Inductee Profile
Sharon Peterson
2024
Sharon Peterson added the passion of a “Warriors Super Fan” plus the math skills of a high school calculus teacher to make a positive contribution to the Rice Lake sports community that is difficult to compute. It is for the immeasurable difference that she made to a wide variety of different RLHS sports (track, football, gymnastics, volleyball, basketball, and softball) that Sharon Peterson was selected as a member of the Rice Lake Sports Hall of Fame. Sharon grew up in Twin Valley, MN, where she participated in high school cheerleading and was valedictorian of her class. Even though no other sports were offered for females at her high school, her love for sports proved to be never-ending. After graduating from Morehead State University, she accepted a junior high teaching position in Duluth where she coached five years of middle school golf and track, as well as supervised the intramural program. At the same time, she enrolled and was the only female in a coaching certificate class at the University of Minnesota-Duluth where she met her future husband, long-time RLHS football coach Jim Peterson. Sharon moved to Rice Lake and was the Varsity girls track and field coach for 5 years from 1979 to 1983 where she coached Terri (Sockness) Leal to the school record and state championship meet in the high jump. While at RLHS, she taught a combination of mathematics, computer programming, and statistics to over 6,000 students over her 37+ years from 1978 until 2015. Sharon loved her students! It was not uncommon for her to attend RLHS sporting events 4 or more nights a week to support her students. Sharon was also a passionate Warriors football fan who rarely missed a home or away game, no matter the weather! She would regularly lead the fan buses and even helped organize the Varsity football team prep rally at the middle school during Homecoming week each year. However, Sharon’s largest contributions came from her combining her amazing math skills with her love for sports. For instance, she computed all of the scores for the high school gymnastics meets and was one of the first in the state to calculate the scores using a computer spreadsheet. Instead of the teams going home and then finding out the results the next day, teams knew the results immediately at the end of the meet, which was a huge advancement in the sport. For many years she was the Clerk of Course, running the RLHS track and field invitational meets. And only the precision of a statistics teacher could be trusted to run the book for hundreds and hundreds of RLHS volleyball and basketball games (and even a few softball games) over her career. She took great pride in the accuracy of the books and referees from across Northwest Wisconsin would love working with her for this reason. Sharon was awarded the Wisconsin Athletic Service Award from the WI Athletic Directors Association for her contributions.