Sports

    Used to fielding perennial powerhouses, Kathy McGeehan, East Hampton High School’s girls volleyball coach, may have one again, though this fall, because the team is young — there are four ninth graders who are making significant contributions and three sophomores — she will in all likelihood be able to savor the satisfaction that comes from watching her players grow over the course of the campaign.

    It wasn’t just the boys soccer team that began its season on the right foot: East Hampton High’s girls team on Friday, behind the scoring of Raffi Franey (two goals) and Amanda Seekamp, and the goaltending of Kathryn Hess, shut out McGann-Mercy 3-0 in a nonleague game played at the Riverhead school.

    With 29 players on its roster, among them a number of athletes who’ve made their marks in other sports such as football, lacrosse, and wrestling — even baseball — the Montauk Rugby Club has great expectations for the Met Union’s Division II fall season.

    The side tied for fourth in the eight-team league last year, missing out on the playoffs by one point. The team that went to the playoffs, North Jersey, fell to the Sharks in a division opener Saturday by a score of 42-36.

    “It was Tuesday late,” Irene Silverman began in recounting her hole in one, the sole one of the summer at the South Fork Country Club in Amagansett.

    The scene: the par 3, 143-yard ninth hole on Sept. 6.

    The pairing: Irene and her husband, Sidney.

    The gallery: no one.

    “I would tell you what club I used, but it’s very embarrassing,” said the Star copy editor. “I’m not a good golfer. I’m very bad, in fact. . . . It was a kind of miracle.”

    The story of how Harry de Leyer came to ride Snowman, a plow horse he rescued from the glue factory at the cost of $80 in 1956, to national show jumping championships is one of this country’s most compelling sports stories.

Thursday, September 15

BOYS VOLLEYBALL, East Hampton at Huntington, 4 p.m.

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

BOYS SOCCER, Center Moriches at East Hampton, nonleague, 4:30 p.m.

GIRLS VOLLEYBALL, Rocky Point at East Hampton, 5 p.m.

FIELD HOCKEY, William Floyd at Pierson, Mashashimuet Park, Sag Harbor, 4:30 p.m.

Friday, September 16

BOYS VOLLEYBALL, East Hampton at Sayville, 4 p.m.

FIELD HOCKEY, Greenport-Southold at East Hampton, 4:30 p.m.

    East Hampton High’s boys soccer team got its season off on the right foot, besting Mattituck, the defending Long Island Class B champion, 4-0 in a nonleaguer played at the North Fork school’s field Saturday.

    The game was East Hampton’s first in the Bridgehampton National Bank East End Cup tournament, a tourney contested by 10 teams that Mattituck won last year (as it had the previous two years as well).

    The 30th anniversary of the Mighty Hamptons Triathlon, which debuted in 1982 with a number of the then-new sport’s elite competitors, including three Hawaiian Ironman champions, was celebrated at Long Beach in Noyac Sunday by a field almost five times as large as the first one, bearing out John Howard’s prediction that first year that participatory sports were the future.

    There were four teenaged riders in Sunday’s Grand Prix, three of them from California, though the one from the East, Katie Dinan, 18, has this country’s — and some would say the world’s — best rider, McLain Ward, as her mentor.

When questioned on Aug. 31 about the coming fall sports season at East Hampton High School, Joe Vas, athletic director, was sanguine.

    The Mighty Hamptons Triathlon will celebrate its 30th anniversary when 1,000-plus competitors in the swim-bike-run event plunge into Noyac Bay at Sag Harbor’s Long Beach at 6:40 a.m. Sunday.

    John Howard, the 1981 Ironman champion and a renowned ultra cycler who holds the 24-hour drafting record of 539 miles and cycling’s world absolute speed record of 152.2 miles per hour, as well as the American Canoe Association’s world 24-hour record, is expected to be there as a member of a relay team.

    McLain Ward, who had to be feeling a bit effervescent after sweeping with characteristic aplomb through the Hampton Classic’s major prize money classes last week, a streak capped Sunday afternoon by a record sixth Hampton Classic Grand Prix win (and third in a row), cradled in his lap the magnum of Louis Roederer Champagne he’d been given, popped the sizable cork, and invited those who’d attended the show-ending press conference to share in a round.

Friday, September 9

GIRLS VOLLEYBALL, East Hampton at Amityville, 4 p.m.

GIRLS SOCCER, East Hampton at McGann-Mercy, Riverhead, nonleague, 4:30 p.m.

Saturday, September 10

BOYS VOLLEYBALL, East Hampton at Eastport-South Manor tournament, 8 a.m.

GIRLS VOLLEYBALL, East Hampton at Smithtown East tournament, 9 a.m.

BOYS SOCCER, East Hampton at Mattituck, nonleague, 2 p.m.

FOOTBALL, East Hampton at Harborfields, 2 p.m.

Sunday, September 11

    Tim Ensign, a 48-year-old visitor from Chattanooga, Tenn., and Justin Kulchinsky, 38, the owner of Mayfair Rocks, a jewelry store in East Hampton Village, were the winners of the Great Bonac 10 and 5K races in Springs Monday.

     Marty Bauman, the Hampton Classic’s press officer, was on the Bridgehampton showgrounds at 5:30 a.m. Monday, as were scores of workers and volunteers, who by midmorning had most of the some 100 tents that had been taken down in advance of Hurricane Irene’s arrival back up.

    “It’s been unbelievable, incredible,” Bauman said of the effort. “It shows you what happens when everyone pitches in. We told the competitors that there were to be no horses here until Tuesday.”

    Forewarned regarding Hurricane Irene, Shanette Barth Cohen, the Hampton Classic’s executive director, on Friday announced the cancellation of Opening Day, which was to have been Sunday, and resolved to restart the ordinarily weeklong hunter-jumper show on Wednesday, Aug. 31.

    Ryan Pilla’s Car Doctor World garage is on Scuttlehole Road, not far from the late lamented Bridgehampton Race Circuit (now a golf course) where in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, the top sports car drivers in the world used to gather.

    Albert Woods, an 82-year-old swimmer who was named the Old Montauk Athletic Club’s athlete-of-the-year at its December awards dinner, feting the fact that he had as an 81-year-old won six national championships, has done it again.

    Topping a field of about 800 runners and walkers, Nick Ellenoff, the 17-year-old Trinity School senior who the week before had won the Strides For Life 3-miler, glided to the shaded Ellen’s [5K] Run finish line near the old entrance to Southampton Hospital Sunday morning in 17 minutes and 27 seconds.

    The personable winner, who is an all-state competitor in cross-country and track with a personal-best 4:20 in the mile, said he had run faster at this race last year, but last year he had John Honerkamp — the winner in 15:45 — and Angel Rojas to contend with.

    When the first roughly 20 people first worked their way across the open ocean as part of Paddlers for Humanity back in 2005, most were in kayaks or prone paddling on boards, and only one woman, Marilyn Suder, made the trip.

    “In 2008, we started seeing paddleboarding springing up, literally,” said Fred Doss, co-president of the organization with Ed Cashin of Weekend Warrior Tours in Sag Harbor.

Classic’s Coming

    The weeklong Hampton Classic Horse Show opens at the 60-acre Snake Hollow Road, Bridgehampton, showgrounds on Sunday with a day of competition for local riders, beginning with leadline and short stirrup classes in the Grand Prix ring from 8 a.m.

    The Opening Day ceremonies are to take place in the Grand Prix ring at noon, after which the $20,000 Nicolock Time Challenge, the Classic’s first high-level class, is to be held.

    Mike Bunce, who plays on Boston’s Super League rugby side, won the Pump and Run contest Mike Bahel put on at the Atlantic Avenue Beach in Amagansett on Aug. 17, pressing 125 pounds (60 percent of his body weight) 55 times, an effort that resulted in almost three minutes being deducted from  his subsequent two-mile run time.

    Bunce’s net time of 8 minutes and 45 seconds bested Bahel’s net time by 3 seconds, an outcome that Bahel greeted with some relief inasmuch as “it wouldn’t look too good to win my own contest.”

Saturday, August 27

PADDLING, Paddlers 4 Humanity’s 18-mile open water paddle from Montauk to Block Island, Montauk Lighthouse, 6:30 a.m.

Sunday, August 28

HAMPTON CLASSIC, opening day, beginning with leadline classes in the Grand Prix ring at 8 a.m.; opening ceremonies, noon, with $20,000 Nicolock Time Challenge to follow in the Grand Prix ring, Snake Hollow Road, Bridgehampton, showgrounds.

XTERRA TRIATHLON, half-mile lake swim, 11-mile mountain bike leg, and 5K trail run, Schiff Scout Reservation, Wading River, 8 a.m.

August 7, 1986

    This season, Howard Wood, who does his own salary negotiating now, and who has “played every position except guard,” returns to Spain’s “A” professional basketball league, with Valencia.

    “The directors at Burgos fed me a lot of lies — they still owe me quite a bit of money,” he said without bitterness during a stroll on Newtown Lane the other day. “They’d say, ‘Howard, you’re the American so you must score 40 points and get 20 rebounds.’ I said I would if they’d pay me on time.”

    Before he entered Gardiner’s Bay early Saturday morning for the Volunteer Ocean Rescue Squad’s half-mile swim John Conner, who was an international-class miler and 800 runner before being struck by a truck on a bicycle training ride here 10 years ago, recalled Glenn Cunningham, the great American miler, as having said, “In running it’s you against yourself — the cruelest of competitors.”

Thursday, August 18

SWIMMING, showing of “Raiders Of The Lost Ark,” benefit East Hampton Y.M.C.A. RECenter Hurricanes swim team, Havens Beach, Sag Harbor, 6 p.m.

SLOW-PITCH, playoffs, game three of women’s final, if necessary, 7 p.m., and game five of men’s final, if necessary, time to be announced, Terry King ball field, Abraham’s Path, Amagansett.

Saturday, August 20

BENEFIT SOFTBALL, Travis Field tournament, quarterfinal round games from 8:30 a.m., home run derby final, 11, tournament final, 7:45 p.m.

    Justin Kulchinsky, 38, who 15 years ago recorded the 1996 Montauk triathlon’s fastest 10K run split, covering the hilly 6.2-mile course in 34 minutes and 2 seconds on his way to a fourth-place finish, reappeared on the race scene in the Miss Amelia’s Cottage two-miler Sunday, and, not surprisingly, wound up winning it in 10 minutes and 59 seconds.

    It may be summer here, but it’s winter in New Zealand, a country to which Joe Mensch, whose father, Mark, is a former East Hampton High School assistant football coach and trainer, headed this week for a month of professional snowboarding competition.

    The 19-year-old Mensch, who has his eye on the 2014 Olympics, said during a conversation at The Star the other day that American snowboarders were dominant in the sport, to which his father, now the athletic director at William Floyd High School, added, “but the Japanese are starting to catch up a little.”

Thursday, August 11

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

Friday, August 12

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

Saturday, August 13

SWIMMING, East Hampton Volunteer Ocean Rescue Squad swims, Fresh Pond Park, Amagansett, 7 a.m.

BENEFIT SOFTBALL, Travis Field memorial tournament, Terry King ball field, Abraham’s Path, Amagansett, from 9 a.m.

Giant Steps 5K in Amaganset