Susie Brugioni Heads for Her Third Hall of Fame

recently stepped back in time to chat about what may have been Highland Park's first notable girls athlete. 

Put it this way: in 1983, Highland Park athlete Susie Brugioni was all-conference in volleyball, basketball and softball.

"She turned it around," Schramm said. "Girls didn't play sports back then. She was an all-around athlete. She was good as the boys. She would have played football if they would have let her."

Brugioni is a social worker in Lake Forest and since 1995 has been head softball coach at Lake Forest High School. Before that, she clearly left her mark as an athlete at Highland Park.

She's a member of the Highland Park Sports Hall of Fame. She was selected for the Hall of Fame in the University of Wisconsin-Parkside in 2001. And later this year, she will be inducted into the Lake County Sports Hall of Fame.

"Playing sports was all I ever did as a kid," Brugioni said. "My neighbor, Tommy and I even played tackle football. We also broke some windows."

Though it was an time when girls didn't play sports, that didn't stop Brugioni.

"I played baseball and basketball in the second grade with all boys,'' she said. "They were still bigger, faster and stronger than I was and they made fun of me.''

That didn't stop her, either.

"It's what I liked to do,'' she said. "My parents were very supportive. I always had a ball in my hands. It really opened so many doors for me."

In high school, she ran into head coach Don Davis, a 2005 inductee of the Highland Park athletic Hall of Fame.

"She was really the first," Davis said. "She was an outstanding athlete. She had the fire and desire. And she was a good kid on top of it."

Her speed and quickness helped all three squads at the high school. For the volleyball team, she made all-conference all three years she was on the varsity. The 1983 team won a regional title. Her quickness paid off in the back row.

"Our volleyball team was really good," Brugioni said.

For the basketball team, she was brought up to the varsity as a freshman. In 1984, the Giants won a conference championship. In her  final season at point guard, she an honorable mention selection on the all-state team.

"We had a good team,'' Brugioni recalled. "We were only five or six deep."

Former head coach Tom O'Donnell recalled losing a regional game because the other team double-teamed Brugioni.

She made all-conference in softball all four years. She played on two conference championships in that sport. And since she was a baseball player, this was something new to her. She played third base for two years and two years at shortstop.

"I had never played softball before," she said. "I loved it."

By the time she was ready to graduate, the school's best girls athlete began to get noticed.

"I got a zillion articles written about me," she said. "My teams were good. We had good kids."

Then came the basketball scholarship to Wisconsin-Parkside.

"Basketball was definitely what I wanted to play," she said.

She scored more than 1,000 points at Parkside and her senior season certainly stands out. Brugioni was the NAIA District 14 Player of the Year and selected as an NAIA All-American.