V ineyard Youth Lacrosse

The boys’ under-13 team lost to Falmouth this past Sunday 8-2. In their second game of the season, Greg McCarron and Spencer Schofield each had goals in the loss.

All three youth lacrosse teams will be at home on Sunday; game times are noon for the under-11 team, 1:30 p.m. for the under-13 team and 3 p.m. for the under-15 team. All are invited to attend.

A little sun, a little rain, temperatures hovering in the upper 40s and the wind blowing hard — it was perfect weather for the opening weekend of Vineyard Youth Soccer’s little-heralded, largely-accomplished and newly expanded travel program on the fields at the West Tisbury School.

The Island’s travel soccer teams kicked off the first round of the season with home openers against several teams from the South Coast Soccer League on Saturday.

The Vineyard boys’ high school hockey team will advance to the next round in the state tournament following a solid 5-1 win Monday night against Whitman-Hanson at the Gallo Ice Arena in Bourne.

The seventh-seeded Vineyarders scored two goals in the first period against the tenth-seeded Panthers and never looked back. The Vineyarders first got on the board seven minutes into the game when Nick Billingham redirected a rebound from Darren Gazaille and fired the puck past Panthers’ goalie Brandon Lynch.

They haven’t played together in 50 years, but tonight the members of the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School’s first football team will come together from as far away as Florida and as near as Oak Bluffs to attend a dinner at the high school before the Island Cup game tomorrow.

High school athletic director Mark McCarthy, whose late father was the coach of that team, has organized the event.

The Island’s oldest and youngest high school football teams met, not for a match but for a meal last Friday night at the school cafeteria. Nineteen members of the 1960 team met the 2010 team before the big Saturday game with Nantucket. Add to that six members of the 1960 cheerleaders, who also shared stories with the current squad.

On Saturday, after two years of frustration and delay, Nantucket finally came back across the Muskeget Channel and down the placard-lined mean streets of Oak Bluffs to rekindle a rivalry that, simply by geography, is unlike any other in sports. It was worth the wait.

Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School quarterback Randall Jette walked off the practice field in the brisk fall air on Wednesday night after a hard practice that ran until almost 7 p.m. under the lights in preparation for tonight’s pivotal league game against Somerset at home. “Friday night is our Super Bowl,” Jette said.

Last year the Vineyarders lost 20-0 to Somerset and Jette is candid about what went wrong. “Me,” he said.

Football

The game is back. Every fall on the Island the leaves turn red and fall to the ground, scallopers take to Island ponds, and the V’s and W’s line up across from each other on the gridiron the week before Thanksgiving to add a new chapter to The Rivalry. Then, all of a sudden last year, they didn’t. The dead leaves might as well have clung to their branches. After the ensuing round of finger-pointing and resentment subsided the Game is back on the schedule.

The scouting reports are in and Whaler Pride is back. The last Nantucket team the Vineyard faced finished the season 0-10, capped by an embarrassing 43-22 Island Cup thrashing that saw Vineyard coach Don Herman pull most of his starters by halftime.