PORT ANGELES — Peninsula College men’s basketball coach Peter Stewart has a message to Pirates supporters:
“I’m here.”
Some might have worried that the highly successful leader of the Pirates might soon bolt town after word got out that he was one of three finalists for the head coaching position at the University of Mary in Bismarck, N.D.
Stewart and his wife, Pirate women’s hoops coach Julie Stewart, are originally from North Dakota. They both still have family living there, and the Mary athletic director, Roger Thomas, was Peter’s college football coach when he played for the University of North Dakota.
Yet he didn’t end up getting the job.
It went to 38-year-old Randall Herbst, who most recently was an assistant at Nebraska-Omaha.
Stewart said despite the appearances, he doesn’t plan on leaving the Pirates program anytime soon.
“I would still like to avenge last year’s season,” said Stewart, whose Pirates finished 10-17 and out of the postseason this winter.
“It’s an unfortunate part of our business because it causes uncertainty. Now the first question I get form all the parents on the recruiting trail is ‘Are you going to be there?’
“Well, I’m here.”
Stewart had taken the Pirates to five straight NWAACC tournament appearances prior to this winter, and has a record of 111-66 since coming to Port Angeles in 2002.
Julie returned to the coach the women’s program this winter after a few years away and guided it to a second-place finish in the North Division, a 19-11 record overall and its first NWAACC tourney appearance since 2004-05, her last season as coach.
“I expressed to the college here when I first took the job that I wouldn’t hopscotch around the country,” Peter Stewart said.
“When you’re in a position where we’re at in the business where you have some success, you get opportunities to look.
“You just look at opportunities when they come by. You go through a process with the people that you’re talking to, and if it looks like a good fit, you explore it.
“This one happened to make front page, so everybody knows. That’s part and parcel of the business.”
High school players
Stewart has been working with a handful of Port Angeles High School boys basketball players, who are without a head coach, during the past month at the college.
The players have come up on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays as a way to maintain some semblance of an offseason program.
“We basically open the gym up,” Stewart said. “Some nights we’ll do drills and some nights I just sit there and watch.
“I know most of the kids, and it’s a good opportunity for me to be involved.”
