Whalers Are First South Fork-Based Scholastic Ice Hockey Team

The South Fork officially has its first-ever scholastic ice hockey team.

The Southampton/Pierson/East Hampton Whalers played their first game in the Suffolk County High School Hockey League against East Islip on Wednesday night, results of which occurred too late to appear in this week’s edition. The team, which is considered a freshman squad this season with seventh-, eighth- and ninth-graders from the participating schools, will play a 22-game schedule that opened at the end of last month and will stretch into mid-March.

The program has been a long sought out goal for Bryan Wish, director of Southampton Ice Rink on County Road 39 in Southampton, as well as Brendan Goldstein and Jason Craig forming the coaching staff of the program. Just prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Wish had announced publicly that he had a plan in place to get the area’s teenagers on the ice and into the most competitive setting the county has, which is the SCHSL.

As Wish noted on Monday, there was a team that included many players from the South Fork, and points west, that competed during the pandemic. The SCHSL, due to the pandemic, followed a somewhat different format during that time and also included some players who were not from the South Fork, so he is considering this year’s team the first to officially take to the ice.

Southampton is the main “hub” of the team, and according to SCHSL rules, two bordering schools that touch each other can be included on the team, so therefore both Pierson and East Hampton are included, and both of those districts are currently what make up the bulk of the roster. Pierson freshmen Max Goldstein, Quinlan Reilly and Keegan Reilly, eighth-graders Sonny Perello and Aidan D’Angelo and seventh-grader Anthony Cappiello are on the team. Grady Craig is currently a Sag Harbor sixth-grader who will join the team once he’s age-eligible on December 1. East Hampton freshman Enzo Magnotta, eighth-graders Merritt Bistrian-Emptage and Teddy Teryazos, seventh-graders Stefano McCourt, Mateo Vergara, Cam Minardi and Hunter Harrington are also on the team, along with Southampton freshman Andrew Wetter, eighth-grader Tre Armusewicz and seventh-grader Luka Pisano.

On Friday evening, the team held a jersey reveal at the Southampton Ice Rink where Goldstein, Magnotta and Wetter all donned their red sweaters first as captains, to the applause of their teammates, coaches and parents in attendance. The team unveiled three different color-schemed sweaters, with a dark red-light maroon version, a white version and an all green version. All three feature the old Hartford Whalers logo that Wish said will most likely be altered in the near future so it’s not a complete replica of the former National Hockey League team.

All high school hockey teams in the county play in the SCHSL, which is not sanctioned by Section XI, the county’s governing body of high school athletics, but it is the county’s only scholastic ice hockey league and all teams in the league use local school districts to determine their rosters. There are school districts that do not touch participating districts but have student-athletes that play hockey. Those players are eligible to be drafted on the varsity and junior varsity levels, while at the freshman level, they are put into a player pool and placed on teams that are geographically close. Westhampton Beach eighth-grader Mike Kessler was one of those players and therefore rounds out the Whalers’ roster.

There are three different levels within the league based on grades. The freshman league includes seventh-, eighth- and ninth-graders. Junior varsity includes ninth-, 10th- and 11th-graders, and varsity includes any high school players, including seniors. Wish said the plan is for this current group of players to move up through the ranks as they age.

“Hopefully, next year, we’ll have a JV team, and I’m confident we will,” he said. “Our current ninth-graders have to move up to JV next year. We have plenty of young kids in the pipeline, so the group behind this group is strong and so we should continue with a JV and freshman team, and I would think by the 2026-2027 season, we should have varsity, JV and freshman teams.”

All SCHSL games are played at The Rinx in Hauppauge. A few more rinks have opened up in Suffolk County in recent years, including the Peconic Ice Rinks in Calverton, but the league has long contracted its games at The Rinx and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, Wish said.

That will make it tough for the South Fork viewing public to see many of the team’s games, but the team will practice more regularly locally once the season opens at both Southampton Ice Rink, which will be around Halloween, Wish said, and at Buckskill Winter Club in East Hampton, which opens later in November.

There are exhibition games, or nonleague games, that can be played elsewhere. The Whalers opened the season against Wish’s alma mater, Eastport-South Manor, in an exhibition on August 26 at Peconic. They also have an exhibition scheduled to be played against Connetquot at UBS Arena, the home of the New York Islanders, on October 4 and additional games could be added, specifically at Buckskill later in the season, Wish said.

Wish thinks that despite this being the first official season for the team, it can — and should — be pretty competitive right out of the gate.

“Almost all of our players are currently playing travel hockey, if not here with us, then elsewhere,” he said. “There are some who are not playing travel hockey anymore, but did up until this point. One thing I’d say about this team is that it’s pretty young, where we have a lot of seventh graders, where some teams will be ninth-grade heavy. Those teams could be difficult for us at times, but I still expect us to be pretty competitive and I would say this is a playoff team this season.”