Salisbury QB Hank Webb. Curt Fowler photo.

 

 

By Mike London

Salisbury Post

SALISBURY — With a mop of curly hair a cheerleader would envy and with 170 pounds stretched across a pale, 6-foot-4 frame, it always was easy to underestimate Hank Webb, but he turned in a terrific athletic career for the Salisbury Hornets, especially as a senior.

“People looked at him and just saw this tall, lanky kid,” Salisbury head football coach Clayton Trivett said. “But he was one of the toughest athletes I’ve ever coached.”

Much fiercer and more competitive than he appears at first glance, Webb is the Darrell Misenheimer Award winner for the 2024-25 school year as Rowan County’s Male Athlete of the Year. Webb is the fifth straight male Hornet to be honored, following an impressive train that included Georgia All-American and NFL draft pick Jalon Walker, track state champ Marcus Cook, Catawba football’s Mike Geter and Georgia State football’s Deuce Walker.

“Athlete of the Year was a goal I set for myself,” Webb said. “When I started doing pretty well in the 7-on-7 football scrimmages in the summer and knew I would be the starting quarterback, I knew there was at least a chance it might happen, and it did. There was a lot of work that went into it, but this means a lot.”

Like Geter, Webb is a throwback to earlier eras, excelling in the three traditional team sports of football, basketball and baseball.

He was the quarterback, kicker and punter for Salisbury’s football conference champs. He was a starting forward for the Hornets’ basketball conference champs, a team that was good enough to challenge Reidsville in the fourth round of the 2A state playoffs. On the baseball field, he was a line-drive hitter and a standout pitcher, who also could play first base, third base or left field

“Hank had a better baseball season than people realize because we didn’t win a lot of games,” Salisbury coach Carson Herndon said. “He was tough on the mound, threw well, had an ERA under 3.00, but we kicked it around some behind him.”

Added Webb, “We all wanted to win more baseball games than we did, especially senior year, but you try to control what you can control and live with that what happens. I was playing with best friends and playing for coaches I respected, so it was still a positive season.”

Webb was the Central Carolina Conference’s Male Athlete of the Year, a league that included several serious contenders for the award — North Rowan’s Jeremiah Alford and KaMahri Feamster, as well as Webb’s five-sport buddy Jackson Sparger.

Webb and his parents (Billy and Scotti) believe he got a head-start athletically by virtue of having an older brother, Will, who was an excellent athlete. Hank tagged along.

Will played numerous sports at the high school level and was the Rowan County Soccer Player of the Year in the fall of 2021.

Will’s circle of friends growing up included a super-athlete, Vance Honeycutt, who was quicker than everyone else even as a kid, but young Hank was able to keep up with his brother and the older boys, so he was welcome in their games.

By the time Hank was in Tee-ball, he was standing out, a little more coordinated, a little more experienced and confident than the others when he started playing with boys his own age.

“My favorite sport growing up definitely was basketball,” Webb said. “That was the sport where I thought I had a chance to be really good.”

Webb made the Salisbury varsity basketball team as a freshman, no small accomplishment on a team that had athletes such as Cam Stout and Juke Harris. Hank’s older brother was a senior reserve for those 2021-22 Hornets, but Hank got quite a bit more playing time, and Will knew his brother would surpass him in time.

As the years went by in basketball, Webb showed he could shoot and rebound. He settled in as something less than a star, but as an important role player for the Hornets for head coaches Bryan Withers, and then Albert Perkins. Perkins coached Webb as a junior and senior.

Webb scored 564 career points for basketball teams that went 95-19 and won a lot of playoff games and championships.

“Hank is going to be a hard guy for us to replace,” Perkins said. “He relished his role on our basketball team as an all-purpose player. He realized there would be nights when he would score two points, and there would be nights when he would score 12, but how may shots he got never changed his approach to defense, passing, rebounding and the intangibles. He became a much more confident ball-handler as a senior and that allowed him to start fast breaks and deliver timely passes. Every game and every practice, he competed to the best of his ability. He brought that football toughness to the gym, and that helped us be as successful as we were.”

Webb became proficient at throwing alley-oop passes to high-flying Myles Smith. West never was on the receiving end of an alley-oop, but he did have a flying dunk — his favorite individual basketball memory — in the Dale’s Sporting Goods Sam Moir Christmas Classic his junior year.

“A lot of my best memories from high school basketball are going to be from Christmas tournaments because of the excitement and the crowds,” Webb said. “The championship game with Carson my senior year was special. Carson’s Jacob Mills is a guy I’ve known since I was young, and he came out hot and were were down 9-0 before we knew what hit us. But we came back and won that game in the final minutes. This was a very fun team to play on.”

In Webb’s last basketball game in a pretty crazy atmosphere at Reidsville, there were times when he had to try to defend Reidsville’s 6-foot-7, 243-pound Kendre Harrison, who may be the nation’s best multi-sport high school athlete. Webb fouled out with 30 seconds left, but even Harrison, a future NFL tight end, graciously acknowledged Webb’s effort.

While he was very good in baseball and basketball, it was Webb’s monumental senior football season that put him at the top of the Athlete of the Year list.

“I had confidence, but I surprised myself a little bit,” Webb said. “I didn’t expect numbers like that.”

Following electrifying athletes Honeycutt and Geter as Salisbury’s quarterback, Webb proved equal to that daunting task, leading an offense that was more dependent on the pass than usual.

While it always looked like the next sack might break him half, Webb stayed in one piece, stayed healthy except for a twisted ankle in the playoffs. The only thing he broke was program records  — 2,483 yards passing yards and 32 aerial touchdowns for an 11-2 team that reached the third round of the playoffs.

“The whole preseason everyone wanted to know how we were going to replace Mike Geter,” Trivett said. “Mike was a great player for us, but I told everyone to relax, that Hank was going to be fine. He had been a good receiver (seven TD catches in two seasons), and I believed he could be a really good quarterback. Hank made all the throws. He was smart. He was tough.”

Besides playing quarterback, Webb still had the job of taking care of the Hornets’ kicking game. He held that job for years, with the assistance of long snapper Sparger and holder Evan Koontz.

“The biggest thing I had to do was build up my stamina, so I could still do a good job as a kicker along with playing quarterback,” Webb said.

Webb did just fine, arguably the best kicking/punting season ever recorded in Rowan County history. He was the Post’s Special Teams Player of the Year.

He had several 60-yard punts and averaged 46.3 yards, putting him in the top 25 nationally. He had a high rate of getting touchbacks on his frequent kickoffs.

Webb was 11-for-13 on field goals, including one from 49 yards out on a chilly November night. That was the longest a Salisbury kicker ever has made in the playoffs. It was the third-longest in program history.

Former Salisbury star Wade Robins gets credit for mentoring Webb as a kicker.

With 92 kicking points, five rushing touchdowns and 37 passing TDs, Webb was directly involved in at least 344 points scored by the Hornets as a senior.

Webb is headed to Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia. He was recruited by larger schools, but he’s looking to focus on academics, punting and kicking at Hampden-Sydney.

“The plan is to go to school four years there, get a great business education and kick and punt for the football team,” Webb said. “You never know what might happen, but that’s the school that looked like the perfect fit for me in the recruiting process. I’m not expecting to be in a transfer portal.”

While playing three sports was a hectic grind, Webb wouldn’t change anything about high school.

“There were times when we lost our last football game on Friday and played basketball on Saturday, and then pretty much the same thing when basketball season ran into baseball,” Webb said. “It always took a few days to get up to speed, to get acclimated to a different sport, but after that, I just played as well as I could and as hard as I could.”