Keith’s Tommy Tisdale Reaches 3,000 Career Points in 1A Bears’ win over 7A Smiths Station
Keith High School’s 6-foot-3 guard, Tommy Tisdale III, scored his 3,000th career point on the the hardwood. The senior amassed 35 points in a 59-48 victory over Class 7A Smiths Station on December 27 in a contest played at Tuscaloosa’s Paul Bryant High School. He followed this performance with 28 points in a 74-70 victory over rival R.C. Hatch in a key Class 1A, Area 6 battle. This brings Tisdale’s career scoring total to 3,159 points, a journey that began when he joined the Bears varsity squad as a seventh grader.
Tisdale is now the 15th boys’ player in AHSAA history to score 3,000 or more points in his high school basketball career. This rare milestone puts Tisdale in this week’s AHSAA Boys’ Basketball Spotlight. Under Coach Marcus Turner, Tisdale has averaged 28 points, 8.0 rebounds, and 3.0 assists over 18 games this season.
The Bears, with an 11-8 record, have faced challenging games this season against 7A Smiths Station, 6A Shades Valley, 5A Selma and Charles Henderson, 4A Hale County, Dallas County and Wilcox Central, as well as Class 1A, Area 6 games against small-school basketball power R.C. Hatch, rivals Linden, A.L. Johnson, and University Charter School. Tisdale’s season high of 41 points came in a win over Dallas County. He scored 35 points as the Bears beat R.C. Hatch 74-70 and had 18 in a 74-29 victory over Linden.
Tisdale, who scored nine points in last summer’s AHSAA Sports Week’s North-South All-Star Game, hails from a basketball-rich area of Alabama that has produced some of the state’s greatest players.
Tisdale is the first boys’ player in the AHSAA to score 3,000 or more points in his prep career since Piedmont’s Alex Odam, who reached that milestone last year with 3,229 points. Odam was the first since Lindsay Lane’s Tommy Murr, who ended his prep career in 2020 as the AHSAA’s all-time leading scorer with 5,716 points in 181 games from 2015-2020.
According to the AHSAA Record Book, the first player to reach the 3,000-point mark in Alabama High School history was Henry Harris, who had 3,220 points in his career at Greene County Training School from 1965-1968. Keith has four Area 6 matches set for this weekend and next week. The Bears travel to University Charter School on Thursday, return home to play Linden on Friday, then close out the Area 6 schedule with road games at A.L. Johnson and R.C. Hatch next week.
