The Florida coach helped lead Tulane to its first NCAA Tournament
GAINESVILLE, Fla. – Florida men’s basketball associate head coach Carlin Hartman is set to be inducted into the Tulane Hall of Fame on Friday. Hartman will be inducted individually after previously entering in 2020 as part of the entire 1992 team, which earned the Green Wave’s first NCAA Tournament bid and victory in program history. Hartman helped Tulane to another NCAA Tournament berth and victory in 1993.
At the time he wrapped his Tulane career, Hartman ranked 10th in scoring (1,180 points), third on the program’s career field goal percentage list (52.8 percent) and seventh in career steals (146). In 2011, Hartman was named to Tulane’s 1990s All-Decade Team as part of the Green Wave’s celebration of 100 years of basketball.
For more on Hartman’s accomplishment, see the FloridaGators.com feature by Chris Harry<https://floridagators.com/news/2023/9/27/mens-basketball-tulane-hall-calls-for-hartman-sept-27-2023.aspx>, linked here and reproduced below.
Tulane Hall Calls for Hartman
UF associate head coach Carlin Hartman<https://floridagators.com/sports/mens-basketball/roster/coaches/carlin-hartman/1653>, a centerpiece in the early 1990s resurrection of Tulane basketball, will be inducted in the school’s Athletics Hall of Fame this weekend.
By Chris Harry, Senior Writer, FloridaGators.com
GAINESVILLE, Fla. – For Perry Clark, there was a double edge to the razor-sharp sword his standout power forward, Carlin Hartman, used to wield during their record-setting days together at Tulane. Clark was the coach who raised the Green Wave from a scandalous abyss to heights the program had never known. Hartman was a 6-foot-7, 225-pound front court stalwart and fan favorite who brought the kind of energy and intensity his teammates couldn’t help but follow.
Together they made college basketball history and became a trendy national story.
“Carlin was so popular I used to tell people that if I didn’t get him out of there in four years by the fifth he would be taking my place as head coach,” Clark said this week. “If he wanted to run for mayor of New Orleans I think he would have won.”
Instead, Hartman’s calling was the coaching profession, which he has navigated with equal parts class and success at 10 schools over the last 25 years. His current residence is a second-floor office at the Hugh Hathcock Basketball Facility as associate head coach for Todd Golden<https://floridagators.com/sports/mens-basketball/roster/coaches/todd-golden/1648> and the Gators. This weekend, though, Hartman will be excused for a couple days for his induction in the Tulane Athletics Hall of Fame’s Class of 2023<https://tulanegreenwave.com/news/2023/5/19/general-tulane-athletics-announces-2023s-hall-of-fame-class.aspx>.
“It’s just incredibly humbling, of course,” said Hartman, now 51. “My experience there helped me become an adult and helped me learn to be comfortable away from home. It allowed me to meet my future wife and our family dynamic is the way it because of what Tulane provided me.”
Let the record show, it was a symbiotic relationship.
Hartman was a lightly recruited forward out of Grand Island, N.Y., outside of Buffalo. He had offers from Niagara, his hometown university, and LaSalle, but was intrigued by the situation at Tulane.
The Green Wave program had been shuttered for four years following an ugly point-shaving scandal that implicated future NBA star John “Hot Rod” Williams. From 1985-89, Tulane was without men’s basketball program until the university president – with a heavy push from the student body and local boosters – reinstated the program for the ’89-90 season. Clark, an assistant alongside Bobby Cremins for some great teams at Georgia Tech, took on the resurrection. His first team went 4-24.
In the fall of 1990, Hartman arrived as part of a freshman class that also included guard Kim Lewis (another future Tulane Hall-of-Famer) and 6-10 center Makeba Perry. Over the next four seasons, the Green Wave won 77 games, captured the Metro Conference regular-season championship and played in the first two NCAA tournaments in program history – advancing to the second round in ’92 and ’93 – as well as a National Invitational Tournament. They did it with a crowd-pleasing, full court-pressing style, highlighted by a reserve unit of five players that became known as “The Posse.”
As Clark put it, “They’d get in the game and flip the scoreboard.”
Hartman, a self-proclaimed “enforcer,” was the heart of “The Posse,” and a crowd-pleaser at rockin’ Fogelman Arena, the 3,000-seat pit/sauna that was likened to a mini-Cameron Indoor during its heyday. He averaged 9.9 points on nearly 56-percent shooting and 4.5 rebounds over his career, tallying 1,180 points (currently 23rd on the school’s all-time list) and 538 rebounds. In ’92, when the Green Wave went 22-9 and won the Metro with an 8-4 mark, they did it in a rugged seven-team league that sent four teams (Tulane, Charlotte, South Florida and Louisville) to the NCAA field of 64.
“He was a physical player,” Clark said. “Guys knew when Carlin was on the floor. He took charges. He [guarded] their toughest forward. He didn’t take crap from anybody. He made people respect us.”
When Clark, prone at times to let emotions get the better of him, was on the verge of losing his cool, it was Hartman who would come to his side and say, simply, “Coach, we got this.”
And they usually did.
“It was one of those things that you never could have scripted,” Hartman said. “When I made the decision to go to Tulane from Buffalo I didn’t know much about the South, but it was the highest level school that recruited me and it was in a great league. I took advantage of the situation.”
Upon graduating in 1994, Hartman had s short stint with the CBA Rapid City Thrillers, then embarked on a coaching odyssey that began at Rice and wrapped through McNeese State, SW Louisiana, Richmond, Centenary, James Madison, Columbia, a Final Four with Lon Kruger and Oklahoma, UNLV and now Florida.
This weekend, he’ll be joined by some 35 family and friends – including wife Christine and children Sydney, Kailyn, Tess and Joseph – for a glorious trip down memory lane.
“The reason why I recruited him was I felt like I needed someone with same attitude and energy that was reflective of me and wanted the program to be built on,” Clark said. “He came in and fulfilled those responsibilities, with a plus, and he’s carried the same energy to the professional level. Everybody likes Carlin. And everybody respects him.”
