From Deseret News archives:
From Nerf hoopster to Falcon hoop star
Haley Hall has never outgrown her love of playing basketball
Her father thought she might be a cheerleader. Her mom thought she spent so much time playing basketball, she might just get sick of it.
"I grew up thinking girls did cheerleading," said her dad and now her basketball coach, Dorne Hall. "I was kind of a chauvinist. But she loved basketball, and now girls sports have changed so drastically that all the best athletes are playing sports."
From the beginning the Falcons' senior point guard was committed.
"I bought her a Nerf hoop when she was about 3 years old," said her dad, who took on Clearfield High's girls basketball coaching duties when last year's coach resigned this fall. "She'd shoot on that thing for hours."
A basketball player himself, he signed her up for a Junior Jazz league when she was old enough.
"She'd score all the points, but I didn't think that much of it," he said.
It wasn't until she was invited to play on the ninth-grade team as a freshman that dad began to think maybe his little girl had some above-average talent.
"That's when I knew she was pretty good," he said. "Then she scored 20 points in her first game as a freshman. That's when I knew she was really good."
Two traits that make Haley so successful are her commitment and her competitive nature.
"She's crazy competitive," said her dad. "We don't play anything at our house without a fight."
Her mother, Kristin, said, "She's the kind of kid who comes home from basketball practice and goes out and plays basketball. If there is something she hasn't got quite right, she'll go out to our hoop behind our house and work at it until she feels good about it."
She plays so much that at one point, her mother worried she was overdoing it.
"I just kept thinking someday she'll get sick of this," said Kristin. "But she loves basketball. She wants to play; she wants to watch it. She says all the time, 'I just love basketball.' "
Hall's high school career has been very successful. She's a three-time all-state player, and is currently 5A's leading scorer with an average of 21.4 points per game. She's helped the fifth-ranked Falcons to an upset over Layton last week, a team that was unbeaten so far this season.
She scored 35 points in a double-overtime win over Lone Peak, and it was her 3-point shot that forced the game's extra periods. She plays hard every second of every game, no matter what the score, which is what her coaches love about her. They don't have to ask her to leave it on the floor, she wouldn't play any other way.
