East Hampton, Southampton Competing in County's Inaugural Unified Bowling Season

For the first time ever, Section XI is recognizing unified bowling as a sanctioned sport. Both East Hampton and Southampton are game.

Southampton got its season underway on Monday against Port Jefferson at Port Jeff Bowl and has a home match against Central Islip this Thursday, March 9, at 4 p.m. at The All Star in Riverhead. East Hampton, meanwhile, will open its season this Thursday against Longwood at 4 p.m., also at The All Star.

Brian Tenety, Southampton High School’s adaptive physical education teacher and Special Olympics adviser, said the district has had its own unified bowling team, or something similar to it, since 2017, so when the opportunity came up to join the Section XI ranks, it was “automatic.”

“Our kids thoroughly enjoy bowling,” he said. “And there are six or seven teams in the league. Section XI has taken a similar approach to it as unified basketball.”

The county saw a huge boom in unified basketball last spring. Southampton had already been participating in that sport for the past couple of years, but other schools such as East Hampton and Eastport-South Manor joined, including additional schools throughout the county to the point where there were four leagues and a full postseason.

It was last year’s success in unified basketball that led Ethan Mitchell, a special education teacher at East Hampton High School who leads the district’s unified sports programs, to join unified bowling. Fellow special education teach Krista Sanniola has joined Mitchell as an assistant coach.

“It’s another opportunity to highlight our athletes and for our general education kids to be a part of something bigger than themselves,” he said. “Our goal is to get as many unified sports in the state and section, so when both sanctioned unified bowling it was a no-brainer for us.”

Unified sports matches students with intellectual disabilities with general education, nonintellectually disabled students on a combined athletic team, or as defined by Special Olympics, “empowers individuals with and without intellectual disabilities to engage through the power of sports.”

Southampton, in the past, had its bowling matches at Wildwood Lanes in Northampton — there are no bowling alleys between Riverhead and Southampton anymore — but when Wildwood closed down recently, Tenety opted to both practice and play at The All Star in Riverhead. Southampton will play all but its season opener there.

East Hampton is in a bit of a different situation. Since it has The Clubhouse just miles away, Bonac practices there. But because those lanes use a string-pin system, official matches can’t be played there. So East Hampton practices at The Clubhouse, but has its matches at The All Star.

“Tremendous. They have been awesome,” Mitchell said of The Clubhouse. “With it opening it up three days a week for us to practice for an hour, with the time out of the day it takes to travel to Riverhead, having to do that every day would have made things difficult for the athlete and it would have made it more in terms of making a commitment. It is what it is to have to play matches in Riverhead, but the Clubhouse has been so helpful.”

“Fun and inclusion,” are the two big themes of the inaugural unified bowling season, Mitchell said. But like unified basketball, there will be a competitive aspect to it all. While those who need to use ramps at the lane will be able to do so, the athletes will have to set them up for themselves and there are no bumpers allowed.

“What’s fun and different about bowling is that we had plenty of partners who could play basketball last spring and who are pretty decent at that. But you take those same kids, and they’re struggling a little bit on the lanes,” Mitchell said. “So it’s pretty cool to watch the gen ed kids develop their bowling skills as well as teaching the athletes just as much.”

Tenety said that unified bowling is just another part to the “big picture,” which is East End inclusion through sports, bringing different communities and families together to help one another out. And it’s something that started a few years ago and will continue in the future. Tenety said that he has been getting more and more help in certain pockets of the South Fork, from Mitchell in East Hampton and Whitney Reidlinger in Springs, to Connor Davis in Westhampton Beach, Carla Pensa in Hampton Bays and Brian Cunningham in Riverhead.

“There’s definitely a nice contingency now of people on the East End working toward building these type of programs,” Tenety said. “Some schools aren’t ready and maybe don’t have the numbers to have unified teams set up, but we’re going to continue to have Unified Days throughout the area where anyone can come and participate. At our unified soccer day last fall in East Hampton, you could see there where it all started to come together. With Southampton kind of being the hub, we’ve taken a lot of strides and I feel we’re in a really good place organizationally of building a program out east so people don’t have to travel farther west.”

Tenety said there is certainly a connection between the unified sports and the community-based programs such as Special Olympics, which will also continue to grow together. To that end, Special Olympics Long Island is hosting a regional competition at The All Star on March 26 from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. that both East Hampton and Southampton will participate in.

“There’s been a lot of growth in unified sports,” Tenety said. “Bowling is obviously a nice segue as we move toward basketball later in the spring in May, but we’d like to have additional sports, maybe two or three more options, through Section XI over time. After basketball, we start competing on the community side in track and field. And so our goal here on the East End is to try and build a program. And if it’s three kids per school and we’re bringing five schools together, that creates a nice little team and is just more inclusion through sports.”