Sayville Is Just Too Much As It Defeats Westhampton Beach Football To Win Suffolk County Conference III Championship

The players on the Westhampton Beach football team knew they were going to need to play a clean game if they were going to take down host Sayville in the Suffolk County Conference III Championship on Friday night, April 23.

For a quarter and a half, playing mistake-free football led to just a 7-0 game in favor of the Golden Flashes, but things quickly turned from okay to bad for the Hurricanes in a matter of minutes.

Sayville scored 15 points in the final 4:34 to go into halftime up 22-0, and went on to win its second consecutive county championship — and Suffolk County record 15th championship in school history, by a score of 32-7.

Westhampton Beach coaches and players gave Sayville its due for capitalizing on their mistakes.

“We knew that we had an uphill battle,” Westhampton Beach head coach Bryan Schaumloffel said after the game. “We talked all week that we couldn’t make mistakes. We had to play a perfect game and we didn’t do that at times.”

When the two teams met on the same field on April 9, Sayville senior quarterback Jack Chesire threw for a school record 500 yards, leading the Flashes to a lopsided victory. Schaumloffel said he simply wasn’t going to let that happen again.

“Our game plan was working, at least defensively,” he said. “We weren’t going to let him sit back and throw the ball for 500 yards against us. But when you do that, you give up other stuff. They were able to run the ball a little bit on us, and we were fine with that, but we just had to make plays when we had to, and at times we didn’t.

“That two touchdown swing at the end of the second quarter really kind of hurt us,” Schaumloffel added. “We were hoping to go in at halftime at 9-0, but they’re a great football team. They’ve got great players all over the place and they make plays.”

Sayville scored just over three minutes into the game, but the Hurricanes stood tall for much of the first half and looked like they may have a chance to possibly come back and win the game, or at the very least tie it, if they could just get into halftime down by just a touchdown. But a little over halfway into the second quarter, Sayville junior punter Michael Argenziano pinned Westhampton Beach inside its own 10-yard line at the 6, and a few plays later, Hurricane senior quarterback Christian Capuano was sacked in the end zone for a safety, giving Sayville a 9-0 lead.

Just a few plays after the ensuing kickoff, Chesire ran in a 4-yard touchdown, and after a rather quick set of downs on offense for Westhampton Beach, junior Charlie Sands blocked a punt that senior Alex Millwater picked up and brought back to the Hurricanes 4-yard line. Two plays later, Chesire ran in another touchdown, and just like that, Sayville led 22-0 at halftime.

To the Hurricanes’ credit, they didn’t go down without a fight. Senior Gavin McIntyre ran in a touchdown from 20 yards out and Jackson Hulse kicked the extra point to make it a 25-7 game with 2:03 remaining in the third. But at that point, the game was already a little out of hand, and Westhampton Beach had to sit through the fire truck parade that traveled around the circumference of the field just as the final whistle blew.

Regardless of the outcome, Schaumloffel said he was proud of his team for how it played all season long, in particular a number of seniors, many of whom are the final class that played on the team’s Suffolk County and Long Island Championship teams in 2017 as freshmen.

“Our senior class had a great, great career at Westhampton,” he said. “They’ve seen a lot of great things. They left a great legacy for themselves and the younger kids, who are going to have to rise up and work hard.”

Hulse and fellow senior captain Aidan Cassara were both on that memorable 2017 team.

“We had a couple of JV kids we brought up so they learn the way, although it sucks right now, this is a great experience,” Cassara said after the game. “They see the firetrucks rolling by, how badly I wanted that again, they get to see, ‘Alright, this is what we’ve got to do.’ It sets a goal. We worked our ass off.”

Hulse said that it wasn’t fun losing to Sayville on Friday night, but that when he and his teammates look back on their careers at Westhampton Beach, there will be mostly great memories.

“It means a lot to us. We’ve been a great program,” he said. “Me and Aidan have been on the varsity team since freshman year, winning LIC with [Dylan] Laube and all them, so really it’s been a great four years to be a part of this. Every single day over the summer we worked hard, played as a team. Sometimes it just doesn’t work out, and I wish good luck to the younger kids.

“I’m proud of us,” Hulse added. “I’m proud of us as a team, I’m proud of us as a family. We’ll remember this for the rest of our lives.”

With all of the unknowns of playing a football season during a pandemic, Westhampton Beach still managed to play seven games (5-2), one of the few teams in Suffolk County to do so. Schaumloffel said Friday night marked just the sixth time in the program’s long history that it reached a county championship. By all accounts, it was a great season, he said, and added that he is already looking forward to next season, which is only a couple months away already.

“I’m proud of these guys. Nothing to hang their heads down,” he said of his players. “Our senior classes for the past four years, five years, six years, have set the tone for the future of Westhampton football. We have to continue that. We have to work hard in the offseason, improve on the things that we didn’t do well this year and get better.

“There’s another football season right around the corner. We’re looking forward to it. We’re going to try and do better next year.”