Early Momentum Fades as Bonac Football Drops County Semifinal to Sayville

Following his team’s 28-14 loss at Sayville in the Suffolk County Division III semifinal on Friday night, East Hampton/Pierson/Bridgehampton football head coach Joe McKee emerged from his postgame huddle with tears in his eyes, as did his fellow coaches and players.

Not long afterward, McKee appeared to completely gather himself, only to become emotional once again when describing just how far his program had come.

“It’s a tough loss,” he said. “That’s a quality football program. They came out and kind of imposed their will on us a little bit in the second half. Their offensive line was actually, in our awards meeting the other night, voted the top offensive line in the league, and they showed it. I don’t even think they threw it hardly in the second half, they just ran it down our throats. Kids fought hard. We had some injuries, that’s no excuse whatsoever, but in all honesty, I don’t want to get too crazy here, but that was a pretty historic season.

“We’ve come a long way, oh boy, now you’re going to make me cry,” McKee said as he started to well up again.

“I took it over in 2015. It was shambles,” he continued. “We got it going for two years, and then the floor fell out from under us in 2017 and we had to go to just a couple JV-only teams for two years. And then we brought it back — went 1-7, 2-6, just fighting through everything to this season. And I think all you have to do is look in the stands tonight — that was just pretty phenomenal. For all of those people to come out on a Friday night and come all the way up here to support us like that shows what East Hampton football means to the community. It was pretty heartwarming.”

The Bonackers controlled the first half of the game, scoring the first touchdown when senior quarterback Theo Ball faked a handoff to senior running back Jai Feaster to the left. Ball quickly checked downfield to his right before quickly returning to hit an open Feaster, who took the ball and made some nifty moves en route to an 81-yard score, electrifying the large Bonac crowd in attendance. After senior Manny Morales’s extra point, East Hampton led, 7-0.

Driving down the field in Sayville territory, senior running back Alex Davis, who was questionable coming into the game with a high ankle sprain he suffered in Bonac’s first playoff victory in over 30 years at Islip a week prior, had an issue securing the ball on a toss play. Jack Dolan recovered the ball for the Golden Flashes, and as good teams tend to do, they capitalized immediately. Patrick Coan found Tristan Vitale, who scampered 63 yards up the field, and after Henry Reiss’s extra point, the game was tied, 7-7, with 7:25 remaining in the first half.

East Hampton had an answer of its own though on its ensuing offensive drive. Sayville showed an all-out blitz on defense that the Bonac offensive line and Ball picked up very well, and Ball was able to find senior receiver Livs Kuplins over the middle. Kuplins shook off one tackle, then turned the jets on, completely plowing over one Sayville defender leading to a 52-yard touchdown and once again lighting a fire under the Bonac crowd in attendance.

Sayville had a golden opportunity to score at the very end of the half. On 4th and goal from the three yard line, Coan hit Colin Darling untouched on a quick slant, but he couldn’t come down cleanly with the ball and dropped it, leading to a 14-7 Bonac lead at halftime.

“That defense is, if not one of, the top defenses in the league,” McKee said of Sayville. “It’s tough to move the ball on them, but we have some explosive players. Livs broke the big run there, Jai broke a big run. They’re one of several dynamic playmakers that we have. We just couldn’t get it going in the second half.”

It became clear once Sayville took the ball on offense in the second half that it was going to almost completely abandon its passing game and run the ball behind its offensive line with Coan, Vitale and Timmy Holahan, the latter of whom was more or less nonexistent in the first half. But the small and speedy back wound up rushing for 148 yards on 19 carries, two of which included a pair of runs from 10 and 25 yards, respectively, in the third quarter.

Vitale, who rushed for 70 yards on 14 carries and caught two balls for 78 yards, scored from five yards out in the fourth quarter, capping a run of 21 unanswered second-half points leading to the 28-14 victory — the same exact result the two teams had played to three weeks prior — and remained undefeated at 10-0. Coan, who was relatively quiet in the first half, wound up running for 117 yards on 17 carries. He completed just 3 of 12 passes for 92 yards.

Sayville will face No. 2 Smithtown West for the DIII county championship this Thursday, November 20, at Stony Brook University at 4 p.m.

McKee said, once again, that his players gave it their all. Some, like Davis, were banged up coming into the game. Others, like Kuplins, Feaster, and senior starting center Tyler Rodgers, who had his ankle rolled up in the first half and missed the rest of the game, took their fair share of lumps on Friday night.

“So what happens there is you have to take a tackle and move him to center, and then you have to take a new guy and put him at tackle,” McKee explained. “But Joe Martinez, a senior, came in. Didn’t get much playing time all year but came in and did a pretty nice job. But after a while it just caught up to us a little bit.”

As is the case at the end of every season, the Bonackers (6-4) will now say goodbye to a large talented senior class of over a dozen players that has led some of the best football the program has seen in quite some time, arguably ever. Although he admitted he didn’t do a complete deep drive into the history books, McKee is fairly certain that this was the first time ever in which a Bonac football team made the postseason in back-to-back years.

Where they lie in the history books is a discussion for another day. But this season, for McKee, was one of his favorite in the nearly three decades he’s been coaching.

“They gave me such joy and such pleasure this year,” he said. “I’ve been coaching for 29 years and this was by far — and I’ve had a lot of good teams and a lot of fun — this was by far the funnest team I’ve ever had. Just a great, great group of kids, just really nice boys, tough, just an absolute joy to coach. You really can’t say anything to them now, and I thanked them for everything that they did for me and the pleasure they gave me, and in a couple days when we meet I’ll say a couple things that will hopefully make them feel a little bit better. But they’re pretty hurting right now.”