Hampton High's 11 fall teams, seven of which finished with winning records in league competition, made the postseason, and two of those teams, boys soccer and girls cross-country, were league champions.

The 1-5 Bonackers aren't quite there yet, as a 42-7 loss to undefeated Half Hollow Hills West on Saturday showed.

"The blackfish bite has been very solid," said Ken Morse at Tight Lines Tackle in Sag Harbor. "Lots of small fish, but many are still catching their limits." Surfcasters along the ocean beaches are finding action too.

The most exciting cross-country meets Kevin Barry has seen in his 35 years of coaching took place within a few minutes of each other at East Hampton High School on Oct. 18.

Bird populations have declined steeply over the last 50 years, but the North American Bird Conservation Initiative's "State of the Birds 2022" report, published in early October, balanced the gloom with some success stories and offered strategies for future action which would "bring birds back."

Thanks largely to the superb goaltending of Caeleigh Schuster, who has come up big for her teammates all season long, the East Hampton High School field hockey team defeated East Islip in a first-round playoff game here Monday. The hard-fought contest wasn’t decided until the second round of shootouts that followed a 1-1 tie in regulation and two scoreless 7-on-7 overtime periods.

Pickup games open to all in the  world’s fastest sport, badminton, have begun to be played again on Monday and Wednesday evenings from 7 to 9 at the Amagansett School, and will be through May.

Last week, East Hampton High’s boys soccer team won the program’s first league championship since 2014, and the boys cross-country team won the varsity B race at an invitational meet at Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx.

While the fishing for striped bass has been strong in Montauk, it was out of my reach, so I decided to take advantage of the sunny and windless conditions on Saturday morning for the opening of blackfish season in waters outside Long Island Sound.

The first half of Saturday morning’s high school football game here belonged to Harborfields, which led 28-0 at the halftime break. But the second half was pretty much East Hampton’s, which led Joe McKee, Bonac’s head coach, to say after the 34-14 loss that while he was proud of his players he wondered why they hadn’t played with the same verve in the first half as they had in the second.

After Friday’s 2-1 loss here to Eastport-South Manor, Don McGovern, who coaches East Hampton High’s boys soccer team, which had just seen a nine-game winning streak snapped, asked if his players could tell him why they’d lost.

First light in Sag Harbor during autumn and the place belongs to the fish crows. They show up all at once, 100 landing in the big tree at M&T bank. As the day brightens, they spread out across the village into smaller groups. For a bird whose diet ranges from piping plover eggs to candy bars, Sag Harbor is a perfect foraging ground.

East Hampton High School’s football team lost 20-13 to Amityville here on Saturday, dropping its record to 1-4, but the Bonackers made some big plays, and led 13-12 early in the fourth quarter.

Our original 13-day vacation had already been cut short, then I tested positive for Covid. Hello to quarantine at home, which was still 420 miles away. For those not in quarantine, the fishing scene bounced back quite nicely after nearly a week of northeasterly wind and rain.

On paper, East Hampton’s field hockey game here on Oct. 4 against Comsewogue seemed likely to wind up in favor of the Bonackers, but they had a fight on their hands.

“A ray of hope” for East Hampton Town’s Little League baseball players, coaches, and parents appeared on Saturday when ground was broken for the playing fields near the former Child Development Center of the Hamptons on Stephen Hand’s Path.

Sand and Sea Construction, McMahon’s, the Montauk Rugby Club, and Uihlein’s were as of earlier this week competing for the final two berths in the East Hampton Town men’s slow-pitch softball league’s playoffs.

The popularity of fly-fishing exploded in Quebec when the movie “A River Runs Through It,” starring Brad Pitt, was released in 1992.

The tennis team bageled Southampton 7-0, the swimming team defeated West Babylon 80-62 at the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter, the field hockey and girls volleyball teams cruised to easy wins, and the girls cross-country team placed second in the varsity A race in the Tom Knipfing invitational at Fireman’s Field in Ridge.

Don McGovern’s Bonac boys soccer team won at Comsewogue and at Sayville to improve to 7-0 in league play and 9-1-0 over all.

Ordinarily, fall would not be considered a time for ice hockey, but East End kids are playing the sport pretty much the year round now, primarily in rinks up the Island, though there’s hope, according to Chris Minardi, that a regulation-size rink under a bubble may be put up in Calverton soon.

A number of East Hampton High School teams, boys soccer, boys volleyball, boys and girls cross-country, field hockey, and girls tennis among them, continued to be competitive last week, with the fall season nearing the midway mark.

Many of the 17 grandchildren of the late Harry de Leyer, the Dutch-born horseman who, with a former plow horse, Snowman, scaled the heights of the show-jumping world, have ridden, but only one, Jason de Leyer, one of Andre and Christine de Leyer’s twin sons, is riding and showing at the moment.

The oysters I received 16 months ago, which barely filled a half-pint container at that point, had grown by Sept. 21 to over five inches in length in many cases. After cleaning, culling, and sorting, I had well over a bushel basket of tasty bivalves.

The homecoming football game was all you’d want it to be, at least for a while, before Rocky Point proved to be the better team.