The summer basketball camp is a mainstay for both youngsters hoping to improve their skills and one day play in the NCAA tournaments as well as for coaches and college athletes who run the camps and get to work with future stars.
So it’s worth marking the death the other day of an influential figure in college basketball who created one of the first basketball camps and trained hundreds of schoolboy athletes in this state.
He was Fred McCall, a native of Denver in Gaston County and a three-sport star at Lenoir Rhyne College before World War II. By the 1950s he was coaching at what was then Campbell Junior College in Buies Creek, N.C.
In 1956 he and legendary Wake Forest Coach “Bones” McKinney started the Campbell Basketball Camp with two one-week sessions for aspiring roundballers. It became the place where everyone with hoop hopes wanted to go in the 1960s. His staffers included such famous players as Bob Cousy and UCLA Coach John Wooden, notes the N&O’s Lorenzo Perez in this story.
I spent a week in his care in the summer of 1962 during a time when I naively hoped to play basketball for the Davidson Wildcats after finishing high school a few years later. My hopes were far grander than my talent, as I soon discovered, but at Campbell Basketball Camp – known to most of us as Fred McCall’s Camp – I learned a lot about basketball and how it should be played. One of the most impressive coaches there was Press Maravich, whose then-14-year-old son Pete was hanging around the camp and making fools of much bigger players with his ball-handling skills and his cocky attitude. I learned a lot from Fred McCall, including the value of realistic assessments about one’s own talent.
McCall’s death marks another loss to the Carolina cultural landscape. He was an excellent coach (221-104 lifetime at Campbell) and, incidentally, the father of State Health Director Leah Devlin.
