Sports

For those lovers of crab, it’s not too late to catch some. Good quantities can still be had over the next few weeks in various creeks, coves, and harbors, before they burrow in the mud and sand for their winter slumber.

East Hampton High’s female swimming, cross-country, field hockey, tennis, and volleyball squads did well in homecoming contests.

A large group of tree swallows is called a gulp, which proves ornithologists are not without humor. Before the leaves change, gulps of swallows crowd our beaches. At Mecox Inlet, Sagaponack Pond, and the dunes that circle Napeague Harbor, hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of tree swallows collect.

The East Hampton High School boys soccer team looked good in its League IV opener versus Shoreham-Wading River and in its homecoming game with Stony Brook, and boys volleyball and boys cross-country each won their homecoming matchups.

The Bonac field hockey and boys volleyball teams were 3-0 as of Monday, while the footballers drubbed Wyandanch 50-8.

William Huffman, a 29-year-old member of the Full Throttle team that’s based at Chelsea Piers in New York City, won the Steve Tarpinian Memorial Mighty Hamptons Triathlon at Noyac’s Long Beach Sunday morning, topping a field of 314 finishers. 

There are plenty of bluefish by Jessup’s Neck, porgy fishing is solid in many areas, including the east side of Gardiner’s Island. Sea bass too, are mixed in the catch in the deeper water. Farther offshore, tuna — bigeye, bluefin, and yellowfin — remain plentiful, and at the Cartwright grounds south of Montauk, as well as the area near the Block Island windmills, fluke fishing has been good of late.

“It’s all about creating an experience that they can go home with and remember and always want to do again,” said Steven Lippman, who co-founded A Walk on Water 10 years ago to give special needs children a healing encounter with the waves. For the past seven years, the organization has been coming to Montauk to for a two-day event where everybody gets a neat wooden trophy and an "amazing day."

The basketball court at the Bridgehampton Child Care and Recreational Center was redone Sunday — the first step in a much larger plan that’s to include a new gymnasium, an indoor swimming pool, a regulation-size tennis court, and soccer, baseball, and kickball fields on the five-acre Sag Harbor Turnpike property.

American oystercatchers, which congregate in the marshes of our barrier beaches before flying south, are about the size of crows, and stout, with heavy white bellies, chocolate-colored wings, and pale pinkish legs. They wear a black executioner’s hood and have a long blood-orange oyster knife of a bill and yellow eyes circled by red eye rings.

Homecoming weekend here begins Friday with East Hampton High’s field hockey team facing off against Sayville on the high school’s turf field at 4:30 p.m. Saturday's games and festivities include Hall of Fame inductions, soccer and volleyball matches, cross country meets, a fall festival in the afternoon, and a football game under the lights.

Diane O’Donnell, who coaches East Hampton High School’s girls cross-country team, had all of her charges running in the Great Bonac 5K in Springs on Labor Day, and they did well, as did a Bonac alumnus, Erik Engstrom, in the 10K.

“Plenty of action around,” Sebastian Gorgone of Mrs. Sam's Bait and Tackle in East Hampton said of the local fishing scene. “You name it, you can probably catch it.”

Karl Cook, a 31-year-old Southern Californian who had not competed at the Hampton Classic before, not only won Friday’s $74,000 Grand Prix Qualifier, which entitled him and his 12-year-old Belgian Warmblood mare to go last in Sunday’s $410,000 Grand Prix, but won that class too, a very rare feat.

Last Thursday was a thrilling day for Laura Hayward of Sagaponack, a hypo-birthing doula and practitioner of reiki. She helped deliver a baby, then she competed in the Hampton Classic for the first time. Here's how it all went down.

While the media’s dining room was loaded with high-caloric foods like doughnuts and fried chicken wings, it was a different story for the players, who were offered prepared proteins, carbohydrates, fruits, nuts, protein shakes, and sushi.

Led by Charlie Corwin, its junior quarterback, Finn Byrnes, a senior running back, Will Darrell, a senior tight end, Danny Lester, a senior wide receiver, and Richie Maio, a senior offensive and defensive lineman, the team looked quite good in a scrimmage with Oyster Bay. They are among 24 varsity players on East Hampton's football team this year.

Though the East Hampton Soccer Club couldn’t muster a complement of six field players because of several absences, the five who contested a 7-on-7 league semifinal with Sag Harbor United, the playoffs’ top seed, at East Hampton’s Herrick Park on Aug. 30 acquitted themselves very well in a 4-1 loss. In the night’s other semifinal, a hotly contested struggle between F.C. Tuxpan and Liga De Gulag, Tuxpan prevailed 4-3.

Sag Harbor United, the 7-on-7 men’s soccer league’s leader, and Maidstone Market, which has been the league’s power year in, year out since 2007, were to have met in a regular season-ending game at East Hampton’s Herrick Park on Aug. 23, but the latter, because it could muster only four players, was forced to forfeit.

The horse show was in full swing from 8 a.m. on opening day in Bridgehampton, with action in most of its six rings, the 2-to-4 and 5-to-7-year-old leadline divisions in the newly redone Grand Prix ring being the biggest draw.

Dream became reality on Saturday in Amagansett for those willing to pay between $10,000 and $20,000 to play with John McEnroe, Mats Wilander, Mary Joe Fernandez, the Bryan twins, Gigi Fernandez, and Patrick McEnroe.

Lucky enough to once again secure media credentials to cover the U.S. Open tennis tournament, I needed to do a bit of fishing myself to see who is really hooked on fishing.

There are about a dozen locals, the most in recent memory, playing for Kevin Bunce Sr. and Mike Jablonski in regional 7s tournaments now.

The crowd of children and adults early on Friday afternoon, hours before its official reopening, were a clear indication that the renovated Lars Simenson Skatepark in Montauk is a hit. "What happened was a very organic process of people just building enthusiasm, community coming together . . . until we ended up with something that is world class," said a member of the Montauk Skatepark Coalition.

Sergey Avramenko, 37, of Hampton Bays, Jenny Grimshaw, 31, of San Francisco, and her mother, Judi Donnelly, 65, of Southampton and Wellesley, Mass., the first among breast cancer survivors, were winners at the 27th Ellen’s Run in Southampton Sunday to benefit the Ellen Hermanson Foundation. Another worthy organization, Hoops 4 Hope, benefited from a pleasing turnout at its inaugural 3-on-3 basketball tournament at East Hampton High School Saturday.

The Lars Simenson Skatepark, on South Essex Street in Montauk, will reopen Friday after an extensive renovation made possible through a public-private partnership.

“Lots of weakfish are around, plus there are porgies, blowfish, fluke, sea bass, snappers, kingfish, and even some black drum being caught,” reports Sebastian Gorgone of Mrs. Sam’s Tackle in East Hampton.

On Saturday, the eighth annual Johnny Mac Tennis Project's Pro Am in the Hamptons will be held at the Sportime Amagansett Tennis and Swim Club on Abraham's Path. Proceeds from the event will benefit the Johnny Mac Tennis Project, a nonprofit founded by tennis legend John McEnroe that aims to introduce tennis to thousands of under-resourced children by helping to remove racial, economic, and social barriers that often face them.

The Town Police Benevolent Association squad had high hopes going into the East Hampton Town women’s slow-pitch softball league final with the pennant-winner — and defending playoff champion — East End Land Planning, but the P.B.A.’s forward movement was arrested in the end.

"We joke and say it's the world's second oldest profession," said Ike Birdsall, owner of Birdsall's Hotshoe, a farrier based in Sag Harbor. Farriers, who tend to horse hooves, are an essential but unheralded segment of the $122 billion horse industry, and the job hasn't changed substantially since 400 B.C. when the earliest horseshoes were made.