Sports

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.