“Bet On Yourself”: Inside Keyshawn Hall’s Long Road to Glory

Suffice it to say, Hall’s training regimen was a bit different than it was for basketball. Fortnite was a sedentary pursuit, requiring long hours powered by eating loads of junk food.

“Mostly chips,” Hall says, laughing at the recollection. “Bag and bags of chips. That’s where I went wrong. Chips are potatoes. Those stay with you. So for a month, all I did was eat and stay up all night, sometimes until three or five in the morning.”

Hall’s basketball sabbatical and flight of Fortnite fancy took a toll. The formerly lean, 6-foot-7 multi-position player ballooned to 290 pounds. It’s impossible to say whether Hall could have become a pro gamer, but one thing is certain — with his weight rocketing upward, playing basketball beyond the local rec league was out of the question.

That’s exactly the message Hall’s father presented to him one day when it looked like his son might eat and video game himself into oblivion.

It’s safe to say the fatherly advice Hall received turned his life around. It was enough to get him out of his bedroom and back on the basketball court. And now, more than four years later, Hall is living his original dream — to become a central figure on a team that is competing to play in the NCAA Tournament. After three previous college stops, Hall is the leading scorer and rebounder on an Auburn team that, even minus former coach Bruce Pearl, who last fall retired and turned the program over to his son Steven, is battling for position in the rugged Southeastern Conference. 

In Hall’s defense, powerful forces had combined to suppress his basketball ambitions. The pandemic forced millions around the nation to shelter in place. But even before that, recruiters had stayed away from Hall’s games at Cleveland Heights High School. Making matters worse, he played on an AAU team, the Mid-Ohio Pumas, that didn’t travel the national circuit. Not many college coaches had seen Hall play. 

“It wasn’t giving me much motivation to fight,” Hall says. “But my dad talked me into giving it one more try.”

The C2K Ohio AAU team floated Hall a lifeline, giving him a chance to travel the country and play in significant tournaments. A postgraduate season in Colorado gave him another opportunity to showcase his talent.

Hall’s break came in the spring of 2021 at an AAU tournament in Atlanta. Though he was still on the hefty side, he played point guard for C2K. The best advice he received early in his basketball career came from his brother Arroyal, who convinced Hall he needed to focus on ballhandling. He spent hours working on dribbling drills, and he studied tape of Allen Iverson’s smooth handle and passing ability. When Hall finally hit the national AAU circuit, he might have looked like a three-story apartment building with limbs, but he had ball skills.

That stood out to Tony Skinn, then an Ohio State assistant coach who would one day become head coach at George Mason, Hall’s second stop on his four-college journey. 

“You’re talking 6-7, 290 pounds and he played the point,” Skinn says. “He was doing everything. I walked away impressed and not thinking anything of it. I may have even called a few guys at a lower level (of Division I) and said, ‘You may want to take a chance on this kid. He’s big-bodied but he gets some stuff done. It’s not as if he’s 6-3, 6-4. He’s still 6-7 and I think he can play the four or five for you.’ And that was that.”

The show Hall put on in Atlanta finally woke up recruiters. Within a month he was holding 20 scholarship offers, and his year at Denver Prep, during which he averaged 24 points, 5 rebounds and 5 assists, enhanced his reputation and increased his list of suitors.

Before Denver Prep, Hall served short stints at a prep school in Florida and The Skills Factory in Atlanta. The latter school is where Brandon Chappell, now an Arizona assistant but then working for UNLV, first saw Hall and thought he would be a good fit for head coach Kevin Kruger, then entering his second season.

“Just the way he moved his feet and his ballhandling skills,” Chappell says. “Those didn’t match what a guy that size is supposed to be. But the best thing was his character. I know he’s bounced around a lot, but he’s always been a high-character kid, competitive and super motivated. You can’t coach that.”

Hall’s final choice of schools came down to Saint Mary’s and UNLV, and in large part because of the relationship he had built with Chappell, Hall chose the latter. Chappell was around during most of the summer of 2022 to work with Hall, but when he had a chance to join then-Texas coach Chris Beard’s staff, he took it.

Hall was sad to see Chappell go, but understood it was a business decision. Hall has since gone on to make a few of those. His season at UNLV didn’t turn out quite the way he wanted, but it wasn’t a bust, either. Though he played in just 17 games and averaged 10.8 minutes, he scored 10 or more points four times, including a 19-point effort against Utah State, part of a three-game stretch in which he scored 39 points in 64 minutes and shot 66.7 percent.

Hall made the most of his time in Las Vegas, regardless of whether he played.

“Every day, I ran a mile and a half,” Hall says. “After games I didn’t play, I ran — immediately after the game. I changed my diet. I only ate two times a day — at noon and 6 p.m.  I took out carbs, like bread and snacks and chips. It was hard, but I needed to break myself down in order to build myself back up.”

After the season, with Hall, his weight down to 250 pounds, Hall decided to enter the portal. The coach at Hall’s next stop was already familiar with him.

In the spring of 2023, Skinn was an assistant to Kevin Willard at Maryland. When he saw Hall had entered the portal, he put him on his list of possible recruits. But then Skinn was hired to be the head coach at George Mason, his alma mater. If he had questions about Hall’s ability to compete in the Big Ten, he had zero concerns whether Hall was good enough for the Atlantic 10.

In his lone season with the Patriots, Hall finished fourth in the league in scoring (18.1). Hall had found his comfort zone, but in the spring of 2024, he broke out of it when he again entered the portal and signed with UCF. “The A-10 was a great league, and I got great confidence playing in it,” Hall says. “But I knew I could play at an even higher level.”

That higher level turned out to be the Big 12, then rated the No. 1 conference in the country. Just as he had at George Mason, Hall made an impact at UCF, but like his other two seasons, his stay was short-lived. He started 33 games — 31 in the regular season and two in the Big 12 tournament — leading the Big 12 in scoring (18.8 points per game) and averaging a team-best 7.1 rebounds while earning second-team all-conference and all-conference newcomer honors. 

But even before the Knights’ season was over, Hall was on the move again. The Knights accepted a bid to the College Basketball Crown, but Hall chose not to participate, instead entering the portal. Six other UCF players left along with him, but Hall’s incentive to hit the bricks was mind-boggling. Sources claimed he was being offered NIL money in the $2.5 million range, an up-front arrangement that wouldn’t count against the $20.8 million revenue-sharing cap installed after the NCAA v. House Settlement.

Late last March, Auburn was about 45 minutes away from leaving for a Sweet Sixteen game against Michigan when Auburn assistant coach and offensive coordinator Mike Burgomaster found out Hall entered the portal. Burgomaster couldn’t dial Hall’s number fast enough.

“We had watched him a great deal when he was at George Mason,” Burgomaster says, “because he was really intriguing — a 6-foot-7 combo forward who could do a lot of different things. And he was impressed with us. He had never been to the NCAA Tournament, and here we were, preparing for a Sweet Sixteen game as a No. 1 seed, reaching out to him. It meant a lot to him.”

After the season he just completed, Hall, then down to a lean-and-mean 225 pounds, had his pick of schools. His final five were Kentucky, Arkansas, Kansas, LSU and Auburn. Eventually he trimmed the list to Kansas and Auburn. The Tigers were able to land him because Hall wanted to play for then-coach Bruce Pearl. When Pearl abruptly retired before this season began and handed the program to his son, Steven, Hall was stunned and disappointed. But Bruce Pearl talked to Hall and his parents, and Steven Pearl assured Hall his role wouldn’t change. The Auburn staff envisioned Hall filling the hybrid four-man spot once played by Chuma Okeke, JT Thor, Jabari Smith and Johni Broome.

“Keyshawn (is in the) mold of all those guys,” Steven Pearl said. “The one area Keyshawn is probably ahead of all those guys is his ability to put the ball on the floor. He can really get to the rim and create contact and score through contact. He’s really quick, really versatile… an interesting combination of all four of those guys.”

Hall has lived up to those expectations. Since SEC play began, he has been gaining ground on Alabama’s Labaron Philon, the presumed favorite to win the league’s Player of the Year Award. Hall is second in the league in scoring (20.8) and seventh in rebounding (7.1), the only player in the league toro rank in the top 10 in both categories. He’s 10^th in shooting percentage (47.4) and leads the nation in made free throws (159) and is fourth in free -throws attempted (185). When Hall decides he wants to get to the rim, there isn’t much defenders can do to stop him.

Though Burgomaster is Auburn’s offensive guru, he takes no credit for what Hall has done so far, save for letting him play with a different mindset. “The one thing we’ve done to help him is he hasn’t just had the ball in his hands and had to go figure it out like he had at other places,” Burgomaster says. “We’ve tried to take that burden off him, getting him cleaner and more consistent looks. We try to give a decent amount of offensive freedom.”

Looking back on his career from those lonely nights playing Fortnite in his room to now, Hall succinctly sums up the experience in the hope others could follow similar paths, no matter how winding they might become.

“Three words,” Hall says. “Bet on yourself. I’ve bet on myself through my whole journey, even when people didn’t believe in me. I just needed an opportunity, somebody to have confidence in me and let me do me.”