Charlottesville, Va. – Sunday in Charlottesville, the 2021 VHSL Hall of Fame class was inducted.
Included in the festivities, Roanoke sports royalty, if you will--in JJ Redick.
The former Cave Spring, Duke and NBA standout guard has just completed a 15-year NBA career.
Taking into consideration all the big stages the 6-4 sharp-shooter has played on, he admitted that some of his best basketball memories can in found--by retracing his steps back to where it all started, at Cave Spring High School in Roanoke.
”I never would’ve imagined that I would have played basketball as long as I did. And you get to the end of your career and it’s the first time you really look back. I was always a forward-thinker. What is the next thing to accomplish, how can I get better, what haven’t I accomplished ?-- all those things. And when I retired it was really the first time I looked back at my career in its totality. And those four years at Cave Spring were special times, and truthfully they were some of my best basketball moments,” Redick says.
“It did start at Cave Spring and we’re super proud of that. He was a wonderful. When I tell stories to kids that I coach now I don’t talk about how great of a player he was, I talk about how great of a teammate he was to his friends. Instead of transferring to a bigger school or private school or chasing something, he stayed at his home school and he rose the level of the others games and he won a state championship with his best friends,” former Cave Spring coach Billy Hicks explained.
Redick’s senior season was the stuff of legend. Cave Spring played a national level schedule and basically entered the VHSL postseason with a .500 record. Redick returned from a foot injury and the team promptly took down all of the region’s top seeds in succession to advance to the state final four. Redick re-injured his foot in a state-semifinal win, but managed to play in the final. He poured in 43 points on an injured foot, including a record 8 3-pointers. The Knights of coach Billy Hicks won the Group AAA 2002 title over George Wythe.
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