Many of us may think that black-and-white photographs are not interesting. Mimi Hodges, an enthusiastic photographer and Sound Beach resident, doesn’t agree. She likes to take black-and-white photographs of local places. As she puts it, “color can sometimes be a distraction.”
Santa’s been sticking around the Heritage Center in Mount Sinai for the last few days.
On Sunday, Santa paid a special visit to the park for its annual breakfast. Year after year families get a closer look at Santa. Lori Baldassare, President of Heritage Trust, says residents also bring nonperishable food items that are donated to local pantries.
Tuscany Gourmet Market provided a buffet breakfast, and families met with Santa and could receive a professional photo by Faraz and Patricia Zaidi from Aw Snap Booths from Selden. Children were also given food for Santa’s reindeer to help jolly ole St. Nick find his way around the neighborhood on Christmas day.
Baldassare started Breakfast with Santa 21 years ago when she was the president of the Mount Sinai Civic Association. The event was held in the Handlebar restaurant in Mount Sinai — the restaurant owners sold the property 2008. In 2003, when the park was still in it’s early construction phase, Baldassare left the civic association for Heritage Trust, and the event followed.
“The community place is the perfect place to hold the event because it was created to be the [community’s] gathering place,” Baldassare said. “It signifies the tradition of [a] community.”
Port Jefferson was crawling with costumed characters and Christmas spirit on Saturday and Sunday for the 20th annual Charles Dickens Festival.
Residents and visitors took rides on horse-drawn carriages, met Santa Claus, heard music from the 19th century and checked out a puppet parade.
North Shore residents burned off calories to make some room for turkey early on Thanksgiving morning, running the 1-mile and 5-mile paths at Shoreham’s 35th annual Turkey Trot.
Three Shoreham and Wading River residents earned top finishes, including 2014 Shoreham-Wading River graduate Ryan Udvadia, who earned first place in the 5K for men with a time of 17 minutes, .01 seconds.
A portion of the proceeds from the charity event will fund community programs.
Senior running back Chris Rosati rushes away with four touchdowns in team's 24th win in two seasons
By Joe Galotti
Most young men who decide to put on a helmet and pads and play high school football never get to experience the joy of winning a class championship or putting together a perfect season. On Friday afternoon, at Hofstra University’s Shuart Stadium, the Shoreham-Wading River football team had the rare opportunity to reach both of those achievements for a second straight season, and did not let it go to waste.
The Wildcats jumped out to a 28-point first-half lead over Locust Valley, helping them come away with a 35-7 victory in the Long Island Class IV Championship game. Senior running back Chris Rosati led the way with four rushing touchdowns, and the team’s eye-popping winning streak was extended to 24 games.
“(Going undefeated twice) is very special,” Shoreham-Wading River head coach Matt Millheiser said. “It really was something I wanted them to achieve and carry with them, and they did that today.”
After the victory, Rosati admitted that the team felt pressure all season long trying to repeat last fall’s undefeated campaign.
“Every team was looking to beat us,” Rosati said. “We got everyone’s best game, but we just really fought hard against every team we faced.”
If the Wildcats were at all nervous on Friday, they did not show it, as they jumped all over the Falcons early on, putting up two quick scores on the team that had entered the contest allowing the fewest points on Long Island this year.
Rosati got Shoreham-Wading River on the board when he capped off the team’s opening drive by taking a pitch to the right side 26 yards for a touchdown. On the Wildcats next drive, Rosati delivered a two-yard rushing touchdown, which was set up by a 31-yard run by senior wideout Jon Constant.
Early in the second quarter, Rosati drove his way into the end zone once again, this time, on a 1-yard rush.
“Chris is amazing,” senior guard Dalten Stalzer said. “Just watching him play every week; it’s crazy. Some of the things he does and the tackles he breaks, it makes us look good.”
With 1:24 remaining before the half, senior quarterback Jason Curran put the game out of reach with a six-yard touchdown pass to Constant.
Shoreham-Wading River was extremely effective on the ground in the game, with Rosati rushing for 110 yards, Curran rushing for 91 yards and Constant rushing for 90 yards. Much of this was made possible by a dominant performance from the team’s offensive line.
“We knew what we needed to do to execute,” Constant said. “But [our success] all starts with our line’s performance.”
The Wildcats’ defense also put up a strong effort, forcing three interceptions and not giving up a score until the fourth quarter. Constant was responsible for two of the picks, while Rosati had the other.
With another perfect season in the books, Shoreham-Wading River is arguably in the midst of one of the best runs in Long Island high school football history. But Millheiser says that the key to the Wildcats’ success has been not getting caught up in any of the streaks or stats.
“We were more concerned about doing our jobs and doing the right thing,” Millheiser said. “When you focus on those things the fun numbers like 24-0 seem to come with it.”
During Shoreham-Wading River’s postgame team photo with its championship trophy, the team once again got the opportunity to honor the memory of their former teammate Tom Cutinella, who died as a result of an on-field collision in a 2014 game. Senior lineman James Puckey held up Cutinella’s No. 54 jersey for the group shot, making it clear that he was still very much a part of the Wildcats team.
Port Jefferson’s chamber of commerce held the village’s annual Santa Parade over the weekend, bringing a little early Christmas spirit to children in the area.
The parade went through the heart of the village and ended at the Drowned Meadow Cottage on Barnum Avenue, which has been transformed into Santa’s workshop for the season.
By Bill Landon
It wasn’t like the Newfield football team to trail in a game, but like the first and only other time they found themselves behind this season, it didn’t last.
Both times were against the Colts of Half Hollow Hills West. The first time was when the two teams faced off in September, when the Wolverines went on to outscore their opponent, 41-13. But this time, the teams were on a bigger stage — the Suffolk County Division II championship. Continuing its quest for a perfect season, Newfield propelled past a 20-18 deficit late in the second quarter to help the team claim its second county title since 2011, with a 58-34 victory at Stony Brook University’s LaValle Stadium Friday night.
“From the beginning of the season you work as hard as you can to get here,” Newfield senior Austin Gubelman said. “It’s a surreal feeling, it really is.”
Gubelman, a tight end, scored first on a short run, and after a failed two-point conversion attempt, Hills West cut the Wolverines’ lead in half with a field goal. Newfield senior Elijah Riley, a wide receiver who has been a one-man wrecking machine this postseason with eight touchdowns in the last three games, scored his first of four touchdowns off a handoff he took more than 50 yards for the 12-3 advantage, after another failed two-point conversion attempt, to end the scoring in the first.
The two teams totaled 952 yards, with 516 coming from Newfield. Riley alone finished the game with 146 yards on 11 carries.
With junior Justin Ottenwalder catching a pass up the middle and carrying it 71 yards for a touchdown run, the halfback, who caught three passes for 154 yards and gained 62 yards on eight carries, helped the Wolverines remain in front. But the Colts responded with another field goal and an interception on a screen pass that was returned for a touchdown. With the extra-point attempt successful, Newfield’s opponent took a 20-18 lead with 1:51 left in the half.
Just like in that September matchup, the Wolverines wouldn’t stay behind for long.
With 20 seconds on the clock, Riley took matters into his own hands. He took a handoff up the middle and found nothing. Bouncing off the wall of defenders, the senior looked for an open hole on his first, second and third attempts before cutting to the outside and finding the corner of the end zone from four yards out to put his team out in front, 24-10. From there, the Wolverines never looked back.
Hills West was on the move to start the second half, but a deep throw to a wide receiver was snatched by Newfield senior safety Denzel Williams. From the 18-yard line, Williams returned the interception up field to the 31-yard line. He finished with 108 yards on nine carries.
Newfield senior Ryan Klemm, the team’s quarterback, dumped a screen pass off to Ottenwalder, who jetted down the left sideline, covering 69 yards for the score. With the extra-point attempt by senior kicker Jacob VanEssendelft successful, the Wolverines extended their lead to 31-20 with 7:22 left in the third.
Klemm said he knew his team had the ability to bounce back, and the Wolverines refocused their efforts after a losing record at the end of last year.
“We knew we had a really talented team and we worked very hard in the offseason,” the quarterback said. “It’s surreal right now. It’s an awesome feeling, and it hasn’t quite sunk in yet.”
The Colts fumbled on the ensuing kickoff, and Newfield junior Jesse McKeever scooped it up and took off for the end zone. The cornerback was stopped just shy of the goal line, and the Wolverines offensive unit went back to work. Gubelman got the call and plowed his way up the middle for his second touchdown in the game. With a missed point-after attempt, the tight end put his team out front, 37-20.
With just over five minutes remaining in the third quarter, Half Hollow Hills West quarterback Anthony Lucarelli found the end zone on a keeper and, with the point after, the Colts closed the gap a bit.
On the ensuing play from scrimmage, Newfield called on Williams, the Middle Country sprinter, who dashed 64 yards across the field, leading blockers all the way to the end zone. With the kick from VanEssendelft good, Newfield jumped out to a 44-27 advantage.
And after a Hills West three-and-out, Newfield struck again.
With just over a minute left in the third quarter, Riley eluded three tacklers and covered 46 yards for six points. VanEssendelft’s kick split the uprights to blow the game open, 51-27.
Hills West went to the air the rest of the way, and tried to force long passes to make up for lost time. Lucarelli went deep to his wide receiver, who appeared to make the catch but bobbled the ball. Just as deadly defensively at cornerback as he is on offense as a wide receiver, Riley snatched the ball out of the Colts player’s hands for the interception with just over three minutes left in the contest.
The dominant and forceful senior finished the turnover he created with a short plunge into the end zone for his final touchdown of the game. Along with VanEssendelft’s kick, Riley’s score increased his team’s lead to 58-27.
Newfield head coach Joe Piccininni rested his starters on both sides of the ball the rest of the way, and Hills West made the most of the change by scoring one final touchdown.
“Our mistakes were hurting us and we faced a lot of adversity, but we were able to come back tonight,” Piccininni said. “We faced a great football team tonight — they didn’t fall back and they didn’t falter.”
With that, the team was crowned Suffolk County champions, and Newfield will take its undefeated season to the gridiron of Hofstra University on Friday, for a 4:30 p.m. kick off against MacArthur in the Long Island championship game. Although this year looked uncertain after the Wolverines’ 3-6 season last year, Gubelman said he thought his team could do it all along.
“I’ve known my teammates my whole life — we’ve been playing together since we were 5 years old,” he said. “We practice hard the same way we always do, come out with one vision: [to win the] Long Island Championship.”
Residents were “freezin’ for a reason” at Cedar Beach on Saturday, for the Town of Brookhaven’s sixth annual Polar Plunge event.
Some of the countless residents in attendance took the plunge into the chilly waters of the Long Island Sound to help raise money for the athletes of the Special Olympics New York. Plungers who raised at least $125 received a sweatshirt for their efforts.
Members of the Suffolk County Police Department, Nestle Nesquik, Long Island’s My Country 96.1 FM and local government officials, including Supervisor Ed Romaine (R), Councilwoman Jane Bonner (C-Rocky Point), Councilman Kevin LaValle (R-Selden) and Councilman Neil Foley (R-Blue Point), were there to show their support or join the plungers and take a dip in the water.
Despite the breezy weather and cold currents, some residents left the water saying the water wasn’t as chilly as last year.
While she’s brushing her teeth, she can hear elephants passing outside. She’s spotted lion footprints in the ground outside an electrified fence that gives her comfort when she sleeps on a bed in a tent at night.
Catherine Markham, an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stony Brook University, has been traveling to Kenya for the last 10 years to study baboons as a part of the Amboseli Baboon Research Project, a decades-long study of baboons on a savannah north of Mt. Kilimanjaro.
Markham and her colleagues recently discovered that there is something of a Goldilocks phenomenon when it comes to group size for baboons. A group that has a smaller number of baboons has to spend more time watching out for predators like leopards, lions and hyenas and foraging carefully amid competition with other baboon groups, while a group that has too many members travels over greater distances to find food.
Markham measured the amount of stress adult females felt by monitoring a glucocorticoid hormone. The least stressed baboons were the ones in the mid-sized group, where the benefits of social living — companions to pick bugs off their fur, extra eyes to watch out for predators and potential mates to raise and protect offspring — outweighed the challenges of competing with other group members for food. She published her results recently in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Susan Alberts, the Robert F. Durden professor of biology at Duke University, suggested Markham’s research provided “the most compelling empirical evidence ever produced that animals living in social groups experience a tension” within and between groups that is resolved at an intermediate size.
Alberts said that in this sweet spot for group size, she’d expect individuals would live longer and have higher fertility.
“This has changed the way we think of the costs and benefits of groups of different sizes,” Alberts said.
Jeanne Altmann, a founder of the Amboseli Baboon Research Project and emeritus professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton, said research like Markham’s will “facilitate predicting and potentially assisting with the challenges social groups of diverse species, including humans, will face in the changing environment of the future.”
Altmann added it was “especially wonderful to see how much the current generation of young scientists exemplified by Catherine Markham can accomplish by taking what’s come before them and developing new techniques and insights.”
As a behavioral ecologist, Markham is interested in how baboons, and other animals, manage the trade-off in group living.
The next set of questions could address whether group size, or hormone levels, can serve as a predictor for a fissioning of social groups, which happens infrequently.
When groups fission, social bonds break permanently, which can cause a different kind of stress that may help explain why groups that are above optimal size continue to stay together, despite the stress and intragroup competition, Alberts said.
While she’s observing the baboons, Markham generally tries to stay at least 10 meters from them. Scientists like Markham, or anyone else who visits Amboseli, need to follow rules that extend beyond the proximity to animals.
When she’s conducting research, she makes sure she’s with at least one other person. Once, she was watching a female baboon closely when a car came up behind her.
“This wonderful Kenyan, who is a good friend, said, ‘I’m saving you from the elephant.’ I looked and, sure enough, the elephant who, at my last check had been on the distant horizon, wanted to investigate” Markham and the baboons.
The elephant was close enough that she knew it was time to “get in the car.”
To gain insight into the stress levels of these baboons without poking or prodding them, Markham and her collaborators studied the clues the baboons left behind. They watched the animals carefully and, once an animal relieved herself and left the area, the researchers retrieved the droppings.
“It’s not the most glamorous part of my job, that’s for sure,” she said. “At this point, I am so motivated by the question and I see it as a tool to noninvasively understand what these animals are going through. It’s a way to have some window into their internal state without having to dart them.”
She said the success of a program like this wouldn’t be possible without the dedication and knowledge of an experienced and talented team of Kenyan researchers. The Kenyans know the individual baboons well, using scars on their faces, body size or individual markings.
Markham, who lives in St. James and is originally from Maryland, said she became interested in nature in part because of trips with her father Julian Markham to a book store, where she would buy National Geographic magazines for a dime or a quarter.
Markham, who joined the staff at Stony Brook last year, said she is excited to be a part of a strong anthropology program.
As for her time in Kenya, she gets to live out her childhood dreams, where, she finds the “ecosystem and animals beautiful. These are some of the happiest times in my life. Watching animals in the wild is something so special.”
Members of the community can hear directly from Markham at a talk she’s giving entitled the “Evolution of Social Complexity in Chimpanzees and Baboons” on Nov. 20 at 7:30 p.m. at the Earth and Space Sciences Lecture Hall 001 on the west campus of Stony Brook University.
By Bill Landon
Just call it the fabulous fifth.
The No. 2 Kings Park girls’ volleyball team defeated No. 1 Westhampton Beach in three straight sets Thursday, 25-23, 25-20 and 25-17, to claim the school’s fifth straight Suffolk County Class A title.
The Kingsmen took seven straight points in the first set, and broke out to a 10-6 lead as both teams continued to trade points until Kings Park was ahead 17-12 at the first time out.
The Hurricanes battled back with several long volleys to close the gap to 20-18, but the Kingsmen rattled off four more points to take a 24-20 advantage. Kings Park looked to put the game away, and did, but not before Kings Park took three more points, to win the first set, 25-23.
“Our team is about coming out and doing what we have to do,” Kings Park junior outside hitter Lauren Kloos said. “We come out with so much excitement, so this win is just amazing for us.”
With the teams tied 7-7 in the second set, Kings Park surged ahead 24-17, but Westhampton Beach scored the next three points to trail 24-20. Again, the Kingsmen found a way to dig out the last point, to win the second set 25-20.
Kings Park sophomore middle hitter Erika Benson said her team has a winning formula.
“I think it’s the passion we have for each other,” she said. “All three matches were close, and they played really well, but in the end we came out stronger.”
Westhampton Beach struggled, and fell behind in the third set 8-2 in a must-win set to stay alive. The Hurricanes would not go quietly though, and battled back to close within four points late in the match.
Kloos finished with 14 kills; senior middle hitter Lauren Kehoe added 12 kills and 16 digs; senior outside hitter Jaclyn Wilton had 12 kills and 16 digs; sophomore libero Meagan Murphy had 25 digs; and senior setter Stephanie Cornwell added 31 assists.
“We communicate really well; Meagan Murphy, Lauren Baxter and Kayla Buell played really great defense,” Kehoe said. “Lauren Kloos and Jaclyn Wilton were swinging great and Stephanie Cornwell was serving really well, so it was just a good performance all around.”
It was the third time the teams faced each other this year, and although Kings Park won the second meeting between the two, the Hurricanes handed Kings Park their only loss in the season in the first game of the year.
Wilton said Westhampton Beach is a much stronger team this season compared to last.
“We lost to them in our first game, we’ve been undefeated in my high school career and that first lost hurt,” Wilton said. “I never knew what that felt like, but since then, I knew that I never wanted to experience that again.”
And so far, they haven’t.
With the win, Kings Park advances to the Long Island championship round. The team will return to Suffolk County Community College’s Brentwood campus tomorrow, Nov. 14, to face Wantagh at 3 p.m.
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