Editor’s note: The Menominee High School Athletic Hall of Fame Class of 2024 induction ceremony takes place May 4 at the Pullman House in Menominee. Tickets are on sale at the Superintendent’s office at Blesch School and the Principal’s office at the high school for $35. Each week, the EagleHerald will spotlight one of the 12 inductees. This week’s feature is on former Menominee boys basketball coach Pete Pericolosi.
MENOMINEE — Take a moment to think about the Menominee boys basketball program and there is a good chance that Pete Pericolosi’s name is one of the first that will come to mind.
Across a career that spanned over 30 years in both sports and academia, the man lovingly referred to as “Coach Perc” carved out an enduring legacy as one of the truly iconic figures in the history of Menominee High School.
Pericolosi will add another jewel to his crown on May 4, when the Menominee High School Athletic Hall of Fame welcomes the longtime hoops guru into its hallowed halls as a member of the Class of 2024.
The induction ceremony takes place at the Pullman House in Menominee.
“He was just a brilliant basketball mind, and that’s what set him apart,” current Menominee boys basketball coach Sam Larson said. “When you look at Pete’s track record, he’s been super successful. He did a great job of not just coaching basketball, but in taking people and instilling values in them that helped them become successful later in life.”
Basketball has long been a way of life for Pericolosi, who spent his formative years in Iron Mountain and was an All-U.P. performer under head coach Rick Olds before transitioning into coaching.
Pericolosi spent one season (1979) at the helm of the Norway girls JV basketball team and immediately proved his acumen by guiding the Knights to a perfect 20-0 record.
After two seasons (1979-80) as the skipper of the Iron Mountain Legion Post 50 baseball team, Pericolosi made the move to Menominee, where he became head coach of the boys basketball program in 1988.
Over the next three decades, Pericolosi molded the Maroons into a consistent contender and helped change the perception of a team that often plays second fiddle to Menominee’s rich gridiron tradition.
“It wasn’t easy coaching in Menominee,” Pericolosi said during his U.P. Sports Hall of Fame induction speech in 2018. “If you don’t know, Menominee is a little bit of a football town. Just a little bit. The running joke was, well, the football team scores more points than the basketball team. And the sad part about it, it was true.”
Under Pericolosi, the Maroons were the Class A-B Team of the Year 13 times, won 11 Great Northern Conference championships, six MHSAA District titles and one Class B Regional crown.
Larson played for Pericolosi from 2008-10 and recalled being in awe looking at the Class A-B trophy.
“When you look back at the trophy, you see how many times in Pete’s career that Menominee was Class A-B Team of the Year, and I think that speaks volumes to what he was able to accomplish, especially when you consider that Menominee was not one of the bigger schools for a large portion of his career,” he said.
Pericolosi’s Maroons qualified for the State championship tournament once, reaching the semifinals in 2008.
“Coach Perc was old-school, for sure,” Larson recalled. “He was hard on his players and very demanding, but he was also someone that you knew was extremely fair and had your best interest in mind at all times.”
Pericolosi was named the U.P. Class A-B-C Coach of the Year twice, as the mustachioed mastermind compiled an overall win-loss record of 366-253 before retiring in 2017.
For Larson, who served as an assistant coach under Pericolosi before taking the reins of the boys basketball team upon his retirement, the lessons that his former coach imparted in him over a decade prior still resonate with him today.
“From a basketball perspective, Coach Perc was one of the best minds when it came to X’s and O’s that I’ve ever been around,” he said. “When you talk about offensive sets and schemes, we still do a lot of things today that are based on things Coach Perc installed during his career. .”
“The other thing that he was very good at was being extremely fair,” Larson continued. “He did a great job of navigating the social pressures that go with high school basketball. At the end of the day, whether they were the best player on the team or the last player on the roster, he treated everyone with dignity, kindness and equality.”
Pericolosi, who graduated from Northern Michigan University with a degree in Education in 1979, spent 35 years as a teacher for the Menominee Area Public School System and has served as an MHSAA official for over 45 years.
He was inducted into the U.P. Sports Hall of Fame in 2018.
“Some years we couldn’t throw it in the bay and that is the truth,” Pericolosi recalled in 2018. “But we always were physical, we were good defensively and we were good at blocking cutters. We had a lot of good players in Menominee to win that many games.”
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