PirateCrew: Seton Hall Pirates Football & Basketball Recruiting
The definitive source for all PirateCrew news.
By Zack Cziryak
Everyone brings it up to Myles Cale and he understands why, it’s also his favorite moment of his career in a Seton Hall Pirate uniform.
"I was just kind of out there playing basketball. I wasn't thinking. I was just playing off my instincts,” he says of the shot, a sidestep three-pointer after a pump fake sent his defender flying that propelled Seton Hall to an 84-83 victory over the University of Kentucky at Madison Square Garden in New York City on Dec. 18, 2018.
Seton Hall had thought they had a win against the Wildcats wrapped up in regulation before a halfcourt buzzer beater from Keldon Johnson with less than two seconds forced the extra period. Pirate players and fans went from a state of euphoria to having their jaws dropped to the floor in a manner of seconds.
“That huddle was actually very quiet,” Cale said of the stoppage between regulation and overtime. “I mean, [Head Coach Kevin Willard] was trying to talk to us, but it was really going in one ear and out the other. We were just all looking at each other in shock. We didn't know what to think right there. We were looking [at each other] like we just messed up, that was our only opportunity."
The Hall would make the most of the overtime though, outscoring Kentucky by a single point in the period, with no bigger basket than Cale’s three-pointer from the right elbow that sealed a victory over the then-#9 ranked team in the country in the Mecca of Basketball. It was a highlight win for the program and shot for Cale, who insists on and can still recall the team basketball that led to each when asked about it nearly four years and one pandemic-interrupted career later.
"The ball came around the whole circle. Everybody did like a ball fake. Ant Nelson drove to the basket on the left side, he passed it up to Quincy McKnight, and he was in the left corner, he pump-faked. He took and he passed it to Taurean Thompson who was at the top of the key. And then he did a pump-fake and then he did a one-two and then he passed it to me and I did one more pump-fake and then that's when I shot the shot. It was just good basketball I would say right there."
Did the then-sophomore know the shot was going in when it left his hand?
"Never a doubt,” he said. “I knew it was good the whole time. I was like, 'Oh yeah, that felt good right there.'”
There is much to feel good about if you’re Myles Cale, who officially departed Seton Hall after a COVID-19-extended five-year career that left him with Seton Hall’s record for all-time wins at 98 and games played at 154. A four-year starter, he finished 33rd all-time in points scored in program history with 1,270, won a bronze medal in the 2019 Pan American games in Lima, Peru, played in three NCAA Tournaments and won a Big East regular season championship in 2020 before the pandemic derailed the program’s most promising season in years.
The Middletown, Del.-native committed to the Pirates the day after the team’s 2016 Big East Tournament Championship victory over Villanova and through the recruitment of then-Assistant Coach Fred Hill. While the run to the championship in the arena he would later vanquish one of the sport’s more storied programs helped propel his decision, it was perhaps seeing the team in action outside the painted lines more than the victories that sealed it for him.
"I took my official visit during the 2016 Big East Tournament, and I actually got to experience that,” he said. “I got to see them win game after game all the way up into the championship, and then they won the championship. So, in my mind, I'm like, 'Oh yeah, I've got to come to this school ... this is where I want to be.’ And it wasn't even because they won. It was because I got to see the relationships they had with each other. It was really like a brotherhood and a family. I was in the locker room, and I could tell they really loved each other. Everything was so funny, we used to laugh at everything. It was just a great spirit.”
