‘A man for all seasons’: Former Capuchino coach Pete Harames dies at 80; wake set for Sunday

Known as a true gentleman with a charismatic smile and contagious laughter, Harames died from complications of pneumonia, Tuesday, May 5, at age 80. A celebration of life will be held Sunday at the Capuchino gym from noon to 3 p.m. The event is open to the public.

“Coach Harames was a great man and a mentor to me,” said Matt Wilson, Capuchino’s longtime baseball coach and member of the 1995 Nor Cal basketball championship team. “Guys like him have rubbed off on me to how I coach today. He was ... firm but fair.”

A 1963 graduate of Capuchino, Harames was part of North Peninsula League championship teams as a player. After graduating from San Francisco State University, where he played both basketball and baseball, Harames returned to Cap in 1980 as head coach of the boys’ basketball team. There he led the Mustangs to another league title in 1981, the program’s last until a Peninsula Athletic League Lake Division championship in 2011.

After coaching 19 seasons at Cap — over two stints from 1980-87 and 1990-2000 — he returned to the sideline as varsity head coach at Burlingame from 2013-18, where he earned two PAL Ocean Division titles in 2013 and ’14, and led the Panthers to the program’s first Central Coast Section championship for Division III in 2013.

Harames’ legacy, however, will always be tied to San Bruno. A longtime history teacher at Parkside Intermediate School, Harames began his high school coaching career as an assistant at Crestmoor High School on head coach Bobby Thompson’s staff. After taking over the basketball program at Cap, he served as a multisport coach, offensive coordinator for Cap varsity football, and manager of varsity baseball, also leading the Mustangs to the 1981 CCS championship game on the diamond.

“He was the last of those three-sport teaching guys,” Keith Larson, a lifelong friend who grew up with Harames in San Bruno, said.

Harames will always be synonymous with basketball though, forever tied to the 1995 Nor Cal title run, as the Mustangs took the community of an entire city on a whirlwind ride that hadn’t been seen before by any team sport at the San Bruno public school, and hasn’t been repeated since.

“It felt like the city of San Bruno ... it felt like it was coming together,” Brian Gomes, a senior on the 1995 team, said. “It was such a big moment because it hadn’t happened before.”

One of just six current PAL public school boys’ basketball programs to ever reach the boys’ basketball state finals, the Mustangs came within a point of a state crown, falling 60-59 to Verbum Dei-Los Angeles in the CIF Division IV state championship game March 18, 1995, at the Oakland Coliseum.

Steve Picchi, a longtime area basketball coach who ran the girls’ programs at Burlingame and Sequoia, was at the Oakland Coliseum to witness the thriller, and remembered: “Just how good it was and how excited I was because it was a local team that came within inches of winning the thing. And just how well prepared they were and how they took the other team out of the game. And just how good the coaching was. ... That game, it was so obvious.”

As a coach, Harames honed his craft the old-fashioned way, over many a postgame drink with coaching piers, and even referees, over the course of years and years. Hillsdale legend Homer Zugelder, who coached the Fighting Knights from 1958-70, but was a fixture around local basketball courts for many years thereafter, would frequent these impromptu think tanks at Lyon’s Restaurant in Millbrae or Van’s Restaurant in Belmont, as something of a mentor to the generation of coaches that followed him.

PAL Commissioner Terry Stogner was the head basketball coach at Carlmont in those days, and remembers his coaching contemporaries being as much compatriots as they were competitors.

“We all learned together,” Stogner said. “We all went to clinics together.”

The postgame trips at late-night watering holes, ones that would sometimes turn into ham-and-egg breakfasts in the dark morning hours, were where the real coaching talk would be shared. And, there, Harames and Thompson — despite coaching at rival schools, with Thompson taking over the boys’ basketball program at Mills — were inseparable.

“Guys had napkins out ... it was Xs and Os,” Larson said.

“It was very open,” said Stogner, who said coaching strategies were not treated like state secrets, but as public record. “‘What do you need?’ ‘What are you doing?’ And I remember a lot of conversations, ‘Why are you doing that?’”

While he was a soft touch off the court, Harames was revered for his intensity on the sideline.

“He was the boss,” Gomes said. “He was the authoritarian. He was the man. He was tough.”

Somewhere between his stern coaching persona (including the occasional flying chalk) and his profound love for his players on and off the court, it was apparent to most who knew him Harames didn’t let the dramatic loss in the state championship game get to him.

“It wasn’t that big a deal for him,” Larson said. “He was prepared. It was just another game. We always had to bring it up, and his kids always bring it up, but it wasn’t his benchmark to him.”

It was that love for his players that defined him. His sideline temperament and passion for the game only endeared Harames to his players. And he worked to cultivate connections with each of them.

The end-of-year party in 1995 was the culmination of the personal side of coaching for Harames, who was known for his generous sense of humor, and for teaching his players to love to laugh as well. Hosting a celebration barbecue, Harames prepared joke gifts for each of his players. Some relied on locker room humor, while others were as sentimental as they were humorous, as the plastic faux World Wrestling Federation championship belt he bestowed on Wilson, a gift Wilson still has to this day.

“He was fun,” Wilson said. “He would joke, but when it was in between the lines on the field or on the court, it was nothing but business.”

In 2017, the year before Harames retired from coaching at Burlingame, he and his wife Tammy relocated to Half Moon Bay. It was in retirement Harames took up painting as a hobby. The hobby soon turned into a passion, as he painted frequently, mostly landscapes and portraits.

“He just reinvented himself,” Larson said. “The painting he did over the last 2 1/2 years was just spectacular.”

In addition to having his paintings displayed at several Half Moon Bay art galleries, including The Ocean Blue Vault and Coastal Arts League Gallery, he sold several paintings at a Sanchez Art Center 50/50 Show in Pacifica. His work can be viewed online at coachpaints.com.

“He was a man for all seasons,” Rob Ennis, Harames’ former assistant coach at Burlingame, said “He was an artist ... he loved poetry, he loved reading, he loved drawing.”

Ennis said the artistry would have come as no surprise to anyone who ever visited Harames’ backyard in Millbrae, where he cultivated a flower garden that became a destination for so many of he and Ennis’ deli lunches together.

“The garden was so pristine, it was beautiful,” Ennis said. “There was flowers like you couldn’t believe.”

Harames was a dedicated father of two, whose daughter Ty followed in his footsteps by enjoying a long run as an amateur athlete. A former three-sport athlete at Mills, she continued after her prep cross country and track days as a competitive distance runner, and played for the University of Oregon Women’s Club Soccer team.

While Ty went to work in the private sector after graduating college, her best friend at University of Oregon, Megan Smith, returned to her native Half Moon Bay to take over the girls’ basketball program at Half Moon Bay High School.

Smith said Harames became not only a coaching mentor to her, but a life mentor, as well.

“It was reminding me it was a lot bigger than basketball,” Smith said. “It was always just so much bigger than basketball to Pete, and it was always just such a great reminder to me.”

Harames is survived by his wife Tammy, his children Brett and Ty, and his grandson James.