Sports

Looking for a walk and a challenge, I went to the Mulvihill Preserve in Noyac to hunt for wild chickadees. Hard? No. A unique reason to be in the woods? Yes. A winter activity for a winter bird.

East Hampton High School’s boys basketball team remained at the top of Division IV as of Monday given its two lopsided wins over Eastport-South Manor and Miller Place last week, and more from the week in sports.

The solitude that Kevin Shattenkirk enjoys at his house in Sag Harbor, on a three-acre parcel mostly surrounded by a nature preserve, is a far cry from his chosen occupation as a professional hockey player.

Sag Harbor may have a towering front line, while Bridgehampton rarely fields a player over 6 feet, but with these two teams it’s always a barnburner, and so it was Friday for three quarters.

Playing aggressively, and with everybody getting into the scoring act, the East Hampton High School boys basketball team took it to the Mount Sinai Mustangs in the early going of their clash here on Jan. 10, but ended up losing to the visitors by 5 points. Two days later, they redeemed themselves with a 60-57 win at Bayport-Blue Point.

“It was an extraordinarily competitive meet, and our athletes performed at a very high level. We’re looking strong as we head for the states and nationals,” Tom Cohill, head coach of the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter’s youth swim team, the Hurricanes, said on returning from a large regional Winterfest meet at the University of Maryland last weekend.

On Saturday, teams of birders spread out across New York State to count freshwater ducks, saltwater ducks, and geese for the annual New York State Ornithological Association waterfowl count. Locally, from Shinnecock Inlet to Montauk Point, seven groups of birders faced winds and temperatures that were stubbornly in the mid-30s to peer into our ponds, bays, and coves. They located 31 species of waterfowl for a total of 10,451 birds. More than half that number, 5,303, were the familiar Canada goose.

Two school relay records were set over the weekend by runners on Yani Cuesta’s East Hampton High School girls winter track team.

Three years ago at this time, East Hampton High’s wrestling team, then coached by Jim Stewart with Ethan Mitchell as his assistant, won its first match in five years, edging West Babylon 46-41 thanks to Alex Vanegas’s win by pin at 145 pounds in the penultimate bout, marking the beginning of a resurgence in the sport’s fortunes here. 

Registration opened last week for East Hampton Little League, including tee ball, baseball, and softball programs for kids as young as 5 and up to seventh grade.

Doug De Groot first had the idea of building a padel court accessible to the public here about eight years ago. Though it has taken a while — a puzzling permit denial prevented him from finishing one last year at the Buckskill Tennis Club, which he owns with his wife, Kathryn — he now, with Southampton Village’s blessing, has one up at the Triangle Tennis Club on Hampton Road. 

The 10-and-under Peconic Wildcat ice hockey team, coached by Jason Craig, played Saturday and Sunday at the Buckskill Winter Club here and won both games, improving to 9-0 in league play. Although, “because we can’t play as many games as the teams up the Island do, we’ll need to win most of our remaining league games to make the playoffs,” Chris Minardi, the scorekeeper, said. 

While the handsome high-ceilinged 6,000-square-foot building behind the popular Round Swamp Farm in East Hampton could have feathered a nest egg, Shelly Snyder Schaffer, its owner, preferred instead that it become a year-round hub for young ballplayers, boys and girls looking to up their baseball, softball, or lacrosse games.

On their return this week from the holiday break, the East Hampton, Pierson, and Bridgehampton High School boys basketball teams seem to have the playoffs in their sights.

A joyous, comradely feeling was evident at the East Hampton Hurricane swim team’s New Year’s Day plunge at East Hampton Village’s Main Beach and later at the annual plunge in Wainscott. Both raised money for food pantries here.

Year-round tennis in Amagansett: That’s the goal of the plan pitched by Claude Okin, who owns the Sportime facility and camp off Town Lane and Abraham’s Path, to the East Hampton Town Trustees in December.

During this Christmas/New Year’s interlude, I offer a fun challenge: Take a walk in the woods at night. Try it. You may hear a great-horned owl, who, despite the cold, is starting its courtship ritual. Its classic hooting call — offered in the cadence of “Who is awake? Me too!” — can be heard for miles, the song of the blue winter night.

Covid continued clinging when the 2022 winter sports season began here, but soon thereafter the constraints of the past two years were shrugged off as local athletes went toe-to-toe again in scholastic competitions, rubbed elbows again in road races, and, when it came to athletic ambitions, frequently put their best feet forward.

The temperature is predicted to be 51 degrees here on New Year's Day, virtually balmy when compared to Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, so expect big turnouts for the New Year's Day ocean plunges at East Hampton Village's Main Beach at 1 p.m. and at the Beach Lane road end in Wainscott at 2:30.

The Peconic Wildcats’ under-10 ice hockey team, coached by Jason Craig, took the ice at Doug and Kathryn De Groot’s Buckskill Winter Club, and took it to the UpIsland Police Athletic League Silver Knights.

The East Hampton High School wrestling team enjoyed a lopsided win over Deer Park, the boys swimming team evened its league record by defeating Sayville-Bayport, and the girls winter track 4-by-400-meter relay team set a school record in that event by almost 10 seconds at a crossover meet at Suffolk Community College-Brentwood.

Eighty young Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter Hurricane swimmers went to the three-day Cross Island and Flushing Y holiday invitational meet at the Nassau Aquatic Center, and their performances were impressive.

Cold and wind greeted the 45 participants of the 93rd Montauk Christmas Bird Count on Saturday, but the rough conditions didn’t stop them from tallying 131 different species, the highest total for the count in the last 10 years.

Twenty or so fifth and sixth-grade boys basketball players here were treated to an hourlong clinic by Frank Alagia, a Frances Pomeroy Naismith Award-winning guard when he was at St. John’s.

Montauk’s young Pleiades rugby 7s side that Kevin Bunce Sr. coaches did itself proud in the Thanksgiving 7s tournament on Randalls Island, sweeping through the social division without a loss.

Ellen Cooper, Kathy McGeehan, and Sandy Vorpahl — all of them East Hampton High School Hall of Fame members — are searching through old yearbooks and making phone calls to ascertain who among the school’s female athletes predating 1976 are worthy of being considered by the Hall of Fame committee.

East Hampton High’s wrestling team took four of five matches at Doc Fallot, the Southampton Mariners swept to the Kendall Madison championship, and the Bonac girls hoopsters finally won one.

“A couple of seconds is like a lifetime,” Jane Brierley said the other day about the breaststroke, her strongest event and the one she recently parlayed into a state championship in Rochester.

East Hampton’s boys basketball team is to play host to the revived Kendall Madison Foundation Tip-Off tournament here this weekend.

To borrow a phrase from the game of baseball, the fishing season is now in the bottom of the ninth inning. Striped bass season concludes Dec. 15, blackfish season comes to an end seven days later, and Dec. 31 is the final day to retain black sea bass.