Winthrop star Hunter Hale excelled at every stage, except the one he never played on
This isn’t the ending Hunter Hale’s story deserves.
Perhaps no story should end on these terms, held hostage by external circumstance. Perhaps no basketball player — on any level, on any team, from whatever background — should end his or her career watching ESPN, scrolling through headlines on a cell phone, like Hale likely had to on Thursday.
College basketball players have always been afforded to end their careers one of two ways: They could end it on a win, sure. They could cut down the nets in the final possible game of their last season, blessed by the unique phenomenon that is March Madness.
Or, more likely, they could end it on a loss — a sad yet merciful alternative. In a loss, departing players have their moment in the locker room to give a postgame speech. They have their chance to wash their hands of regret by saying and believing the platitudes that spin the beautiful cycle of college sports round: We left it all out there on the floor. I’m proud of us. I’m proud of what we did while I was here.
Hale, the Eagles’ leading scorer and graduate transfer, must’ve been prepared for the latter outcome. He’d spent his sole season at Winthrop trying to delay that loss this season — playing through a hip pointer in September and October; launching big shot after big shot during Winthrop’s 14-game winning streak in January and February; struggling in his team’s final stretch of regular-season games, but catching fire during the conference tournament in March to help deliver Winthrop’s third NCAA tournament bid since 2010 and its 11th all-time Big South tournament championship (of which he was named tournament MVP).
After being under-recruited at Kalamazoo Central High School in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Hale walked on at Central Michigan. He redshirted his sophomore year there, and then, still with three years of eligibility, he transferred to Grand Valley State, a school with a Division II basketball program. GVSU was about 45 minutes away from his childhood home, and he went there to get playing experience so that when the right school called, he would be ready.
Hale spent two years at Grand Valley State, and in his last year, his team won a conference championship and he won his conference tournament’s MVP. A few months later, Winthrop coach Pat Kelsey’s staff found Hale, somehow, in the transfer portal, and they sold him on the Winthrop men’s basketball program.
“(Assistant) coach (Brian) Kloman, he called me, and he said, ‘H2O,’” Hale said. “And I was like, ‘Who is this messing around in my phone? Who is this?’ And he was like, ‘H2O. That’s what I’m going to call you because that jumper is wet.’”
Winthrop had everything Hale wanted in a school for his last year playing college basketball, he later said. Rock Hill “felt like” and reminded him of home.
Once brought on, Hale had one year to excel at Winthrop. And he did. In fact, considering the sport’s convention, winning a Big South championship and earning a chance to win or lose your last game of the season with the country watching is all Hale — the D-2 prospect turned mid-major star — could’ve asked for.
“This feeling right here, there’s nothing that compares to it,” Hale said on the court after his team won the Big South tournament championship on Sunday. “I won one last year at my D2, but now to play on a national stage, the big tournament where everybody is watching, it just means so much more.
“I’m happy for my guys. I’m happy this is my (last) year, and I get to experience this.”
But then, on Thursday afternoon, Hale’s career ended. He didn’t get to deliver a teary-eyed speech in a postgame locker room, nor did he get to hoist a national championship trophy.
Instead, the NCAA announced that its end-of-year men’s basketball tournament was canceled due to the ongoing threat of coronavirus (COVID-19). His career, thus, ended in a bizarre limbo.
He was a winner, certainly.
But he was a winner who still had more basketball to play.
Hale’s path to Winthrop
Before Hale could accept his Tournament MVP award last Sunday, after the Eagles were crowned Big South champions, Josh Ferguson stopped him.
“OK D-2!” Ferguson yelled. The team’s lone senior, who had been at Winthrop four years and had gone to the NCAA tournament in 2017, dapped Hale up.
“D-2” was a name Hale embraced since arriving on Winthrop’s campus. It was his way of owning and making light of being overlooked in the past.
“I’ve been underrated my whole life,” Hale told The Herald before what would be his team’s last practice of the 2019-20 season. “I was really small, but I could really shoot the basketball. I could score, but people didn’t really take me seriously.”
By “people,” Hale means everyone outside (1) his family — who would play till nightfall, scraping their knees on a full concrete court in their backyard — and (2) the frequenters of the Bronson Athletics Club, where some of the best hoop in Kalamazoo is played. Hale said he trained at The Bronson with his uncle, Anthony Stuckey, “every day” as a teenager.
You had to be 15 years old to play pickup with the “older guys,” Hale said — but his two older brothers, H’Ian and Herschal, vouched for Hale back when he was 11.
“I still look back at videos from Facebook from that gym,” Hale said. “I was so small playing against my brothers, who used to torch me out there. But once I finally got to about 5-10, 5-11, all that stopped, and I was finally able to compete with them.”
Hale was always playing above his age and was outsized because of it. And when he wasn’t, he was playing on the same high school team as other college prospects — like Devon Daniels, who’s at N.C. State now, and Isaiah Livers, who was Mr. Basketball in Michigan in 2017.
To not be overshadowed, he said, Hale picked up a few habits — one of which was picking up full court on defense.
“That’s just kind of how I grew up,” Hale said. “I’ve always played with a chip on my shoulder.”
Chandler Vaudrin, who also rose from the D2 ranks, hosted Hale on Hale’s recruiting visit to Winthrop. The two got close quickly, Vaudrin said, because they could relate with each other’s story so well.
Vaudrin liked him despite the fact that Hale picked Vaudrin up full court after every bucket during the open gym on Hale’s official visit.
“I was like, ‘Man, that was nice,’” Vaudrin said he told Hale after that first open gym. Vaudrin then laughed. “‘But you gotta be tired.’”
Hale’s start at Winthrop
Hale said he learned a lot in his only season at Winthrop.
“I had led the conference in steals last year in D2, but it wasn’t the right way,” Hale said. “I wasn’t playing the right way. I was kind of lackadaisical, kind of shooting the gaps for steals and just not playing solid defense. And when I came here, they really taught me to just lock down on defense.
“I think I really needed that.”
Hale soon carved out a role for himself. In his graduate transfer season, Hale started 31 of 32 games played, and he ended the season as the team’s leading scorer, averaging 13.9 points per game. He became known for being willing to shoot anything and everything.
When asked about one of Hale’s most memorable shots of the season — one where he collected an offensive rebound, sprinted out to the 3-point line and nailed a fadeaway three to force an unexpected overtime against Gardner-Webb at home — Vaudrin laughed.
“Like, he does that in practice and gets yelled at for shooting it,” Vaudrin said after the game.
Throughout the Big South tournament, too, Hale was Winthrop’s engine. He scored 59 points in his team’s three-game run.
Right after he accepted Big South Tournament MVP, in fact, Ferguson told The Herald that Hale being merely an honorable mention in the Big South’s end-of-year awards was a sign of “disrespect” toward the team.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Ferguson said. “It’s a lot of disrespect, but we roll with that.”
Hale’s ending
Perhaps the last time Hale put on his Winthrop practice jersey was on Wednesday evening in the Coliseum. He wore a headband and an undershirt with his practice jersey. He spent the scrimmage portion of practice attacking the rim and being the vocal leader he always had been.
When Josh Corbin didn’t know where to go on a play, he’d quietly direct him.
When DJ Burns fouled, Hale got in the freshman’s face: “C’mon, DJ, we’re going to need you in the tournament!”
The Herald couldn’t reach Hale or any of Winthrop’s players or coaches for comment after the NCAA canceled its tournament. (Winthrop coach Pat Kelsey, in reaction to the initial news that there would be no fans in attendance in the postseason, told The Herald that he was confident that the officials were making the best choices for the safety of the college athletes.)
At the end of Wednesday’s practice, when Kelsey gathered his players for a final huddle and told them that the tournament would be played without fans, players were despondent.
Hale, specifically, didn’t move. It looked as if he couldn’t process what was going on.
After all, he’d excelled at every level and stage he was given a chance to play at. He was looking forward to doing that again next week with the world watching him and his team — this time in Omaha, Nebraska, or Greensboro, North Carolina, or Spokane, Washington — or wherever Winthrop, a projected 16-seed, was sent to play.
Hale walked out of the Coliseum frustrated on Wednesday, but he likely didn’t know he was exiting the last practice of his college basketball career.
He ended as a two-time conference tournament MVP — once at the D2 level, once at D1. He ended his career with two conference championships. He took advantage of his only chance to make it to the NCAA tournament, where he always wanted to be.
But Hale — like Ferguson, Winthrop’s four-year star, and like presumably other seniors around the country who saw their careers cut short on Thursday — didn’t get to end his career on his own terms. He had no chance to cash-in on any sort of closure.
Hale ended his story a winner with more basketball to play — a discombobulating situation made by unprecedented circumstance. And no one’s story deserves to end like that.
This story was originally published March 15, 2020 at 5:06 AM.
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