Staten Island Sports Hall of Fame
Relive It All Again
Jim Signorile, a 6-8 center from New Dorp High School, was NYU’s leading scorer and rebounder in 1969 and 1970, and the team MVP. He scored 1,235 career points – 50 of them in one game, a school record.
Drafted by the Knicks and Carolina Cougars, Signorile played six seasons of professional basketball in Europe, averaging 40 points a game, and scored 101 points one night in the French Basketball League.
Al Paturzo, a two-time New York State Coach of the Year at Susan Wagner High School, is Staten Island’s winningest high school football coach of all time.
Paturzo’s Falcon teams won six New York City PSAL championships – three in a row in 1988, 1989 and 1990 – 14 Staten Island public school titles, and a record 37 straight games.
Sonny Logan toured the country with the New York Black Yankees in the final days of the Negro Leagues, while he was still a student at Tottenville High School.
He played three seasons in the Cleveland Indian organization before a shoulder injury ended his professional career, and Logan came home to play and later officiate in the best Staten Island Sandlot Leagues, and coached four national championship softball teams.
Jimmy Collins was an All-Met, All-East, All-American basketball player at St. John’s, where he averaged double-digits – when college basketball scores were in the 20s and 30s – and led the country in scoring.
Collins, the father of after-school sports and recreation programs on Staten Island, served as the borough’s Supervisor of Recreation from 1947 to 1964, and was a high school and college referee for 25 seasons.
Pete Whitehouse, a high-jumper at St. Peter’s High School and All-American hurdler at Notre Dame, finished second at the 1964 NCAA championships, and won at the hurdles in the 1964 New York AC Games against some of the world’s best.
As the coach at Tottenville High School, Whitehouse’s girls’ teams won 22 straight Staten Island public school cross-country championships and more city titles than any other school, raising the bar for every program in the city.