Sports

Three athletes and the 1953-54 boys basketball team are to be inducted into East Hampton High School’s Hall of Fame Saturday, and the Kendall Madison hoops tournament starts here Friday night.

After breeding on the northern lakes, loons arrive on the East End in the autumn and increase in numbers through the winter as their breeding territories freeze. They can survive our winter water because they’re so well insulated.

East Hampton High’s wrestling team was the runner-up in the 45th Frank (Sprig) Gardner tournament it hosted on Saturday, while the Bonac boys swimmers started a tough league schedule last week.

A visit from South Africa, a season when the Bonac boys basketball team was flying high, and more from the sports reportage of yore.

The plight of our beloved scallop is a sad one. For five straight years, we have witnessed a summer die-off. Baymen never have it easy.

The Bonac winter sports schedule starts with swimming and continues with Saturday’s Sprig Gardner wrestling tournament, while boys hoops gets a coach out of retirement and boys indoor track will be led by the cross-country coach.

The Maidstone Market won the Wednesday evening 7-on-7 men's soccer final on Nov. 20, defeating top-seeded F.C. Tuxpan 4-1. Plus, Bonac boys soccer players awarded.

With the season for blackfish and sea bass concluding in a few weeks, our columnist headed toward Block Island on a trip organized by Bill Bennett of Sag Harbor. They enjoyed consistent action all morning.

Sunny and brisk, Thanksgiving was a good day for running 3 and 6-mile loops around Fort Pond, and many took advantage. Ryan Fowkes, a former standout in track and cross-country at East Hampton High, won the 6-miler.

Four 7-on-7 men’s soccer teams, F.C. Tuxpan, Tortorella Pools, the Maidstone Market, and Sag Harbor United, battled it out at East Hampton’s Herrick Park last week in the league’s semifinal playoff round.

Eight East Hampton High School student-athletes aiming to play at the college level were feted last week at the school.

Sas Peters’s gold medal from the recent world Ultimate Disc championships in Florida is the seventh that the 67-year-old Amagansett resident has won in the free-flowing, spirited sport.

Notes from Pierson’s 1998 field hockey wars, and the story behind a celebrity basketball tournament benefiting the Bridgehampton School.

“I honestly don’t think I missed a fish, as they were taking the bait with such abandon,” Joel Fisher said of the waters off Big Gull Island. “All were in the 14-to-17-inch range. It was a great way to end the season.”

At the 3.3-mile Dock Race in Montauk Sunday, it was a good thing that George Watson had the Elitefeats timers at the finish line in front of his dockside restaurant and bar, for this year’s turnout of more than 400 was double that of the last two years.

Leslie Czeladko, the men’s 7-on-7 soccer league overseer, said F.C. Tuxpan, Maidstone Market, and Sag Harbor United all had a chance to finish the season in first place as of Monday night.

The plan was to head out on a 90-minute ride to Block Island for blackfish, sea bass, and codfish. When boats were able to get out in recent days, the action was good, especially for blackfish.

In just a few weeks, since the end of October, a crew of 20 has transformed the Buckskill Tennis Club into the Buckskill Winter Club, which on Saturday is to begin its 21st year of operation in East Hampton.

An East Hampton High scoreboard is dedicated to Brandon Hayes, and a standout Southampton wrestler looks back.

Last November I landed one bushel of scallops on opening day in and around Shelter Island Sound. The next day, however, I struggled to land barely a quarter bushel. East Hampton Town waters will open to scalloping in two weeks.

Judy Weaver works with veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and would like to do similar work here next summer, under the aegis of the Connected Warriors and Bodymind Recalibration programs she founded.

East Hampton High’s 12 entrants did themselves proud at Saturday’s Suffolk County girls swimming meet, placing 10th among the 24 teams that vied at Stony Brook University. Plus news of Pierson field hockey and boys soccer.

While 10 East Hampton High School teams were playing this fall, men’s teams in slow-pitch softball and in 7-on-7 soccer, whose season at East Hampton Village’s Herrick Park is nearing an end, were active as well.

Among the middle school teams here that did well this fall were East Hampton’s seventh-and-eighth-grade football team, which began its 5-1 season with 44 players and ended the season with 44 players, and the Springs School’s boys cross-country team, which went undefeated for the second year in a row.

Blackfishing has been tough of late, “but bass, blues, and false albacore are still running well in Plum Gut,” Ken Morse of Tight Lines Tackle said, and anglers have experienced blitz-like fishing for striped bass around the Montauk Lighthouse.

When Monday’s county Class AA high school boys soccer semifinal was over, and when it had sunk in that Huntington, the tournament’s third seed, had defeated second-seeded East Hampton 3-1 in a penalty kick shootout that followed almost two hours of riveting play, not only did Bonac’s players tear up, but so did their coach, Don McGovern.

The seventh-seeded West Islip Lions came in loaded for bear here Thursday afternoon, hoping that, somehow, they could upset the county Class AA tournament’s second seed, East Hampton. But, despite the fact that the visitors contested every ball, and pretty much matched the Bonackers when it came to corner kicks and free kicks, East Hampton emerged the winner, by 1-0, and will play third-seeded Huntington here Monday.

There is something creepy about cormorants. From most distances, they look black, with long thick necks, tails, and wings. In flight, they appear like black crosses. Against a cormorant, fish have no hope; the tip of their orange bill is hook-shaped, a perfect tool to capture over 250 species of fish. Soon those single black crosses will join to form sky-wide, shape-shifting patterns as they migrate away.

Bonac’s golf team, which plays in the top league in Suffolk County, is to play host today to Hauppauge in a first-round county team tournament match at the South Fork Country Club in Amagansett.

“Local spots like the Sag Harbor bridge, Nichols Point, and the black spindle rock pile outside the breakwater have been producing of late,” Ken Morse of Tight Lines Tackle said from behind the counter of his new establishment in Southampton.