Catalina's Paddley joins Tucson's rare 50-point club
At halftime of Friday’s Catalina-Thatcher boys basketball game, Catalina scorekeeper Mike Davidson turned the page back to the Trojans’ Wednesday game at Douglas.
“Look at that,” he said pointing to the name Hunter Paddley. “Look at all those 2s and 3s. That’s 52 points.”
Davidson recounted the many 2s and 3s and all the free throws.
“That’s 26 points in the first half and 26 in the second half,” he said. “Quite a night.”
On Wednesday at Douglas, Catalina sophomore guard Paddley, who is probably 5-foot-7-inches and 130 pounds, became the eighth boys basketball player in Tucson history to score 50 or more points.
None were more unlikely.
“Hunter sat out last year to concentrate on academics, but the more I saw him in the gym with the junior varsity, the more I liked him,” said Catalina coach Eric Peterson, a Salpointe Catholic grad who coached Globe to the 2002 state championship game. “He’s come so far; we’re a very young program, rebuilding the culture, but what Hunter has done is encouraging.”
So far this season, Paddley has scored 34 against Sahuarita and 26 against Rincon/University, one of Tucson’s top teams. He scored 73 over a three-game tournament in Benson.
But 52? It wasn’t that he shot to excess; Paddley made 16 of his 28 field-goal attempts.
“Hunter’s got a lot of room to grow,” Peterson said. “He’ll get stronger, work on his pull-up jumper, work on everything. He’s like everyone on our team.”
On Friday, Catalina didn’t even score 52 as a team. It lost 58-28 to Thatcher. Paddley, a Native American, was limited to 14.
Here’s the list of Tucson’s other 50-point scorers, to which Paddley now belongs:
58: Aromeo Grigsby, Pueblo, 2003
57: Anthony Lever-Pedroza, CDO, 1997
54: Smiley Contreras, Pueblo, 2001
53: George Walls, Salpointe, 1970
53: Mark Jung, CDO, 1978
50: Jim Pyers, Santa Rita, 1979
50: Sammy Wade, Pueblo, 1998
What happened to those who preceded Paddley? You name it.
Grigsby, whose record has endured for a dozen years, played basketball at Division III Simpson College in Iowa, earned a degree in biology and has since played professionally in Lorrach, Germany, where he is now a teacher.
Wade, former road manager for Lil Wayne, is now in the rap music industry.
Jung, who played at Colorado State, is an insurance executive in Tucson. Walls, who played at Denver, has worked extensively for TUSD. Lever-Pedroza, son of former NBA All-Star Fat Lever, who played at Oregon, runs his own promotion and marketing company in Mexico and in Phoenix.
