Sports

   Ryan Pilla, “the Car Doctor,” won both ends of a national sports car doubleheader at Watkins Glen over the course of a recent weekend, setting the track’s speed record for Mazdas in the process.

    “I’ve been racing all summer long, and I’ve always been in the top five,” Pilla said on his return, “though this is my biggest achievement — the Sports Car Club of America’s Mazda series has been contested since 1990, almost 23 years.”

    All week leading up to Saturday’s homecoming football game with Southampton, the winner of which would take home the handsome silver Hampton Cup that was introduced into the rivalry by Bridgehampton National Bank in 1982, East Hampton High’s coaches fed the emotional fires, and came the big night, the Bonackers scorched their ancient foes 42-7 before a full house under the lights.

    Nine decades of East Hampton High School sports were celebrated Saturday morning when 12 athletes (5 of them deceased), 2 coaches, 2 teams, and The Star’s sportswriter were inducted into the high school’s Hall of Fame, as its inaugural class, following a breakfast for 400 in the school’s large glassed-in cafeteria.

    “This is one of the great days in Bonac sports history,” said Jim Nicoletti, president of the 19-member committee that made the Hall’s first selections. He was overwhelmed, he said, by the reception the effort had received.

Thursday, September 27

GOLF, East Hampton vs. Center Moriches, Maidstone Club, 4 p.m.

GIRLS SOCCER, Eastport-South Manor at East Hampton, 4:30 p.m.

BOYS VOLLEYBALL, Eastport-South Manor at East Hampton, 5 p.m.

CROSS-COUNTRY, Westhampton boys vs. East Hampton, 4 p.m., and Elwood-John Glenn girls vs. East Hampton, 4:30, Indian Island County Park, Riverhead.

Friday, September 28

GIRLS TENNIS, West Islip at East Hampton, nonleague, 4 p.m.

BOYS SOCCER, Elwood-John Glenn at East Hampton, 4:30 p.m.

   Besides football, three other Bonac teams — field hockey, boys soccer, and girls volleyball — celebrated homecoming victories this past weekend.

    The boys soccer team, which is the defending county Class A champion, bested Miller Place 2-1 Saturday afternoon, a nice lead-in to the rout in football of Southampton. The girls volleyball team swept Rocky Point in three, and the field hockey team, in a Friday game whose second half was played under the lights, defeated Port Jefferson 2-1 thanks to a corner play goal by Amanda Calabrese in the final minutes.

September 10, 1987

    John Kenney of New York and Shelter Island, who nine days before had won a 5K here, continued the string by leading some 200 runners across the line in Monday’s Great Bonac 10K race in Springs.

    Kenney, a 31-year-old IBM systems engineer, covered the 6.2-mile course in 31 minutes and 41 seconds. Kevin Barry, also of Shelter Island, who won this race last year and in 1985, was third in 33:04.

   Bill Barbour Jr., head coach of the East Hampton High School football team, and an assistant, Jason Menu, remember what it was like the last time an East Hampton team defeated a Southampton one.

    “It was a great feeling,” Barbour, who was the center in that game of 25 years ago, said following a recent preseason practice.

    “It was a low-scoring mudfest,” said Menu, who played a guard position. “It was fantastic.”

   Saturday’s homecoming will mark the return of one of the oldest high school football rivalries on Long Island, the one between East Hampton and Southampton that dates to 1923, and will feature as well the induction of East Hampton High School’s first Hall of Fame class.

    Locals who cursed the presence of New Jerseyites here this summer can take a measure of revenge in the dispatching of the Montclair, N.J., Rugby Club back whence they came Saturday, courtesy of the Montauk Sharks by a 17-14 tally at Herrick Park in East Hampton.

    Still, “a 3-point game in rugby is a pretty close game,” the Sharks’ coach, Rich Brierley, said Monday. And Montclair is a team that just moved up to the Empire Union’s Division 2, which, taken together, could signal rough waters ahead.

   Michelle Del Giorno is a world champion in karate, hooked since her first tournament at the age of 16, but she said on Monday that despite what some may think, self-defense is not all about kicking, punching, blocking, and throwing. At her dojo in Sag Harbor, Epic Martial Arts East, the curriculum teaches kindness, respect, tolerance, focus, discipline, confidence, and self-control.

Thursday, September 20

GIRLS SOCCER, Rocky Point at East Hampton, 4:30 p.m.

GOLF, Westhampton Beach vs. East Hampton, South Fork Country Club, Amagansett, 4 p.m.

Friday, September 21

FIELD HOCKEY, Port Jefferson at East Hampton, 6 p.m.

Saturday, September 22

BOYS VOLLEYBALL, Half Hollow Hills at East Hampton, 10 a.m.

GIRLS SOCCER, Harborfields at East Hampton, 10 a.m.

GIRLS TENNIS, Ross School at East Hampton, 10:30 a.m.

GIRLS VOLLEYBALL, Rocky Point at East Hampton, 11:30 a.m.

August 6, 1987

    Bridgehampton High School’s sophomore wing, Bobby Hopson, and East Hampton’s junior center, Kenny Wood, were starters on the Long Island team that played in the Empire State Games at Syracuse last weekend.

    About 150 spectators watched as a Racquet Club of East Hampton pro, Frank Ackley, defeated Ken Trell, a member of the Green Hollow Tennis Club, 7-5, 6-2 in the finals of the senior men’s open tournament held Sunday at the Racquet Club.

August 13, 1987

   If you need proof that bowling is a lifetime sport, just come to East Hampton Bowl Wednesday mornings.

    There you’ll see some pretty keen competitors in the Senior Men’s League, whose average age, Ken McFall, a member of the league for the past seven years, reckoned, was “pushing 80.”

    East Hampton High School’s football team has nowhere to go but up, and this fall it presumably will.

    Last year, if you recall, the Bonackers, who were outnumbered, undersized, and outplayed by all their Division III opponents, went 0-8.

    In the second game of the season, with Kings Park, the starting senior quarterback, Ryan Joudeh, went down with a severe ankle sprain, and his sophomore backup, Cort Heneveld, and the team’s best defender, Dan Barros, were taken to the sidelines with concussions, a “first” in this writer’s memory. And so it went.

Thursday, September 13

FIELD HOCKEY, Riverhead at East Hampton, 4:30 p.m.

BOYS SOCCER, East Hampton at Mount Sinai, 4:30 p.m.

CROSS-COUNTRY, East Hampton boys and girls at invitational meet, Red Creek Park, Hampton Bays, 4 p.m.

Friday, September 14

GIRLS SOCCER, Miller Place at East Hampton, 4 p.m.

GIRLS TENNIS, East Hampton at Shoreham-Wading River, 4 p.m.

FOOTBALL, East Hampton at Stony Brook, 7:30 p.m.

Saturday, September 15

   Alexander Peters and Peter Bennett, two regulars in the Ultimate flying disc competitions held on Friday nights at Herrick Park in East Hampton, took part in the Ultimate national championships in Blaine, Minn., over the Labor Day weekend.

   The two played on the Brooklyn team, one of 18 in the tournament from all over the country. “It’s one of the toughest tournaments in the world,” Peters said Monday. “It was great. We both played really well.”

   The brother and sister act of Adam and Dana Cebulski was on display Labor Day morning as each of them won first-place medals in the Great Bonac Footrace’s 5K.

    Adam, a 17-year-old junior at East Hampton High School, won running away in 18 minutes and 10 seconds. He’d been hoping for a 17:30 or a 17:45, but was nevertheless happy, knowing that he had run hard.

   Grand Prix Sunday at the Hampton Classic ran the gamut age-wise, from 2-to-4-year-olds in leadline classes to the 50-year-old Jeffrey Welles, a two-time former Grand Prix winner, who on Merlin placed eighth in the day’s main event.

    Stuart Nayman, as he was watching his wife, Hilary, lead their 4-year-old daughter, Rachel, around the Anne Aspinall Ring that morning under the discerning eyes of two judges, said, when questioned, that Rachel had been riding “practically since birth.”

   The last line, as it were, of the Hampton Classic’s $250,000 Grand Prix was writ large insofar as about a third of the 35 horse-and-rider combinations were concerned.

    Eleven of them, by one count, came to grief at the 17-effort course’s final hurdle, a skinny vertical four short strides off a wide oxer that followed a double liverpool (a double jump under which small water trenches lay).

   The fall high school sports season is upon us, and from a Bonac fan’s perspective the prospects are bright. Just about all of East Hampton’s 11 teams seem to have legitimate shots at the playoffs.

   The Montauk Rugby Club, which went undefeated in league play last fall, is looking to repeat, although, according to Rich Brierley, the format has been changed so as to include upstate sides in the mix.

    “There will be four three-team divisions in the Empire Union,” Brierley said during a conversation this week. “We’ll play each side in our division twice and then one crossover game. Ours is with Syracuse, but they’ll have to come to us.”

Triathlon

    The 31st Mighty Hamptons Triathlon (.93-mile bay swim, 23.8-mile bike, and 6.2-mile run) is to be held at Long Beach, Sag Harbor, on Sunday beginning at 6:40 a.m.

    Tom Eickelberg, a 23-year-old pro from Babylon, was last year’s winner, in 1 hour, 57 minutes, and 18 seconds. It was his first time at this race. At the time, Eickelberg said he didn’t think he’d been beaten on Long Island in the past couple of years. The women’s winner, and seventh over all, was Amy Bevilacqua, 37, of Wilton, Conn., in 2:07:32.

Hall of Fame

Thursday, September 6

GIRLS SOCCER, East Hampton at Southampton, scrimmage, 4 p.m.

Friday, September 7

BOYS SOCCER, Mattituck at East Hampton, nonleague, 4 p.m.

GIRLS VOLLEYBALL, East Hampton at Hampton Bays, scrimmage, 4 p.m.

FOOTBALL, East Hampton at Babylon, season opener, 6 p.m.

Saturday, September 8

BOYS VOLLEYBALL, East Hampton at Smithtown East invitational, 8:30 a.m.

GIRLS SOCCER, East Hampton vs. Pierson, nonleague, Mashashimuet Park, Sag Harbor, 10 a.m.

   No longer a comedy of errors, the Artists-Writers annual softball game has become discomfitingly well played in recent years, this past Saturday’s mano-a-mano struggle in East Hampton’s Herrick Park being no exception.

    In the end, the Writers’ egos were spared serious bruising as they emerged from the dogfight as 12-11 victors in 10 innings, thus taking a 26-18-1 lead in modern times, and going up 12-11-1 in the post-modern era.

   The Beach Diplomats, a team got together by Chris Carney whose roster included a former Olympic decathlete from Ghana, Kofi Sekyiamah, wound up winning the Gurney’s Inn beach volleyball league’s finals last Thursday, coming back to best top-seeded Air and Speed 17-21, 21-16, 21-14.

    “It was great volleyball,” said Kathy McGeehan, the league’s founder and girls volleyball coach at East Hampton High School, who in the summertime works as a fitness instructor at Gurney’s Spa in Montauk.

    Caroline Cashin, with 120 pumps, which took the pressure off her in the subsequent run that spanned the Atlantic and Indian Wells Beaches in Amagansett, was the runner-up to Neil Falkenhan and set a record for women in the Body Tech and Old Montauk Athletic Club’s “Pump and Run” competition on Aug. 22.

    This year, “thanks to my workouts at [her husband Ed’s] Exceed Fitness studio” on Plank Road, Cashin chest-pressed the bar 120 times, 22 more repetitions than she did at the same event in 2011.

    A pleasant sea breeze caressed the horses and riders and spectators as the 37th Hampton Classic opened Sunday — in stark, and welcome, contrast to the tropical storm that caused the weeklong hunter-jumper show to be foreshortened last year.

   Among the Local Day ribbon winners from Alvin and Patsy Topping’s Swan Creek Farms in Bridgehampton were: Practical Magic, owned by Samantha Rudin Earls and ridden by Jagger Topping, champion, local professionals; Spring Fling, owned and ridden by Yvetta Rechler-Newman of Southampton, champion, local amateur owners; Red Drum, owned by Charlotte Maerov of East Hampton and ridden by Amanda Topping, first and fourth in local professionals.

Paddle Relay Race

    Despite southwest winds that made paddling in Gardiner’s Bay difficult, the three-person, three-mile stand-up paddleboard relay race overseen by Paddlers for Humanity went on as scheduled Sunday with 13 teams participating.

    The race to raise the $35,000 needed so that about 40 Springs School seventh and eighth graders may continue to be combined with the middle school in certain sports has apparently been won.

    Mark Lappin, one of a half-dozen parents who, under the Springs Sports Booster Club aegis, began soliciting donations from businesses and individuals scarcely a month ago in the run-up to a Sept. 1 deadline, said during a conversation Sunday evening, “It’s definitely a go.”