Sports

    With the Giant Steps 5K having ended its run, the Old Montauk Athletic Club stepped into the breach with a race of its own at Fresh Pond, Amagansett, Sunday, though the turnout was light, perhaps given the fact that a number of others were running in a weekly Hamptons Marathon warm-up whose participants gather every Sunday morning at the Gubbins Running Ahead store in East Hampton Village.

   The team without a sponsor but with a logo, CfAR, sprayed sand in the defending champions’ faces in the first two games of the East Hampton Town men’s slow-pitch softball league’s best-of-five final.

   Maidstone Market, the Yankees of East Hampton men’s soccer, advanced to last night’s spring-summer 7-on-7 final by shutting out Bateman Painting 2-0 at Herrick Park on July 25.

    Tortorella Pools earned the other finalist’s spot by upsetting 75 Main, the top seed, 2-1.

    Bateman played the Market toe-to-toe in the first half, which ended scoreless. But it shot itself in the foot in the second frame as the result of a yellow card handed out by the referee, Alex Ramirez, to Juan Zuluaga for entering the game without his permission.

Artists-Writers

Thursday, August 2

BENEFIT SOFTBALL, Travis Field tournament begins, Terry King ball field, Abraham’s Path, Amagansett, 5:30 p.m.

BEACH VOLLEYBALL, games at Gurney’s Inn, Montauk, from 6 p.m.

Friday, August 3

BENEFIT SOFTBALL, Travis Field tournament, Terry King ball field, Abraham’s Path, Amagansett, 5:30 p.m.

Saturday, August 4

BENEFIT SOFTBALL, Travis Field tournament, Terry King ball field, Abraham’s Path, Amagansett, from 8 a.m.

   As “defiant” as he had been as a teenager, Kofi Sekyiamah said with a smile during a conversation at The Star the other day, the all-boys Presbyterian school in England his Ghanian parents had sent him to had, with its strict rules and regulations, “made me stay in line,” and that toeing of the line combined with his innate love of sport had given him “real direction.”

   Amos Ryan, who first came to East Hampton as a teenager at the invitation of a pen pal whose sailboat he’d tended on Union Island in the Grenadines, and who was to attain educational and professional goals that some here doubted he would, now faces a serious challenge indeed inasmuch as his and his wife Canela’s 14-year-old daughter, Manijeh, has been diagnosed with brain cancer.

   The I-Tri explosion was never more evident than at Sunday morning’s youth triathlon at Maidstone Park.

    Cheered on by a sizable crowd of parents, relatives, and coaches, including Theresa Roden, who several years ago founded the program, which has used triathlon training to transform teenage girls who would otherwise have been couch potatoes, about 80 young competitors, half from the Springs and Montauk Schools’ I-Tri groups, swam 300 yards in the bay, biked 7 miles through Maidstone Park’s environs in Springs, and finished with a mile-and-a-half run.

   Year-round South Fork residents know well what it means when an otherwise nondescript vehicle appears in their rearview mirrors with a flashing green or blue light on the dash. Other drivers, particularly those passing through just for a day or weekend, may have no idea that the signals say, “Get out of the way — and fast!”

   The scoreboard was working again and things were pretty much back to normal at the Terry King ball field in Amagansett Monday night as Schenck Fuels, the defending champion, whose hitters delivered four runs in the top of the seventh inning, ousted Round Swamp Farm from the playoffs and, by virtue of the 13-12 win, advanced to a best-of-five men’s final with CfAR that was to have begun last night.

Waterborne Events

    There will be two waterborne events supported by the East Hampton Volunteer Ocean Rescue Squad this weekend — ocean swims of one-half, one, and two miles in Montauk that are to benefit the Montauk Playhouse’s aquatics center on Saturday, and a stand-up paddleboard race benefiting the Retreat at Fresh Pond Landing on Sunday.

Friday, July 27

TRAVIS FIELD TOURNEY, “Bracket Bash,” American Legion Hall, Amagansett, 7:30-10:30 p.m.

Saturday, July 28

OCEAN SWIMS, benefit Montauk Playhouse aquatics center, Kirk Park beach, Atlantic Terrace, and Ditch Plain, from 7:30 a.m.

Sunday, July 29

PADDLEBOARDING, Main Beach Surf and Sport races to benefit the Retreat, Fresh Pond Landing, Gardiner’s Bay, Amagansett, 8 a.m.

RUNNING, Old Montauk Athletic Club 5K to benefit O.M.A.C.’s athletic grant program, Fresh Pond, Amagansett, 9 a.m., registration from 8.

    Air & Speed, whose roster includes Summer Foley, Kim Valverde, Jon Jamet, and Dan Weaver, took over first place last Thursday in the 10-team beach volleyball league at Gurney’s Inn with a 9-1 record.

    Organized beach volleyball has been a rarity here in the past 20 years, and the 4-on-4 games Kathy McGeehan has been overseeing at Gurney’s have proved popular indeed.

   Babylon Bike Shop co-workers Tom Eickelberg, 23, and Ryan Siebert, 21, who are also sponsored by PowerBar and Western Beef Racing, placed first and fourth in Sunday’s sprint triathlon that ended at the foot of the Montauk Lighthouse, where the exceedingly well-informed M.C., Terry Bisogno, greeted them.

    It was a repeat for Eickelberg, who won this race last year too.

    Taking up where Rusty Red Lacrosse left off, Zach Brenneman, the former two-time collegiate all-American midfielder who starred for the East Hampton High School team before going to Notre Dame, oversaw a well-attended camp for kids at East Hampton’s Stephen Hand’s Path fields this past week.

    The campers, who ranged in age from 6 to 12 years old, had fun while learning the game’s fundamentals.

    One of Brenneman’s assistants was his former Bonac coach, Ralph Naglieri, whose two sons, Jack, 9, and Danny, 8, were among the 77 attendees.

Thursday, July 19

LIFEGUARDING, Main Beach, East Hampton, invitational tournament, from 5:30 p.m.

BEACH VOLLEYBALL, games at Gurney’s Inn, Montauk, from 6 p.m.

WOMEN’S SLOW-PITCH, games at Terry King ball field, Abraham’s Path, Amagansett, from 7 p.m.

Friday, July 20

MEN’S SLOW-PITCH, playoffs, either game three of Schenck Fuels-Round Swamp Farm semifinal series or game one of best-of-five final with CfAR, 7:15 p.m., Terry King ball field, Abraham’s Path, Amagansett.

Saturday, July 21

    Sixteen of the best professional women squash players in the world — from Australia, England, Canada, and the United States — mixed deep lobs with whacks down the rail and nicks up front before appreciative audiences at the Elmaleh-Stanton courts at the Southampton Recreation Center this past weekend.

July 23, 1987

    Summer squash is about to make its debut on the East End, not only at farm stands, but also at the Omnihealth and Racquet Club in Southampton, which recently converted one of its four air-conditioned racquetball courts to accommodate the lively racket game.

    Richard Gold, the club’s director, said of the addition, “Frankly, our fourth racquetball court was underused, so we said, ‘Why not squash?’ ”

   Having just swum a mile in Gardiner’s Bay Saturday morning as part of a Swim Across America cancer-research fund-raising event, Arnie Paster, a 68-year-old Southamptoner who had raised more than $15,000 on his own, said to the scores of participants and volunteers assembled around him, “We’re all going to die. But we don’t have to die of cancer. What we’re doing today will have a great effect.”

    Sayed Selim, an Egyptian-born squash pro who once coached that country’s national women’s team, and who, after beginning to build a junior program at the Southampton Recreation Center, left in the fall of 2010 to teach at the Pyramid Squash Club in Tuckahoe, N.Y., recently returned here, intent on taking up where he’d left off.

    Shawn Pollard, a graduate student in physics at the State University at Stony Brook, won Sunday’s Firecracker 8K (4.97-mile) road race in Southampton in 27 minutes and 51.1 seconds, a time that probably would have been quicker, the winner said later, had he not attended a bachelor party the night before.

    Pollard’s pace that pretty — though hot — morning was 5:37 per mile. On a flat track, he said, in reply to a question, he could run “a 4:30-something.”

   Before Monday night’s clash between the East Hampton Town men’s slow-pitch softball league’s top two teams, the defending-champion Schenck Fuels and CfAR, a team without a sponsor that has adopted the Citizens for Access Rights logo, about 15 minutes was spent filling in a deep hole in shallow center field so that fielders would not risk injury.

Thursday, July 12

SQUASH, professional women’s doubles tournament and pro-am begin, Elmaleh-Stanton courts, Southampton Recreation Center, from 2 p.m., through Sunday morning.

VOLLEYBALL, beach league round-robin games, Gurney’s Inn, Montauk, from 6 p.m.

Friday, July 13

PADDLEBOARDING, clinic by Jamie Mitchell, 10-time winner of Molokai crossing, and sports nutritionist Adam Kelinson, Surf Lodge, Montauk, 7:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m.

   Play has begun in a 4-on-4 beach volleyball league contested by 11 teams on the beach at Gurney’s Inn in Montauk every Thursday evening, Kathy McGeehan, the longtime coach of East Hampton High School’s girls volleyball team, announced this week.

    McGeehan, sidelined at the moment because of meniscus surgery, is the league’s director. Gurney’s, Smart Water, and the Diplomatico Rum Company are the sponsors. There are teams from East Hampton, Montauk, and Shelter Island, and the players range in age from 15 to 50, she said, adding that the competition is keen.

July 2, 1987

    Costa Rica became on June 24 the East End Men’s Night Soccer League spring season playoff champion by virtue of a shot by Carlos Vargas late in the second half that found the upper right corner of the Springs-Village Shoe Store goal.

    Dahlia Aman, who recently swept through the Empire State Games senior division in tennis without losing a game, qualifying for next summer’s national tournament in Cleveland, played volleyball when growing up in the Philippines and didn’t begin playing tennis until she moved to the United States in 1973.

    “I wish I had learned when I was younger,” said the 5-foot-1-inch dynamo, with a laugh. “I would have been traveling.”

    It’s been a while, a long while in fact, since the Maidstone Market has faced a serious competitor in the Wednesday evening 7-on-7 men’s soccer league, whose games are played at East Hampton’s Herrick Park.

    The 9-10-year-old East Hampton traveling all-star baseball team’s playoff run came to an end with a 10-6 loss at Patchogue Saturday morning. Thus the Bonackers finished the District 36 Little League tournament with a 3-2 record.

    Following Friday’s 13-0 mercy-rule shutout of Sag Harbor at the Pantigo Fields here, Tim Garneau and Adam Wilson, one of Garneau’s assistants, told the boys that three more wins stood between them and the district title.

Weekend Events

    There will be two sporting events of note here this weekend — Swim Across America’s long-distance Hamptons Swim races in Gardiner’s Bay, a fund-raiser for cancer research, which are to be held, from 6 to 10 a.m., at Fresh Pond Beach in Amagansett, and the Firecracker 8K road race, whose start-finish line is across the street from Lake Agawam Park in Southampton, at 8:30 a.m. Sunday.

    The Stony Hill Stables Foundation’s fund-raiser Saturday exceeded its $20,000 goal, Maureen Bluedorn was happy to report Tuesday morning before children’s pony and horse camps began.

    Thus the foundation is on its way toward awarding eight riding scholarships — apparently a “first” here — to promising applicants with a desire to improve their skills.