PJ Hairston headed to Hargrave Military Academy

I ran into PJ Hairston, the outstanding young HS basketball player(a future McDonald’s All-American), this afternoon while I was eating my fish sandwich, at the McDonalds’s up on Summit Avenue and PJ landed a bombshell on me and here is what he had to say and this is what we learned for the first time today:

PJ Hairston(Dudley HS), who has committed to play basketball for Coach Roy Williams at the University of North Carolina in the fall of 2011, will complete his senior season of high school at Hargrave Military Academy in Chatham, Virginia….

Hairston will play for the advanced prep team at Hargrave this fall and will leave for Chatham, Virginia in August. PJ will enroll at Hargrave and he will joined there by CJ Barksdale from GW Danville HS and by the Dezmine Wells kid from Word of God in Raleigh, the same Word of God team that produced John Wall and CJ Leslie…There are other players that are headed to Hargrave, so Chatham, Virginia should be buzzing next season…..

PJ is still on target to enter the University of North Carolina the following fall(2011) and he plans on playing a lot of basketball this upcoming summer with his AAU team….I believe PJ was with the CP3 team last summer…

We wish him the best as he heads toward Virginia and Hargrave and he will be missed by the fans here in Guilford County next season….PJ is one of the nicest kids you will ever meet and he is just that, a kid who is genuine and he has always been like a member of our Guilford County basketball family….

We are really gonna miss this kid and we selfishly wish he would change his mind and stay with us here in Greensboro, but I doubt he will stick around, he feels it is time to spread his wings and fly, and I told him today that I had always thought that this might happen one day, but PJ really enjoyed being with his teammates and friends at Dudley, but now the time has come to move on to a bigger stage….

Good luck to PJ as he heads up Highway 29 North just past Danville and on to Hargrave Military in Chatham, Virginia…..Thanks for the memories here locally and PJ Hairston, was without a doubt, one of the best post-game interviews you would ever hear from a high school kid….He was one of the best, all the way around…..

We have also been hearing this Spring that Jaquel Richmond, the freshman guard for the Dudley Panthers will be transferring to United Faith in Charlotte for next season. Richmond had the monster dunk coming down the left baseline in the second half of game one versus Grimsley last season, that might just have been the dunk of the year in Guilford County…..

Dudley will look a lot different in 2010/2011 as the Panthers lose Brennan Wyatt, Dominique Byrd, Stephon Redd and Desean Manuel all to graduation and now Hairston and Manuel are looking to transfer this fall….Reggie Dillard, Brandon Clyburn, DJ Altson, Sam Hunt, and Anthony Hamlett are among those that will be back, but the lineup will have a new look as we head toward 2010/2011…..

Coaches Price, Seagraves, Partee and James will keep the Panthers pushing and on pace to end up in the right place, at the right time……….

28 thoughts on “PJ Hairston headed to Hargrave Military Academy

  1. That is a head scratcher. I went to Hargrave after graduating from high school because I didn’t have a high SAT score. When I played football at Hargrave the only athletes that went to school there either had academic problems, SAT problems or discipline problems. I wonder which problem does PJ have.
    Good luck young man.

  2. Maybe a chance to work on Academics, SAT and etc….

    But, in the modern-day scheme of things,it sounds like Hargrave is loading up for some big-time basketball on that Advanced Prep team with PJ coming in along with Barksdale, the Wells kid and several others…

    Look for Hargrave to step up their schedule with these kids on board and it should end up putting Hargrave on the National Basketball map.

    I would love to see a meeting with Oak Hill or Oak Ridge facing Hargrave next year if that can be worked out…..The Hargrave Advanced Prep team should make some noise on the National Basketball scene…..They ought to work out a deal to play Westchester or Greensboro Day at the Greensboro Coliseum Special Events Center….It would sell some seats and what about bringing these guys in for the MLK Day Games?????

    Westchester and GDS re-class, so I see no reason why they couldn’t meet Hargrave and the same could be said for Norfolk Christian, the team with McAdoo on it……McAdoo will be a fifth-year HS senior next year…..

  3. Very surprising since he was at Dudley with the Academy. I thought the Academy could have helped. Hopefully he fulfills whatever he needs. he’s a special talent on the court. Good luck to him. Nice young man.

  4. Good luck PJ! I agree Andy, he is one of the nicest kids you will ever meet. He has been very humble over the years. Wish him well. Don’t feel sorry for Dudley, they always have players. Now Mr. Price has to coach.(lol)

  5. It was just a matter of time before Dudley lost some players. Kids transfer all of the time and this was bound to catch up to them They have been able to attract kids from other districts so it is only fair that some of their own leave as well. They now will feel how disruptive it is to have star players transfer. Good luck to PJ, but it would have been nice to see an athlete finish up at his local school.

  6. hmmm. surprised he did not end up @ orma. there may be more to this than meets the eye. will he be the last of the transfers? does that mean that pinson will be @ dudley to take his place @ the academy?

  7. Someone had come on here a couple of times earlier saying they were Krechaun Williams from Grimsley and that they were headed to Greensboro Day School and I am not sure what is up with that….. Word in today that Joseph Uchebo from Oak Ridge is staying at Oak Ridge and is not headed back to Mount Zion in Durham… He is the young man that is 6’10/6’11 and he can handle the ball like a point guard/point forward….

    Uchebo reamaining at ORMA, but no confirmation on Krechaun Williams going to Greensboro Day School……We need to hear it from him or his coach first and then it is confirmed…..

    We had Uchebo at Word of God in one of our previous posts and again he was at Mount Zion in Durham and not at Word of God in Raleigh and the last word we had was that Theo Pinson was considering Westchester and ORMA and we should know more on this decision in the next couple of days…..Theo will not be at Dudley…..

  8. We all wish PJ the best he is a great athlete.

    Since colleges are looking for student athletes don’t be surprised if you see
    more and more area high profile athletes going this same route. There will be others
    who can do it on the field or court but not in the classroom. They will be going off to Jr. Colleges to improve their grades so they can hopefully go on to the college that originally
    offered them a scholarship. This happens all the time some move on and some are never heard from again. The NCAA have raised the bar and grades are now a top priority.

  9. Hargrave offers a lot of discipline too and that will be a good thing that will help as you make the adjustment from high school to college…..Scout.com was reporting this news last night….I wonder where they got the news from, I didn’t see their guy up at the McDonald’s on Summit Avenue yesterday afternoon….(Maybe he was there, I don’t know, sometimes they can slip by you at the drive-thru…..)

  10. I guess the Fairplay policy put in Guilford Co. Schools stopped Pinson from going to Dudley. I now have to believe that it is either Private school or Southeast for him.

  11. PJ was not in the academy. Please know before speaking. This was established on this site months ago.

    Good Luck PJ

  12. it looks like the news and record won’t give you any props on this story but gives it to some recruiting web site. Remember we know where it first was reported which was greensboro sports . com, good post andy

  13. To Mike, didn’t say he was. Said he was at Dudley WITH the Academy, not IN the Academy. Surprised he was not in the Academy. Reading comprehension partner.

  14. Dale Fulton had a comment earlier today that got knocked out since we are doing part of this work outside today and it is hard to see with the glare, but Dale was saying maybe PJ got tired of the Academy or the Dudley system and he was ready to move on or it was time to move on….

  15. Mike, I would like to ask you a question, since you seem to have all the answers. If PJ isn’t in the Academy at Dudley, WHY IS HE AT DUDLEY ??

  16. I’ve got to think that what difference does it make now that PJ is moving on to Hargrave? Maybe he was in the Academy and his parents are better prepared to know where he was/is than of our readers and the schools know why students are in the schools they are in and which ones they are supposed to be in….

    The issue seems to be that PJ is headed to Hargrave and not anything about why PJ was going to Dudley……All of that is for the school officials and for his parents to handle….

    Again, good luck to the kid and it was great to have a chance to watch him play basketball while he was at Dudley……

    We are the viewers and not the ones who control the school system or the teams….The teachers teach and the ooaches don’t come on here to this site per say, because they are too busy coaching their teams and trying to get all their kids ready for next season….

    We can’t worry about what was going on over at such and such a school last year, it ti time to hit the off-seaason and get ready for next year…..

    Everybody(the seniors) are gone and it is time to start getting ready for the Class of 2010/2011…..

    As our good friend Booker T. Huffman would say, “Can You Dig It”?????

  17. now, andy. it matters because there is a double standard for abiding by the rules in guilford county. you know it, i know it, and everyone knows it; but no one will admit it!!! please post this, as we all need to discuss it. you censured my post the other day, so come on let me speak.. i know it’s your board, but this is important.

  18. I’m not sure the double-standard still works after all that Mo Green has done since he took over the Guilford County Schools…..

  19. come on, Andy. There’s one case right here in this thread that continued on for a year. I know 7 families that are scamming the system right this very minute, and there’s no need to name them ’cause they are not high profile athletes. We are paying a lot of money to admin staff to ‘police” a system that should be based on integrity anyway. GCS needs to quit patting themselves on the back for their “fair play” program that really copied Charlotte’s—if they were enrolled in college, they’d be kicked out for plagiarism, since they only changed the name a little bit to prevent their putting Fair Play in quotes. LOL–

  20. I never thought this would happen, but I agree with Dale. People will find whatever loophole there is to exploit it. All a school has to do is offer a class that nobody else has. Now you have a reason to be able to get kids in that school. The ‘Fair Play’ nonsense basically was implemented to dismantle Northern (which needed to be done), but that is about all it did. It would be nice for the Fair Play commission to list the incidents where they found violations. There should not be any names involved, but it would be nice to know that they are actually doing something other than pushing paper.

  21. BBfan, I don’t know why he is/was at Dudley. Maybe he lived in that district. That would be a novel approach. My comment was with PJ at Dudley I wondered why the Academy might not be a solution to help him. I thought that was part of the purpose of the program. It wasn’t about whether he is or isn’t a part of the Academy now or in the past. I’m glad the kid is doing what he thinks is necessary to prepare himself for the future. If that is Hargrave, so be it. Good for him. No one is slaming the kid. I think most people are happy for him.

  22. BBallfan, not everyone is “hating”. Everyone seems to be happy for PJ. Although I was also surprised to see him transferring. I thought teh academy could have helped him. Maybe they did but he needed something else. Bottom line is he doing what he needs to do. For some of that group over there it’s more convenient to think someone is hating but not the case here. To easy to play that “woe is me” card.

    Dale raises in interesting point. What if every school had an Academy to help attract kids?

  23. PJ is not and never was in the academy. He lived in district his freshman and sophomore year and is now living in Wester Guilford District. He was grandfathered in and allowed to continue t Dudley through the e much bereassignment office. I know his parents and they seem to feel his gpa which is close to 3.0 could be much better in na differnet environment that had a higher level of expectation. I think it is an incredible move by his parents to make sure he is ready for college when he starts next fall.

  24. Pj was not in the academy. The academy is not designed to assist struggling students. It is for honor students who will take AP courses as juniors and attend A&T as seniors.

  25. Listen been there done that Pj has none of those problems jeez its people like you that make this world a horriable place

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