The Old Montauk Athletic Club Holds Its First In-Person Awards Ceremony In Two Years, Honors Its Five Award Winners

For the first time in two years, members of the Old Montauk Athletic Club gathered, in person, on Thursday, May 12, and held the club’s annual awards ceremony at The Clubhouse in Wainscott.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the local nonprofit that promotes athletics, family, fun and fitness through a wide variety of events had held off from its typical in-person awards dinner. Even so, OMAC still made sure to give out its Male and Female Athlete of the Year Awards to graduating East Hampton High School seniors and its Bill O’Donnell Swimmer of the Year Award during that time. What it had held off from giving out was its overall Athlete of the Year Award, given to a local athlete who the organizations deems worthy, and its Community Award, given to someone who is again local and has given back in some way.

Anthony Daunt, a former Montauk resident who now lives in Springs, and who graduated from East Hampton High School in 2010, completed a 24-hour Spartan Ultra World Championship in Iceland back in 2018, and has completed various ultra marathons since then. He was named the 2022 Athlete of the Year.

Sharon Bacon was this year’s recipient of the Community Award. Bacon is the mother of Kendall Madison, a standout three-sport athlete at East Hampton High School in basketball, football and spring track, who was killed in January 1995 at the age of 21. The Kendall Madison Foundation and Kendall Madison Scholarship Fund were created not long after his death and have since provided thousands of dollars in scholarship funds to local athletes.

A pair of East Hampton High School senior runners, Amari Gorgon and Emma Hren, were this year’s recipients of the Male and Female Athlete of the Year awards, and Emily Dyner, a senior who swam on the Bonacker varsity swim team as well at the East Hampton YMCA Hurricanes swim team, was given the Bill O’Donnell Swimmer of the Year Award.

As OMAC President Sharon McCobb pointed out, Daunt had been on OMAC’s radar for a few years, after word got out of his accomplishments. Daunt’s accomplishments include winning his age group of that aforementioned 24-hour Spartan Ultra World Championship in Iceland in 2018, placed fourth in his age group in another race in Sweden in 2019 and then completed the Moab 240, an endurance run through various types of terrain, which he called the hardest thing he’s ever done.

Daunt, now 30, was a skateboarder during his formative years, eventually becoming a captain of the boys soccer team his senior year. Other than running track his senior year, he wasn’t much of a distance runner, he said, until after he graduated from college. On a whim one day, he ran from Lake Montauk to East Hampton and completed 26 miles, or a marathon distance, and he decided why not compete in an official race. So he entered his first race, the Hamptons Marathon, in which he suffered a knee injury three miles in, leading to what he called a pretty bad experience. To his credit, though, he wasn’t discouraged and continued to run. When he heard that a friend of his wife, Erica, entered into a Spartan race at Citi Field, Daunt decided he would try that out as well, and that’s when he got into Spartans, which are obstacle races of varying distances and difficulty, ranging from 3 miles to marathon distances.

“I think, it’s kind of a weird way of saying it, but it’s kind of like an addiction,” Daunt said of the races he competes in. “Like, there is a place only you can get to when you’re just in complete exhaustion and it’s the most honest version of yourself and that’s really the only way you can get there, for me personally. I guess you could do it through meditation and less painful ways, but I just love everything that comes with it.”

Daunt was surprised that anyone and everyone took such an interest in his accomplishments, but appreciated being recognized for them.

“Everyone has Instagram, Facebook nowadays, but even most of the time I don’t post about it, I just do it and go back to my normal life. I didn’t know anybody even knew about the things I did,” he explained. “It’s not why you do it, but it’s nice to be recognized and that people are impressed with what you do. In the community that I’m from, all of my friends race and do so much more and do these kind of things all the time. So for me, I feel relatively unimpressive compared to that. But it’s nice to be reminded sometimes that doing a marathon is a big deal for a lot of people, and it’s good to not lose sight of that.”

Daunt then pointed to the high school seniors in the crowd and said he was nowhere near the athlete they were in high school.

“These kids are amazing, what they do, and they know it,” he said.

Both Gordon and Hren helped their respective boys and girls cross country teams, and spring track teams. But it was cross country in the fall that both seemed to really shine in. Boys cross country head coach Kevin Barry liked Gordon’s makeup so much he named him, and fellow junior at the time Evan Masi, co-captains of the team, a role in which they continued their senior seasons this past fall. Both helped lead the team to undefeated league champion seasons. The Penn State-bound Gordon was one of the top runners on the team but he was an equally impressive student, being named co-president of the student council, again with Masi, and also an All-Academic runner, which Barry broke down real easy for those in attendance last week, “which means he’s really fast and really smart.”

“I like to prioritize schoolwork and running is second. I’m definitely grateful,” of the award, East Hampton resident Gordon said. “I’m glad that I was blessed with such great coaches that pushed me to try my best. When my coach texted my mom and that I got the award, I was super excited.

“Cross country is a very independent sport, so a lot of is mental,” he said. “You can’t really fall back on your teammates, you’re kind of by yourself when you’re running.”

Hren, an Amagansett resident, nodded her head in agreement with Gordon’s thoughts. She was part of the East Hampton girls cross country team’s first-ever county championship in 2019 when it placed seventh in the state. Hren made consistent improvement in all four years on the varsity cross country team, but she is a talented dancer as well, having won multiple awards in that sport outside of school competing with the local school Dancehampton. Hren, who is also a local ocean beach lifeguard, plans on focusing more on dancing while she attends James Madison University.

“Years of hard work, it’s great to see that it pays off,” Hren said

Dyner has been swimming since she was eight years old, many of those young years spent with the East Hampton Hurricanes, the past four years on the varsity swim team at East Hampton where she was coached by Craig Brierley. Dyner, another Amagansett resident who lifeguards at Indian Wells Beach, will be attending Cornell in the fall, where she will swim at the club with them.

All three student-athletes received $1,000 scholarships along with their awards.

“Emily is so kind, she is a great leader for the team,” Brierley said. “Her enthusiasm and her love for her teammates, she’s always there for her friends and her teammates. Whether it was a positive or a negative, Emily was always there to take care of her teammates. As a coach, I rely heavily on the seniors to really take our culture of love and hard work and really relay that out to the other student-athletes and Emily was such a big part of that.”

Bacon said prior to last week’s awards ceremony that she didn’t feel she was deserving of OMAC’s Community Award, stating she does everything for her late son Kendall Madison, who was an outstanding athlete himself — he was a member of the New York State Class B Championship basketball team in 1990 and was an All-County, All-League and MVP football player who went on to play football at the University of Connecticut on a full scholarship. Madison was posthumously inducted into the East Hampton High School Hall of Fame in 2012.

Bacon’s peers, and the sheer numbers, certainly deemed her worthy of such a recognition. Since the Kendall Madison Foundation and Kendall Madison Scholarship Fund were established in 1995, $200,000 have gone to local athletes and all but one have graduated from college.

The Kendall Madison Foundation used to give $1,000 scholarships to both a graduating boy and girl from East Hampton, but now only one two-sport, student-athlete in good academic standing receives $2,500 — for each year they are in college — therefore totaling $10,000.

“It’s an honor to be recognized, but I’m going to accept this honor on behalf of my boy,” Bacon said. “Without the Kendall Madison Foundation, I would not be able to do anything.”