3 Photos
A pair of Bonackers block an attempted kill by ESM's Hank Foglia.
East Hampton junior Nick Schaefer goes up for the ball.
Bonackers Alex Lombardo, left, and Hunter Eberhart go up for a block on ESM's Danny Tiedemann.
The East Hampton boys volleyball team has come a long way from where it was last season and because of that, even after being swept in three straight sets to host Eastport-South Manor in the Suffolk County Division II semifinals on Thursday, the Bonacker’s spirits were still high.
“We’re not done, we’re not finished,” East Hampton head coach Josh Brussell said after the match.
With much of the team staying intact for next season, with just a few seniors graduating this June, Brussell’s excited about what the team’s prospects look like for next season. After multiple shutdowns due to COVID-19, East Hampton’s season was cut short after just six matches last season, and with no junior varsity program, the amount of playing experience the Bonackers (8-10 overall) lost was significant.
“So compared to all of these guys in the league who we were playing, we didn’t get a lot of experience, we didn’t get a lot of play,” Brussell said. “They really stepped it up, and even in the huddle now they were like, ‘hey, let’s start working in a few weeks.’ So they’re raring to go.”
East Hampton needed to defeat East Islip in order to reach the semifinals against ESM, which it did in a 3-1 victory at home on November 2. After taking the first two sets 25-8, 27-25, the Bonackers dropped the third set to the Redmen, 25-18, only to come back and clinch the match with a 25-13 victory in the fourth and final set.
Senior Andrew Dimopoulos led the offense with nine kills, junior Nick Schaefer had seven, junior co-captain Calum Anderson had six and junior Hunter Eberhart had five. Junior co-captain Alex Lombardo had 34 assists and four aces and senior Declan Bistrian had three aces to go with his six kills. Freshman libero Allen Rodriguez had 21 digs, while Lombardo, Anderson and junior Collin Villante each had 10 digs.
Both Anderson and Lombardo said after Thursday’s loss to ESM that the team has formed a tight-knit bond over the past calendar year after everything that happened with COVID last season and it’s certainly helped with the team’s play on the court.
“We had a horrible season last year. We were sidelined multiple times because of COVID and just to be able to come out here and compete … we made semifinals and we knew this was a tough team, but that’s how East Hampton fights. We always try and come in and play a good ball game,” Anderson said.
“We’re known to be a more scrappy team,” Lombardo added. “We had a starting freshman libero, very impressed with how he played this year.”
ESM (14-0) is the favorite to win the Suffolk County Division II Championship over Westhampton Beach this Tuesday, November 7, at Longwood High School. The Sharks went undefeated during the regular season and only dropped one set all season in the season opener to Sachem North back on September 2.
Aside from what head coach Bill Kropp said was a slow start in the first set, ESM was rather dominant on Thursday, winning via set scores of 25-11, 25-5, 25-8.
“I wasn’t happy the first 13 points of the match,” he explained. “It was 8-5. We weren’t patient at the net, we were just jumping into it. We weren’t using our blockers when they hit so we were not in any sort of rhythm. But then again, as the match went on, we were able to do what I expect of them.”
It was at that point in the match at 8-5 that Jake DesLauriers went on a torrid serving streak with eight consecutive aces that basically sealed the victory in the first set. Overall, ESM had 19 aces throughout the match, nine of the from DesLauriers, who also had 10 kills.
“That was pretty special,” Kropp said of DesLauriers consecutive aces. “I’ve never seen that before in my 40 years of coaching. And they were legit, like ripping balls, so that was kind of fun to watch.”
Mark Porcelli had eight kills and five aces for ESM while Hank Foglia had six blocks. Christian Herr had eight assists and five blocks and Ayden DesLauriers finished with 16 assists.
The attention now turns to the county final for the Sharks where it will be a rematch of last season’s final with the crosstown rival Hurricanes, who swept Hauppauge in three sets on Thursday in the other county semifinal to advance. Although the season has gone close to perfect so far for ESM on the court, Kropp said he and his team are not taking things lightly.
“We knew this at the beginning of the season, even when we played Westhampton during the season we were like, ‘well, this means nothing. We’ll see them in the county finals.’”
“[Daniel] Haber is a great player, great coaching, they play hard, they hustle,” Kropp said of Westhampton Beach. “It’s hard to find the floor when we hit the ball, serve the ball, against them — we’re not going to get those aces. We need to start playing better defense and it’s going to be a battle. Nothing is taken for granted and these guys know it and we know we have to come and play our best, otherwise we're going to be kind of disappointed.”
