Armstrong seniors Sean Burns and Rachael Peterson sign letters of intent

Two student athletes from Armstrong High School recently signed National Letters of Intent to play for colleges in Minnesota and Wisconsin.

During an April 15 ceremony, Rachael Peterson signed a letter for the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay (Division I) for swimming, and Sean Burns signed a letter for University of Minnesota-Duluth (Division II) for basketball.

Greg Miller, Armstrong’s basketball coach, said that Burns was only the fifth player in the past 14 years to get a full-ride scholarship right out of high school. Miller said that one of the things he is most proud of is how Burns conducts himself, saying that he is “a great young man with lots of friends from all different groups in our school.”

“He’s going to be successful, and he knows why he is going to college,” Miller said. “He’s going to learn and to make something of himself, and he will, because of how hard he works. He put in a lot of time and hard work, and now he has achieved what he wanted to achieve.”

Justin Zook, a first-year swimming coach at Armstrong, said that Peterson’s success shows that “a lot of hard work in and out of the classroom can make a big impression on coaches.”

“(Her success) shows that if you are willing to willing to put in the hard work, you can really go anywhere you want to,” Zook said. “As a coach and as a person, I couldn’t be more proud of the way that Rachael handled herself all season as a captain of our team.”

According to nationalletter.org, a National Letter of Intent is a binding agreement between a prospective student-athlete and an NLI member institution. A prospective student-athlete agrees to attend the institution full-time for one academic year (two semesters or three quarters), and the institution agrees to provide athletics financial aid for one academic year (two semesters or three quarters).