Peninsula College to induct four individuals, hoops team to Pirate Athletic Hall of Fame

Pirate sports fans are getting a chance to celebrate their own.

Peninsula College will induct four individuals — Mark Amaral, Curt Bagby, Kent Brauninger and the late William Quenette — along with the 1999-2000 men’s basketball team into its Pirate Athletics Hall of Fame on Saturday, June 2.

The induction ceremony — the college’s third — will be held in the banquet room at The Cedars at Dungeness golf course, 1965 Woodcock Road, Sequim.

“Our committee came up with a great new class of inductees, representing men’s and women’s sports over a span of 37 years of our athletic history,” said Rick Ross, Associate Dean for Athletics and Student Life. “I am personally very happy for Mark, Curt, Kent and the family of coach Quenette.”

Ross added, “It will also be great to see the players from the 1999-2000 team again. They had quite a run, winning our first ever league championship and posting the most wins ever for a Pirate basketball team. It’s also cool that they’ve mostly stayed in contact for all these years.”

The event begins with a social time at 5 p.m. with the program starting at 5:30 p.m. Light refreshments and hors devours will be served, along with a no-host bar.

Inductees are asked to reserve space for themselves and their immediate family members by contacting Ross at rross@pencol.edu.

Admission is free for inductees, families, friends and guests as space allows.

In 2016, the Peninsula College Athletics Hall of Fame inducted the NWAC champion 2010 men’s soccer team, the late Jim Lunt, Rose Gala Moorhead, Howard “Scooter” Chapman and Jim Clem. In 2014, the year the Pirate Hall of Fame was founded, the college inducted the WAC champion 1970 men’s basketball team, Jerry Allen, the late Art Feiro, Kathy Murphy-Carey and the late Dr. Wally Sigmar.

The 2018 inductees

• 1999-2000 men’s basketball team

Under head coach Mark Amaral, the 1999-2000 Pirate men’s basketball team was the first in school history to win a league championship. They also became the first team in Pirate history to earn a No. 1 ranking in the NWAC Coaches’ poll following a nine-game winning streak that propelled them into first place in the North in early February of 2000.

After falling to Olympic for one of only two league losses, the Pirates won their last four games to capture the North Region championship. They were among the favorites to win the NWAC tournament that year, but an injury and a buzzer-beater contributed to a heart-breaking 71-70 loss to Southwestern Oregon in the opening round. The Pirates went on to place sixth.

The PC men finished the season 28-6 overall, which still stands as the most wins in a season in Pirate men’s basketball history.

In addition to coach Amaral, teams coaches included Pat Foley, Brant Borghorst and manager Jason Robinson.

Players included Olaf Arvidsson of Ostersund, Sweden; Brian Bell of Puyallup; Brent Bevers of Kissee Mills, Mo.; Mike Bowland of Colville; Leroy Johnson and Justin Murray of Tacoma; Kenny Lutz of White Salmon; Ray Munyagi and Masero Nyirabu of Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania; Eric Smilay of Port Angeles; Jeff Terrill of Vancouver; Steven Towne of Bothell; Aaron Vandenberg of Quilcene, and Barry Willis of Seattle.

• Mark Amaral

Peninsula College hired Amaral to re-launch men’s basketball in 1997 after the sport was dropped in 1981. He brought six years of assistant coaching experience to Peninsula from Carroll College, Lewis-Clark State and Montana Tech. He put together a winning record in his second season (19-9), and followed that up with a memorable third season, leading the Pirates to a 28-6 mark and the first league championship in the history of Peninsula College, earning North Region Coach of the Year honors.

In his three seasons at Peninsula, Amaral went 58-31 and laid the groundwork for what college officials call “a successful modern history of Pirate men’s basketball.”

Amaral went on to join the staff at UC Santa Barbara where he helped coach the Gauchos to two Big West championships and a trip to the NCAA Tournament in a seven-year stint.

From there Amaral served two years at Colorado State and two years at Cal Poly. He then worked for seven years as associate head coach coach at Pepperdine, where he helped the Wave post its first winning season since 2005 in 2014-15, qualifying for the post season two straight years.

This spring, Amaral accepted a position as head assistant coach for the Xinjiang Flying Tigers of the CBA in China.

• Curt Bagby

Curt Bagby was Peninsula College’s first intercollegiate women’s basketball coach when the college relaunched basketball in 1997.

Bagby came to Peninsula following an standout high school career coaching girls’ basketball and football at Port Angeles High School. In his final nine years coaching the Roughrider basketball team, he won seven league championships and made five trips to the state playoffs, including a second-place finish, the best in PA girls’ basketball history.

At Peninsula, Bagby assembled the very first women’s intercollegiate basketball team from the ground up in 1997 and then went on to win 57 games in four years. He took the Pirates to their first two Northwest Athletic Conference basketball tournament appearances in school history and twice won North Region Coach of the Year honors.

Bagby’s overall body of work included 41 years as a basketball and football coach, and PC officials consider Bagby a women’s basketball “founding father” for the college.

• Kent Brauninger

Kent Brauninger, who came to Peninsula College in 1968 to teach mathematics, volunteered to help PC athletic director Art Feiro and the Pirate basketball program as a score clock operator. A math professor by day, he was at the scorer’s table at night keeping time and score for Pirate basketball games from 1968 through to 1981, when the college dropped intercollegiate sports.

Brauninger then returned to the score clock in 1997 when the college reinstated basketball and has been at the table almost every home game since.

All told, college officials say Brauninger ran the score clock for more than 500 basketball games, and is also one of Peninsula’s major Pirate Boosters and one of the Colleges’ longest-running Pirate fans.

Brauninger retired from Peninsula in 2000, but stayed on to teach math part time for a few years and as a volunteer at the scorer’s table for 18 years … and counting.

• William “Bill” Quenette

The late William Quenette was the first coach in Peninsula College sports history, hired to teach physical education and to form a “club” basketball team in 1962-63, one year after the college was founded. He then coached Peninsula’s first intercollegiate basketball team a year later in 1963-64 and went on to serve four years as the Pirate head coach.

Quenette also coached golf, baseball and track during that time, and helped design the current Pirate gymnasium; the gym was built in 1966, the year Quenette moved back to Moorhead, Minn., where he had started his coaching career at Concordia College in 1957.

Quenette would spend the remainder of his 47-year career teaching physical education and coaching football, boys and girls basketball, baseball and golf for Moorhead High School. He was also on the basketball staff at Concordia and the football staff at Fargo Shanley High School in North Dakota.

Quenette, who passed away in 2013, has been named to six halls of fame, including The Minnesota High School Basketball Coaches, Concordia College, Minnesota High School Coaches, Moorhead Hall of Honor, West Fargo High School — and now Peninsula College.