Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 12, 1993 TAG: 9303120110
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SCOTT BLANCHARD STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Long
A CAREER THAT FIZZLED
STEVE HALL was a dazzling high school star with a bright college future. But timing is everything, and he arrived at two colleges just about the time the coaches who recruited him were dismissed.\ Before basketball players joined cars as Detroit's trademark commodities, Charles Nichols was there.
And he was there when Detroit's prep basketball production line outdid itself in the late 1980s, when the new models included a kid named Steve Hall. He was no Derrick Coleman; no Edsel, either.
"I thought he was going to be a very good college player," said Nichols, athletic director for Detroit's public schools and friend of the Halls.
Ditto, said former Tennessee assistant Dean Lockwood, now head coach at Division II Northwood University in Midland, Mich. He also recruited Hall.
Hall, who transferred from the University of Washington to Virginia Tech three years ago, is no star. No starter, even. More of a riddle, answer negotiable.
What happened? Thirty-one points per game as a Cass Technical High School senior in a wicked league; 7.4 at Tech. Detroit city player of the year in '88; buried as a senior at Tech. On stage with Mike Peplowski, Matt Steigenga and Justus Thigpen as a high school senior; a stagehand to those stars now.
Here's what happened.
A good freshman year at Washington. Coach dismissed. New coach, new slow-down system. Hall struggles. Though medically cleared to play, he's benched with a stress fracture early in his sophomore year. Transfers to Frankie Allen's up-tempo program. Allen dismissed. New coach, Bill Foster, new methodical system. Hall starts for part of one season, produces reasonably well. New recruits pour in. Hall slips down the depth chart. Becomes an afterthought.
Foster says Hall never caught on that practice effort dictated playing time. Hall, the middle-class city kid, says he couldn't do anything to please the coach he said never took to Hall's style of play.
"High school is the type of situation where the best players played and you had a lot of fun," said Hall, a senior. "In college you run into a lot of politics. You've got to be lucky. Grudges are held. You don't control your own destiny."
Hall's college career probably will end today when the seventh-seeded Hokies face second-seeded Tulane at noon in the first round of the Metro Conference Tournament at Freedom Hall in Louisville.
Hall started 18 of 50 games at Tech, averaging 12.1 points, 3.6 rebounds and 2.4 assists, shooting 42.3 percent and making 32 percent of his 3-point attempts.
All in an offensive system - much like the one at Washington - that he says makes him feel "like a bird in a cage. . . . I'm not a Loyola-Marymount type of player, but I'm not Princeton, either."
Yet an open-court pace best fits his skills; former Virginia Tech coach Don DeVoe offered Hall a scholarship in 1988 when DeVoe coached an up-tempo offense at Tennessee.
Andy Russo at Washington coached the same way, and Hall started the last 11 games of his freshman year at point guard and got good reviews. But Russo left after that season and now is at Florida Institute.
"He was recruited by two coaches that didn't stay, and he had to play for two coaches that didn't recruit him," said Russo, adding that can be a holdover player's ticket to the basketball morgue.
Could Hall have been a star? Another riddle. Hall baffled Virginia Commonwealth coach Sonny Smith, who said: "He was always better against us than he was against anybody else." One Metro Conference coach said Hall was known as a "shooter," but another said Hall's spread-wristed jump shot declared he would miss more than he would make.
Allen said Hall would have started for him had he survived. He thought Hall would have helped the Hokies press and trap; Foster's Hokies do neither.
Hall's father, Ferd, who raised two children when his wife died in 1980 and who frequently shows up at Tech games, has a scalding opinion of his son's Tech career.
"Steve Hall has been at Virginia Tech with a damn muzzle on him - and a harness," said the elder Hall, a Detroit school board administrator for 32 years. "Foster loosened that harness on senior day, and you saw a bit of what he could do."
Career-high 23 points, 5-for-15 from 3-point range, five rebounds, two assists, three turnovers in 28 minutes. Next game, Hall plays 16 minutes, getting two points on 1-for-4 shooting; next game, he doesn't play.
Hall said he doesn't regret choosing Tech because "It was perfect" at the time. He didn't quit the Hokies because he said he wanted to keep sharp in case a European or U.S. professional team calls and added he's not sour.
Nor embarrassed. Last summer, he played with Michigan's Chris Webber on a summer-league team, with and against other hometown luminaries.
"Those guys know the situation," Hall said. "It's not a situation where they feel, `God, what happened to you? Have you lost it?' They see you can still play."
He will graduate in May, an unforgotten contributor to the legends of Detroit high school basketball whose college career will be forgotten.
No Steve Smith, Doug Smith, Terry Mills, Jalen Rose. Just a kid who tore it up in high school and didn't realize that was as good as it was going to get.
"I see it all the time," Nichols said of some of the city's sure bets that missed. "They've got to come back home; there's no other place to go.
"But Steve has got a good support system behind him. He's not going to fall by the wayside. He's not typical of the `ghetto' kids."
Hall's thoughts?
"I'm not bitter," he says with a shrug. "But what more can you do?"