Rick Peterson’s collegiate basketball career rated high by any standards.

The fact that Peterson did not even play high school basketball made it even more remarkable.

Peterson, a Johnsburg resident and 1975 graduate of McHenry High School, was talked into playing when he attended McHenry County College and became a scoring machine in two years for the Scots.

Peterson, a 6-foot-6 forward, earned a scholarship to NCAA Division II Regis University in Denver, where he played for two years. He is one of five people who will be inducted into the MCC Athletic Hall of Fame on Jan. 17. The induction ceremony will take place between the women’s and men’s basketball games that evening.

Peterson, who later coached MCC’s women’s team, will be joined in the induction class by one of his former players, Michelle (Crosby) Loeding. Also going in will be soccer player Rafael Arellano (1994-95), volleyball player Kelly (Freund) Heider (1997-98) and Tom Carle, a longtime volunteer to the athletic department who has worked such jobs as basketball scorekeeper and assistant baseball coach.

Peterson scored 26.7 points a game as a freshman, then averaged 30 points a game as a sophomore.

“Someone saw me at MCC and said, ‘You’re a big strong guy. You want to play?’ ” Peterson said. “I said I’d go play. Who would have thought? I played a lot of street ball growing up, but I didn’t play in junior high or high school. That’s why I’m so proud about what happened.”

Peterson was hired by former MCC athletic director Dave Hill to coach the women’s team and took the Scots to a 21-5 record in 1988, then a 20-5 record in 1989. Loeding, who also played volleyball and softball for the Scots, graduated from Harvard High School in 1986. She played for Peterson’s first team, then earned a scholarship to D-I Illinois-Chicago for basketball.

“I knew in my heart when I graduated high school that was my goal (to play D-I),” Loeding said. “I didn’t know if that was going to be a possibility. It was a great opportunity, and I had a lot of supportive people. A lot of kids may not want to stay around, think they might miss out on something. In reality, [MCC] was a great stepping stone for me and opened up a lot of doors and opportunities for me.”

Loeding, whose son Kyle is one of the leading scorers on Prairie Ridge’s varsity team, remembers Peterson bringing in a local junior high-aged team that he also coached to scrimmage against the Scots, who had only eight players.

“That had an impact. They were so much quicker, even though we had quite a few years on them,” Loeding said. “That helped.”

Loeding was grateful to everyone – coaches, administrators and especially her teammates at MCC.

“The hardest thing with this whole Hall of Fame thing is you have to have teammates. It’s not about me,” Loeding said. “You’re in this position because you have to have people who rebound, scrap on the floor and pass you the ball.”

Peterson also gave credit to former Scots women’s coach Bob Edwards for establishing a solid program ahead of him.

“We finished 13-1 and won [the Skyway] conference,” Peterson said. “The ‘80s or ‘90s for MCC was huge. Bob Edwards had really good teams in the 1980s. He kind of laid the groundwork down and made people want to come there.”

Arellano, who graduated from Woodstock, was an All-Skyway Conference and All-NJCAA Region IV first-team player. His teams finished with a combined 38-8 record. He also played a vital role as co-founder of MCC’s Latinos Unidos, a club that promotes Latino cultural awareness.

Heider, a Crystal Lake Central graduate, earned NJCAA All-America honors in 1998 and was on the Scots’ first team to qualify for the NJCAA National Tournament. She played at Northern Illinois University.