Multi-talented Hall ignores the pressure

By Liz Keller

Published: August 15, 2008

Vic Hall came to Charlottesville with quite a football resume. And with all the acclaim, came pressure.
What pressure? Entering his junior year, the versatile Vic Hall isn’t feeling any.
Hall does a little bit of everything for the Cavaliers,  — starts at cornerback, returns punts, and was recently named one of the team’s co-captains along with John Phillips, Cedric Peerman and Clint Sintim. Last year, he was also the holder for kicks.
Despite the many roles he fills, Hall has a calm, cool and collected approach to the game.
“It’s just football,” said Hall, who led UVa cornerbacks last year in tackles. “It’s something that you love to play and have been playing your whole life. So that pressure doesn’t matter.”
A former standout at Gretna High School, as quarterback Hall powered his team to back-to-backstate titles his junior and senior seasons.
But in the middle of his freshman year at Virginia, he was switched to defense. Last year was his first as a starter, and he recorded 58 tackles from his cornerback position. The 5-foot-9, 190-pounder was also fifth in the ACC in punt returns averaging 10.0 yards per return.
“In high school I’d never played defense at all, and to come play defense at a level like this was a big transition,” Hall said. “If you focus and pay attention to detail [the game] eventually [gets easier].”
Virginia coach Al Groh hopes that Hall’s job as a punt returner only gets easier this season.
“He certainly, particularly in a couple of early preseason games when we could really use it, he gave us some of the longest punt returns that we had had in a few years. He definitely sparked us in that respect,” Groh said. “There’s definitely work to be done in that, improvement to be made, and probably more so with his help than with Vic himself.
“Hopefully, we can put together a unit there that has got the disposition and the talent to get him started a little better.”
Last year, Hall racked up 230 yards in punt returns — the most by a Virginia player in three years. In a 44-14 win over Pittsburgh in 2007, Hall finished with a career-high 86 punt return yards and scored the first touchdown of his career on a fake field goal. And he hopes to improve on those numbers in 2008.
“The more you practice on it, the better you get,” Hall said. “I practice just about every day and I feel I’ve gotten better since last year. I feel more comfortable.”
With his work ethic and attention to detail, Hall’s impact on the program remains invaluable.
“He is one of the great workers at practice, during training, totally tuned in and focused in every
meeting,” Groh said. “If he was on an NFL team right now, I am sure the coach would be describing him as the definition as being a real professional. Even though he is doing it from an amateur standpoint, he already goes about his business in that particular way.”