Erin Peterson

Erin Peterson was always the one who led the cheers and pumped the team up before games for Westfield High School’s girl’s varsity basketball team. That voice has been extinguished but her spirit is still burning bright.

Basketball was an integral part of Erin’s life. Standing tall at 6’1” earned her the nickname “Big E”. She played on the jayvee team her freshman year and then varsity for the remainder of her career.  She was co-captain her senior year. For coach Pat Deegan, it was an easy decision to make “Some years you get lucky and have an Erin,” said Deegan who has coached the team for six years.

A guidance counselor at Westfield led a session where students wrote down anecdotes about Erin. Deegan recalled three of them:

One girl had just transferred to Westfield as a sophomore and didn’t have anyone to sit with at lunch. Until Peterson swooped in and told her “you’re on the basketball team. You can sit with us.”

The second girl had been crying at her locker when Peterson asked her what was wrong and then comforted her by walking her to class.

The third girl was a fellow basketball player. Over winter break, Peterson had returned to sit in on a practice. But she had just forgotten one crucial element of her game—proper basketball shoes. The team was doing a block out drill, which according to Deegan, “is one of the toughest things in basketball. It rewards aggression and favors the stronger, more aggressive players. Well, during these drills, no one wanted to go up against Erin. If kids could block Erin, they could block anyone in the state.”

This one girl just happened to knock Peterson down because she lacked balance without the right shoes on. “Time stopped,” said Deegan, but then Peterson jumped back up and exclaimed to the player, “Way to go!”

Peterson continued to stay involved at Tech.  She was a freshman international studies major and part of the honors fraternity Phi Sigma Pi’s pledge class. She was also co-president of The Empower Program, which serves as a way for minority girls to increase self-esteem and develop leadership skills.

Her enthusiasm for basketball didn’t wane either. Peterson was part of a girl’s intramural basketball team in the fall and the spring. Both of her teams won the intramural championships and went undefeated all semester.

“She loved the game. You could tell that in her intensity. She had such a love for basketball and a love for life. She gave a lot of encouragement if you were down,” said freshman and Communication major Jen Libbares.

Libbares and Peterson had played on rival teams in high school and were able to play on the same intramural teams in college.

Anna Richter, who has played sports with Erin since fourth grade, will never forget who Peterson’s biggest fans were.

“Your mom and dad made sure they were heard when cheering for you in the stands. I’ll never forget the sounds of their voices during the hundreds of basketball and soccer games we shared. I love you so much Erin,” wrote Richter, a freshman at WVU, in a Facebook comment for the group “Remembering Erin Peterson and Reema Samaha.”

Family also played an integral role in Peterson’s life.

“She was an only child and very close to her mother and father.  They were a very close knit family. She’d call her parents daily when she was at college,” said Tracy Littlejohn, Peterson’s cousin.  

That same close knit family brought Peterson to church and it was there that she developed a relationship with God. Both Richter and Littlejohn said that Peterson “believed in the power of prayer.”

The strongest testament of Peterson’s faith is from Peterson herself. A paper that is dated 11/14/06 was placed on Peterson’s Drillfield memorial and was there on Thursday, April 26.  The title of the piece was “Losing a Loved One and Gaining a New Perspective.” In it,

Peterson describes how the death of her great-grandmother was a defining moment in her life because made her “mentally stronger” and that “my faith in God became exponentially stronger as well.  All my life, my family has told me to trust in God and believe that He had a plan for all of us, but it wasn’t until that day did I actually believe it. That day I had to let her go and believe that she was going to a place where she would not feel any pain. It was almost as if when she died she left some of her strength with me.”