Is Westminster Catawba’s Tim Hall, son of an SEC track coach, the area’s most underrated?
Ed Addie has coached travel and high school basketball for more than 25 years, and he’s coached McDonald’s All-Americans and NBA players.
He feels like he knows a star when he has one, and he just knows that 6-foot-7 Westminster Catawba senior forward Tim Hall is a star.
Only Hall has one college offer, from Cal State Bakersfield, and that offer is for the 2024-25 school year. To take it, Hall would have to carry his per-game averages of 23.1 points and 14.2 rebounds to the West Coast, pay his way to school, and walk on this fall.
“Sounds kind of crazy, doesn’t it,” Addie said, with a laugh.
Addie thinks Hall may be the most under-the-radar player in the Charlotte area, and this is after Hall has amassed 28 games with double-digits in points and rebounds in 30 tries.
“Honestly,” Hall said, “I take that as a chip on my shoulder. And honestly, to answer your question (about being under-recruited), yes, I feel like that. But I feel with the season I’m having, hopefully that changes sooner than later.”
College recruiting, of course, has changed with the NCAA allowing extra eligibility and instant transfers in recent years, but Addie seems befuddled that a player like Hall — averaging 28 points, 13 rebounds and nearly five blocks in his past five games — would basically go undetected.
“I’ve never seen it like this,” Addie said. “All the other coaches we play against are shocked and blown away that he doesn’t have any college offers in 2023.”
Count Concord Academy’s Frank Cantadore among them.
Cantadore’s team has won two of the past three private school 3A state titles. It’s among the favorites to win another this year. And Cantadore’s watched Hall go for 25 points and 20 rebounds in one game against his team and then 18 points and 10 rebounds in another.
“I love Tim,” Cantadore said Friday afternoon. “The thing with him is how quick he gets off the floor. His second bounce is faster than most of my guys’ first bounce. We’ve played most of the best players in the state, and he’s one of them. He’s definitely an under-the-radar kid. I don’t get his recruitment, but I know this, on the floor it’s hard to pass him up.”
The school where Mason Rudolph once played
Westminster Catawba sits in Rock Hill, not too far from where the Carolina Panthers were once planning to have a practice facility. Westminster is a small private school of 550 students that is probably most well known for the fact that Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Mason Rudolph played tight end there during his freshman year of high school.
Addie’s team, however, plays in a league of N.C. private schools and lost in the N.C. state quarterfinals Saturday at home to Caldwell Academy. Hall finished with 27 points, 15 rebounds and five blocks. He ended his high school career with more than 2,000 points and 1,000 rebounds.
There are not many private schools or private school leagues close to Rock Hill and there are many in the Charlotte region. But in either state, Hall’s production ranks well.
Among North Carolina players, he’s No. 29 in scoring and No. 4 rebounding. Among S.C. players, he’s No. 5 in scoring and No. 2 in rebounds. And Hall ranks among the nation’s top 60 in rebounding.
“He works for it,” Addie said. “He comes to school at 5 a.m. a lot of mornings, working on his shot, and he can shoot. But he says, ‘Coach, why do I need to shoot 3s to get 25 and 30 when I can stay closer to the basket and do the same thing?’”
Addie said Hall has only taken five 3-point shots this season.
The Mikey Williams thing and the Kentucky Wildcats thing
Hall grew up in Charlotte but his father, also named Tim Hall, is the associate head men’s track coach at Kentucky.
So Hall moved with his family growing up as his father’s career began to take off. They made a stop in Lexington, where his father worked for Kentucky, before they moved to Tennessee, when his dad got a job with the Volunteers.
The Halls went back to Lexington, Kentucky, for Tim Hall Jr.’s first year of high school. But after a solid freshman year, he caught the eyes of coaches at Vertical Academy, a start-up in Charlotte that featured teen basketball sensation Mikey Williams.
Tim Jr. came back to Charlotte and played with Vertical last year. When Williams decided to go back to California for his senior high school season, Vertical shuttered and one of Hall’s teammates, Nick Hamrick, introduced him to Addie.
“I knew immediately that this was the coach I wanted to play for and the school where I wanted to end my career at,” Hall said. “It was his connections, the whole environment, the atmosphere. It all seemed like the right fit for me and I knew going here, I’d be able to produce and have the season I’m having now.”
Addie said coaches from schools like High Point, UNC Greensboro and UNC Asheville have scouted Hall at recent games. But he also knows that the NCAA transfer portal will open in a few weeks, and high school recruiting will tail off significantly for seniors like Hall.
So, for now, Addie is working the phones and keeping his fingers crossed.
“He’s one of the most high-character kids you’ll ever meet,” Addie said of Hall. “He’s only made one C in high school. He’s loved by the student body and the teachers. He’s been raised right. So we’re hoping to get him a home.
“And honestly, we think some program is about to get lucky.”
PHOTOS: Westminster Catawba’s Tim Hall
This story was originally published February 18, 2023 at 5:30 AM.
