Who is the best pro athlete to come out of every Seattle-area high school?

Click through the following slideshow for SeattlePI's No. 1 professional athlete from every high school in the Seattle metropolitan area. Click through the following slideshow for SeattlePI's No. 1 professional athlete from every high school in the Seattle metropolitan area. Photo: Jonathan Ferrey/Getty Images Photo: Jonathan Ferrey/Getty Images Image 1 of / 152 Caption Close Who is the best pro athlete to come out of every Seattle-area high school? 1 / 152 Back to Gallery

Seattle-area high schools have produced more professional athletes than anyone can count. But is there one, from each school, that stands out above all else?

That’s what we’ve attempted to determine.

SeattlePI has taken on the impossible (?) task of anointing the No. 1 pro athlete, regardless of gender, to come out of every high school in the Seattle metropolitan area.

As defined by the United States Census Bureau, the Seattle metropolitan area includes the three most populous counties in the state: King, Snohomish and Pierce. That’s important to note, as that does not include areas such as Olympia (Thurston county) and its neighboring suburbs.

For the most accurate and verifiable statistics possible, athletes that concluded their professional careers before 1960 were also excluded from this project. Athletes who started their careers in 1959 or earlier but finished them in 1960 or later were taken into consideration.

Athletes of schools that no longer exist or closed down are left out.

Sports-reference.com -- and its expansive databases of professional sports leagues and events -- and Wikipedia.com were the main resources used to track down prominent athletic alumni of Seattle-area high schools.

For some schools, there’s a note on ‘honorable mentions’ -- the top athletes that deserve recognition, but were not deemed No. 1 by SeattlePI. The top athlete at each school was determined by a subjective combination of one or more of the following criteria: level of play reached, length of career, championships won, All Star/All-league nominations and Olympic performance, among others.

Browse through the gallery above for SeattlePI’s top athlete from every Seattle-area high school (Did we miss your school? Let us know.)

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Ben Arthur covers sports for SeattlePI. He can be reached by email at benjaminarthur@seattlepi.com. Follow him on twitter at @benyarthur.





