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Belgreen's Mayberry headed to Huntingdon on hoops scholarship

Jacob Mayberry remembers exactly how it felt.

As a middle-school student at Russellville, Mayberry didn’t make the cut when he tried out for the seventh-grade basketball team. And it stung. But it also forced him to take a hard, honest look at the player he was and the player he badly wanted to become.

“It made me mad,” Mayberry said, “but I should have got cut. I knew I wasn’t good. Getting cut motivated me. It made me want to prove to people that I could play.

“That’s when I started to get better.”

With school ball out of the picture for at least a year, Mayberry signed up to play in the Muscle Shoals rec league. After transferring to Belgreen as an eighth-grader, Mayberry had to sit out a year before he could suit up for the Bulldogs, so he returned to the rec league for another go-round.

It was there in Muscle Shoals where Mayberry, an old-school point guard with handles and quickness but limited shooting range, crossed paths with former Coffee High School star and hoops whisperer Rayfield Ragland, who was coaching another team in the same league. Already eager to dedicate himself to the game, Mayberry’s development as a player kicked into overdrive during regular training sessions with Ragland.

One of Mayberry’s chief goals was to address what he saw as his most glaring deficiency.

“My shooting. I couldn’t shoot at all,” Mayberry said. “I was a good ball-handler, and I could play off the dribble, but I wasn’t a good shooter.”

Mayberry improved his stroke under Ragland’s tutelage, but he never became a knock-down three-point shooter—not even while running the point the past two seasons for Bulldog teams that went 47-15 and made back-to-back trips to Hanceville. He did, however, develop a reliable mid-range jumper, one he could stop on a dime and fire with accuracy anywhere between 12 and 17 feet from the basket.

The pull-up J became a signature shot for Mayberry, who valued it most of all for the element of surprise (and the cleaner looks) it often provided.

“When somebody’s a catch-and-shoot guy,” Mayberry said, “you usually know who those guys are, and you can put a hand in their face. But if you’re driving in and pulling up off the dribble in the mid-range, it’s kind of hard for them to stop and get a hand up. They never know when you’re gonna pull up and shoot it.”

That patented mid-range shot was on full display early this spring when Mayberry and fellow Belgreen senior Eli Hiser attended a try-out—arranged for them by Bulldog coach Clint Isbell—at Huntingdon College, a Division III program in Montgomery. Mayberry, who had previously taken part in a summer hoops camp at Huntingdon prior to his senior year, made a strong impression this time around on head coach Caleb Kimbrough while playing five-on-five with current Hawks players.

“I did not do good at all starting out,” Mayberry said. “We had been doing baseball stuff at Belgreen for two or three weeks, so I hadn’t been shooting much. But after a while I finally got into a rhythm and made a few plays. I started getting back into it and doing really good.

“It’s a whole lot different than high school ball.”

At 6’1 and roughly 150 pounds, Mayberry is slight of build but wiry, cat-quick and athletic. The sheer size of players at the next level [“I was only bigger than one or two kids on the team,” he said] threw him for a bit of a loop, but by the latter stages of the scrimmage he was more than holding his own. He got on a scoring roll during one hot stretch, sinking several of those mid-range jumpers and even tossing in a handful of threes.

One particular play stands out in his memory, though.

“There was this one kid who was pretty good, one of the best on the team,” Mayberry said. “I don’t think he thought I was that good, but I got hot and kept scoring, and we went at it for a while. There was one play everybody went crazy on. I’m sure Eli remembers it, too. I got a steal and got out on a fast break, and that guy tried to swat it up off the backboard, but I did like an up-and-under reverse layup, and everybody went crazy.

“It was pretty cool.”

As Mayberry, accompanied down to Montgomery by his father, Anthony, and his grandfather, Freddy Hall, was getting ready to head back home after the workout, Kimbrough came over for a chat.

“He was talking to my dad and grandpa,” Mayberry said. “He told me he was impressed with what he saw. He told me I could play a little bit, and he wanted me to come down and play for them.”

Mayberry, who also had offers to play at Spring Hill College in Mobile and Blue Mountain College in Mississippi, had thoroughly enjoyed both his trips to Huntingdon and wasted little time in accepting Kimbrough’s offer. He is set to sign with the Hawks on Tuesday at 2 p.m. in a ceremony at Belgreen. [Hiser will sign with Blue Mountain on Thursday at 1:30 p.m. For full coverage of his signing, see next week’s edition of the Free Press.]

“It was a pretty good feeling,” Mayberry said of getting the offer from Huntingdon. “That’s the one place I liked the best when I went and tried out. To actually hear the coach say those words, you know, I was really happy to hear that.”

Mayberry enjoyed a career year at Belgreen as a senior, averaging 10.4 points per game on 45-percent shooting from the floor. He led the Bulldogs with 110 assists (3.7 per game) and also with 74 steals (2.5 per game). He pulled down 3.7 rebounds per game and shot 62 percent (70-for-112) from the foul line, earning second-team All-County honors from the Free Press for a second straight year.

With Mayberry running the show and setting an aggressive, up-tempo tone on both ends of the floor, Belgreen rolled to a second consecutive area title and also repeated as Franklin County champions. The Bulldogs finished the season 25-6, losing to R.A. Hubbard in the Northwest Regional semifinals.

Mayberry was at his best in some of Belgreen’s biggest games, scoring a career-high 21 points (to go along with five assists and four steals) the day after Christmas in an 81-78 loss to Class 6A Cullman in the Bracy Invitational at Deshler High School. He also put up 18 points in the county semifinals against Phil Campbell (a 58-49 win) on January 20 and then scored 13 points two nights later to help the Bulldogs out-last Red Bay 64-53 in double-overtime in the finals.

As a junior in 2016-17, Mayberry averaged 9.2 points, 4.2 assists and 3.5 rebounds per game while leading Belgreen with 54 steals. He scored a season-high 19 points in the Northwest Regional semifinals against South Lamar.

All in all, not a bad career for a kid who got cut from the team as a seventh-grader at Russellville. That career will now continue at the college level, a goal Mayberry has been pursuing for quite some time.

“Probably ever since I started working with Rayfield,” he said. “I’m pretty excited.”

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