JMU men’s basketball head coach Matt Brady on Friday announced the signing of forward Hari Hall and guard Dante Sterling to national letters of intent to join the program for the 2014-2015 season.
Hall and Sterling are both from the southeast corner of the united states and bring height and athleticism to the Dukes. Hall is a forward hailing from Jacksonville, Fla. Sterling is a shooting guard from Fayetteville, Ga.
Sterling is 6-foot, 5-inches and is an athletic wing who currently attends Fayette County High School near Atlanta. He averaged 12 points per game as a junior while leading his squad in rebounding and serving as one of the team’s more reliable long-distance shooters.
“Dante is a wing with terrific athletic ability,” noted Brady. “He plays for a high school coach in Coach [Andre] Flynn who has put a couple of guys into Division I basketball. We think it’s one of the better programs in the Atlanta area. He was on an AAU team that had three other Division I signees and he went under the radar because of the quality of players on his team. He’s a guy with terrific upside and terrific basketball ability.”
Hall is a 6-foot, 7-inch forward who attends Jean-Ribault High School for his senior season after attending Paxon School for Advanced Studies last year. After not playing scholastically until his junior year, Hall scored 34 points and grabbed five rebounds in his debut game for Paxon against First Coast High School last season. He finished with a season average of 24 points per game.
Brady offered, “Not far from where Juwann James grew up, we think that Hari is a guy who is tremendously under the radar. He didn’t play any AAU basketball except for one weekend in July. We think he’s a mismatched forward. He’s a very difficult matchup at either the small forward or power forward position.”
The signings came as JMU prepares to open a stretch of four games in five days with participation in the NIU Invitational against host Northern Illinois on Friday at 9 p.m.
James Madison is the defending champion of the Colonial Athletic Association under sixth-year head coach matt brady. Sterling and Hall will a squad that ranks, by average class year, as the youngest team in the country in Division I this season.