Pius XI High School varsity basketball players celebrate the 500th win for their coach, Scott Herrick. (Submitted photo)
The Pius XI High School girls basketball season was brought to you by the numbers 1,000, 500 and 25 — and not just because it’s the year 2025.
Those three numbers each mean significant milestones for that senior-laden team. The pursuit of those milestones created memories and molded young women that Scott Herrick is, as he puts it, “super-blessed” to coach.
“I wouldn’t want it any other way,” Herrick says about the journey of leading 13 student-athletes during the 2024-25 campaign at a school whose girls basketball program has been a standard-bearer for decades in Wisconsin, with a total of 16 state championships.
No, they didn’t win the WIAA state title in 2025, losing to Whitefish Bay High School in a regional final, but Herrick and company achieved three big numbers that symbolize so much more for the team.
The first is 25. That number marks a pair of milestones for Herrick, who retired two years ago as a teacher at Pius XI.
Herrick has now coached at his alma mater for 25 years — two years as an assistant (2000-02) and 23 as a head coach (2002-25). This year also marks his 25th as a head girls basketball coach. He spent his first two years as a head coach at Nathan Hale High School in West Allis (1998-2000).
“I’m real proud when I say I coach basketball at Pius XI. Everybody kind of gets it and what we’re trying to accomplish,” said Herrick.
“You’re also in a position where you get a chance to take in a young person at a challenging age and help mold them into who they become as a young woman.”
Incredibly, Herrick — a member of St. Alphonsus in Greendale — has averaged 20 wins per season as a head coach. Doing the math, that means his teams have earned 500 wins. He’s only the 20th coach in Wisconsin high school girls basketball history to achieve the milestone.
Pius XI earned his 500th victory Feb. 19, beating Greenfield High School.
“I don’t keep track of numbers, so I had no idea,” Herrick admitted.
“A parent called me during the day and kind of gave it away by accident. Some people came to the game that I haven’t seen in a year or something. (I’m thinking) ‘What the heck’s going on?’ and then when it happened and they announced it, I thought, ‘It is a big milestone.’”
Herrick attributes much of his success to the quality of Pius XI as a top-notch school and athletic program.
“There’s a ton of better coaches out there, but I’ve just been fortunate enough to be at a place where we’ve had good student-athletes, and I always told them they make me look good.”
Perhaps more incredibly, Herrick achieved that milestone number of 500 on a night when one of his seniors, Addison Miranda, reached 1,000 points as a varsity player — all on Senior Night and during the team’s last home game of the year. Miranda joined fellow class of 2025 members Georgia Acompanado and Tess Wiczek on the 1,000-point plateau.
“I know we didn’t bring home the gold ball (state championship trophy), but there’s the gifts that you receive when you leave everything on the floor,” he said about the team that took its slogan, “All In,” to heart.
“Miranda is one of the best shooters I’ve ever coached. She ended up our leading scorer (this year), but she wasn’t for her first three years on the varsity. She worked her butt off at practice and stayed after practice to shoot.”
Herrick said that work ethic, combined with the unselfishness that she, Acompanado and Wiczek showed for four years on the floor, reflects what he believes is the subtle but substantive extension of Pius XI’s Catholic teaching coming into practice on the basketball court every day.
“I know we’re a school and we’re trying to get good grades, I know we’re a basketball team, but just the faith aspect carries over in sports,” said Herrick. “I care about the person I’m playing next to. I pray for them to have success all the way down the line.”
All this reflects moments of gratitude to God for a 50-year journey Herrick took since graduating from Pius XI in 1975.
“I never ever envisioned myself coaching girls. Girls sports weren’t really prominent at that point. I remember getting my senior year yearbook and there was a picture of the girls basketball team, and we all looked at each other and said, ‘We had a girls basketball team?’” he joked.
“It has helped so many kids. To see all those kids grow, get scholarships, have success and become great women. That’s a blessing for me. God had some kind of hand in that. I’m very, very blessed that I got what I got, and I am where I am,” Herrick said.
“I get to coach a sport that I love, and I get to impact lives doing it.”
