Hampton Bays Wrestling Hosts Annual Doc Fallot Duals

The Hampton Bays wrestling team hosted its annual Doc Fallot Memorial Tournament on Saturday, hosting nine schools in the all day dual-meet style competition.

Joining the Baymen on their home mats were fellow East End schools East Hampton/Pierson and Westhampton Beach along with Amityville, Connetquot, Islip, St. John the Baptist, Ward Melville and a pair of teams from Elwood/John Glenn. This was an increase from last season, when the Baymen hosted eight teams, but that was largely due to the tournament returning from a year off due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Two years prior, the tournament had increased in size from eight to 10 teams with three mats in the back gym and two mats in the front gym with five rounds instead of four. Hampton Bays head coach Mike Lloyd went back to that format this weekend, but to keep things simple, they planned out all five rounds ahead of time, such as which schools would faceoff, in five separate hour-and-a-half blocks. Some dual meet tournaments will have semifinal and final rounds to determine a champion but that wasn’t the case this season.

Overall, the tournament was once again a big success in the sense that each wrestler got around five matches in on the day, which is the goal at any early-season tournament. Hampton Bays went 1-4 on the day, largely due, Lloyd said, to the team missing a few of its wrestlers who found success at the previous weekend’s Sprig Gardner Tournament at East Hampton.

Still, a few Baymen were successful on Saturday. Matt Scott led the team with a 3-2 record and Kevin Saa Pacheco went 2-2. Deykel Berrocal won all five of her matches but all were exhibitions.

“Each week the additional mat time is helping connect the dots for many of our newer guys and we are excited to continue to cultivate and grow our success as the season progresses,” Lloyd said.

L. Robert “Doc” Fallot was considered by many a pioneer in sports medicine. Born in Amityville where he originally started off as a team doctor, then later on in Lindenhurst, Hampton Bays and East Hampton, Fallot was well known in the wrestling community for over three decades and was known specifically for his groundbreaking medical techniques when it came to the “cauliflower ear.”

Fallot was the attending physician for many years at the New York State Wrestling Championships, New York Athletic Club tournaments and was the team physician for the 1964 United States Olympic wrestling team. He was inducted into the New York State Wrestling Hall of Fame in 1972, named Suffolk County Wrestling Man of the Year in 1976 and inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in 2007, posthumously.

In 1993, a year after he died, the Section XI Suffolk County Wrestling Championship was renamed in his honor to the Doc Fallot Memorial Suffolk County Wrestling Championships. The Doc Fallot Scholarship Fund was also created in his memory and awards a substantial college scholarship every spring to a deserving Suffolk County wrestler.

After a nonleague meet at Stony Brook on Wednesday, Hampton Bays was scheduled to compete in a tournament at Islip this Saturday before having its first League VII dual meet of the season at Glenn on December 21 at 4:30 p.m., what is currently scheduled as its final match of the year before the calendar turns over.