EVERETT — Snohomish County’s distinguished sports history was celebrated on Wednesday night with the induction of 10 individuals and one team into the county’s Sports Hall of Fame.
The event was a dinner banquet in the Edward D. Hansen Conference Center at Xfinity Arena. The inductees included six athletes, two coaches, two sports contributors and one team.
One of the inductees, former University of Washington and NFL football player Jeff Pahukoa, said the honor “is really not about what I’ve done. It’s more about what the people in my life have done for me. The people that have been around me and the things they’ve done for me throughout my career.
“That’s really what the Hall of Fame is about to me,” said Pahukoa, who grew up in Marysville and lives today in Lake Stevens. “It’s about honoring the people that took the time out of their lives to either take care of me or coach me along the way.”
Another Marysville native, top amateur and professional boxer Bret Summers, said the induction “is just such an honor. It’s surreal.”
And for some it was an honor decades in the making. Members of the undefeated 1952 Everett High School football team, undoubtedly one of the best teams ever from this area, had to wait 62 years to be enshrined among the county’s elite.
“Where did 60 years go?” asked Dan Michel, the quarterback on that team and the banquet spokesman. “I tell you, it really flew by fast.”
The sports contributors were Bob and Margaret Bavasi, the husband and wife who brought minor league baseball to Everett in 1984. The year before, in an offhand remark, Margaret Bavasi had suggested to her husband that they should quit their jobs as attorneys and buy a baseball team.
“I assumed (Bob) knew I was joking,” said Margaret Bavasi, whose husband was unable to attend because he is traveling in Japan. “But as it turned out, not only did he not get my sarcasm, but it flipped a switch in his brain.”
After buying a team, the Bavasis then had to find a city and a stadium to call home. Their arrival in Everett “was part serendipity, and part the intervention of a tremendous number of very kind, community minded, trusting souls,” she said. In conversations with the city’s sports, community and political leaders, “that’s when we, and especially me, began to feel the magic of Everett.”
The other inductees were wrestler Otto Olson of Everett, bowler Matt Surina of Everett, soccer player Theresa Wagner Romagnolo of Edmonds, and rower Richard “Rusty” Wailes of Edmonds. Also inducted were former coaches Margaret “Maggie” King from Mountlake Terrace High School and Joe Richer from Everett High School.
Also honored were The Herald’s Man and Woman of the Year in Sports for 2013, volleyball player Kylin Muñoz of Monroe and curler Brady Clark of Lynnwood, though both were unable to attend. Muñoz is playing professionally in Europe and Clark was on an out-of-town business trip.
The banquet also recognized a Male and Female Collegiate Athlete of the Year, with nominees from Edmonds CC, Everett CC and Trinity Lutheran College. The honored athletes were Edmonds CC baseball player T.C Florentine and Trinity Lutheran track athlete Janell Alyea.
The keynote speaker was Mike Rohrbach of Lynnwood, a linebacker and co-captain on the University of Washington football team that played in the 1978 Rose Bowl. Rohrbach, who has been a chaplain for several Seattle-area professional, college and high school teams, talked about the positive values and life lessons that come from being in sports.
As a boy, Rohrbach remembers watching on television when Washington played in the 1964 Rose Bowl. “And as if it was yesterday, I remember turning to my parents and saying, ‘Someday I’m going to play in the Rose Bowl for the Washington Huskies.’ When I speak to kids today, I simply tell them I’m one of those guys who got to live the dream. And it’s been an amazing journey.”
Crediting coaches who guided him along the way, Rohrbach added, “Dreams indeed do come true. They do come true, but they don’t come easily. … My life has really been a blessing, and the things that I learned in sports motivate me and continue to inspire me to this day.”
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