Sports

Nick Escalante, a wellness teacher at the Ross School, is headed to Buenos Aires to vie for a spot in a semipro soccer league. His brother, Charles, is busy building up the basketball program at Ross.

The screech owl is about the size of a brick, with big eyes, and ear tufts, but this adorable little owl is an efficient killer. Its howl represents pure death to a variety of critters. Nothing is safe, even other screech owls. It even takes bats on the wing.

The futsal (indoor soccer) season at the Sportime Arena in Amagansett is nearing the playoff stage, and it has been a lively season indeed.

Dylan Cashin, Melina Sarlo, Riley Miles, and Ryleigh O’Donnell set a distance medley relay record at the Zeitler Relays Saturday, and Juan Roque and J.P. Amaden showed grit in wrestling at 118 and 132 pounds.

Judging from the scores of skaters there Saturday afternoon, the Buckskill Winter Club is the place to be this season, and “the ice this year is the best ever.”

Evan Masi, an East Hampton High School senior who recently became a News 12 Long Island scholar-athlete of the month, has been through trying times in his high school career.

Why isn’t the long-tailed duck more celebrated? It’s crazy looking, gregarious, easily seen, cackles like a stuttering kazoo, hilariously belly-flops when it lands, and hangs out in bad little duck posses. It’s even controversial.

East Hampton High School’s boys and girls basketball teams were paused because of the pandemic this past week, while the boys swimming and wrestling teams remained active.

Richard J. Cooney Sr., the East Hampton School District’s athletic director from 1974 until his retirement in 1995, is to be a New York State Athletic Administrators Association “wall of honor” inductee at Saratoga in March.

The first two and a half quarters of the Holiday Classic boys basketball game that East Hampton High played at Southampton on Dec. 28 “were the best we’ve played all year,” East Hampton’s coach, Dan White, said following the 69-60 loss to the Mariners.

I’ve lived here for 20 years under the Great American Robin Flyway and I had no idea, but recently started noticing them gathering en masse, as many as 5,400 of them, like black stars shooting against a white sky. Where were they headed?

High school sports made a stuttery recovery in the past year of Covid. The good news was that there were at the high school level two fall seasons in 2021, in which 11 mostly-playoff-caliber East Hampton High teams contended.

The first day of the new year was drizzly and drab, and, to some, depressing, though you wouldn’t have known it had you been at East Hampton Village’s Main Beach or at the Beach Lane road end in Wainscott for the New Year’s Day plunges that afternoon.

Asked this week if the New Year’s Day plunges were on, Colin Mather, who began the annual ritual in Wainscott in 1999, and John Ryan Jr., the Hampton Lifeguards’ chief, who followed suit soon after first in Amagansett and later in East Hampton, said they were indeed.

The swimmers’ win evened their league record at 2-2, while the basketball team’s was its second in a row since Luke Reese, its star junior shooting guard, suffered a knee injury during a Dec. 9 game.

During the 101st Audubon Montauk Christmas Bird Count, 125 species were spotted, the rarest a western kingbird found by Mike McBrien just off Fernwood Drive. The birds are great, but so are the people, some of whom have returned to take part in the count for 50-plus years.

All four of the East Hampton Soccer Club’s youth travel teams, one of which is an under-12 girls team coached by Luis Barrera, recently won the Long Island Junior Soccer League divisions in which they played, all of them going undefeated.

Dan White, the coach of East Hampton High’s boys basketball team, was in high spirits Sunday morning in reporting the team’s nonleague win the day before at East Islip. For the first time, the Bonackers were playing well in the absence of Luke Reese, their stellar junior guard, who has been knocked out of the season with a knee injury.

Chase Lieder, Chloe Coleman, and Tucker Coleman, Montauk surfers who attend East Hampton High School, are faring well in national surf competitions, fueling professional ambitions.

If you are lucky enough to encounter one of these visitors from the north, the number-one rule is to simply keep your distance.

The East Hampton High School boys swimming team knew that West Islip would be hard to beat in a meet that was held at the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter on Dec. 15, , according to its coach, Craig Brierley, and indeed the visitors, whose depth proved to be a deciding factor, were.

The wrestling match that was held here Friday between East Hampton and Eastport-South Manor High Schools began early, as the Sharks had no junior varsity competitors, and ended early, as seven of the 11 matches wrestled ended in first-period pins, owing in large part to cross-wrist tilts.

The East Hampton High School boys basketball team may have lost its league opener with Kings Park last Thursday, but an even worse loss was that of Luke Reese, the stellar junior guard.

And the Turkey Trot winner was . . . Samantha Whitmore!

New baseball and softball fields, a competition-size track, new bathrooms and field lighting, maybe even a concession stand — that’s what may be on the horizon at Sag Harbor’s Mashashimuet Park.

Love birds? Love someone who loves birds? These gift ideas from The Star's "On the Wing" columnist will help to nurture that passion, support bird habitat, and perhaps spark a deeper understanding of our avian neighbors.

The East Hampton High School boys swimming team evened its League 11 record at 1-1 by winning at Deer Park last week, while the winter track teams got around a Section XI insurance snarl by hitting the track outdoors at Southampton.

The Frank (Sprig) Gardner tournament made an appearance here Saturday for the first time in three years, and, because of a new round-robin/scramble format, every wrestler from the six schools that vied was guaranteed four matches.

The East Hampton High School boys basketball team won a season-opening tournament at Mattituck High School over the weekend, and the boys swimming team, while it lost its season-opener by 3 points at Hauppauge last Thursday, would have won if diving had not been one of the events. East Hampton has no divers.

In baseball parlance, the fishing season is now formally in the bottom of the ninth inning. There are two outs and two strikes on the batter at the plate, or in this case a fisherman with a rod and reel in hand. For my part, I did not want to strike out by not fishing one last time before the end of the year.