Petrie Honored By Rye Neck

   The honors keep coming in for Ed Petrie, New York State’s winningest public high school boys basketball coach, though the latest, in the form of his induction into his high school’s Hall of Fame, was a long time in coming.

    Petrie, who led F.E. Bellows (now Rye Neck) High School in Westchester County to back-to-back county boys basketball championships in 1950 and ’51, and who played in two N.I.T. tournaments with Seton Hall before setting forth on what was to become a half-century Hall of Fame career in high school coaching — 41 of those years spent at East Hampton — became Rye Neck’s first Hall of Fame inductee on Dec. 14.

    “Obviously, it was a long overdue honor,” Joe Noon, of San Ramon, Calif., wrote in a recent e-mail to Petrie and his wife, Nancy, who was a classmate of her husband’s at F.E. Bellows.

    “When you think about the era in which Eddie played,” said Noon, “an era in which most high school teams scored 30 points on a good night, his 27 points-per-game average in his senior year — not to mention the 51 points he scored against Pleasantville and the two county championships for little Bellows High School — were remarkable.”

    “I suspect [correctly] that Bellows/ Rye Neck’s Hall of Fame might be a recent development because it seems inconceivable that Eddie would not have been their first inductee years ago.”

    Nancy Petrie said that F.E. Bellows, which “was in the Rye Neck School District in Mamaroneck, is now an elementary school. Ed was the first inductee in Rye Neck’s first Hall of Fame class.”

    An article in The Journal News that appeared around the time Petrie was inducted into the Westchester Sports Hall of Fame in October (he’d been an inaugural inducted into East Hampton’s first Hall of Fame in September) said, after listing his many coaching accomplishments over the years, that “he developed those winning ways and a desire to coach in Westchester County, where he grew up and displayed great talent as a baseball and basketball player.”