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Published: June 02, 2009 09:51 pm   

BASKETBALL: GI's Hartman starts a new chapter

Grand Island basketball great Carlin Hartman will return to the ranks of Division I next season, joining James Madison University as an assistant coach.

The new job will allow Hartman to continue pursuing his hoop dreams without uprooting his family from their current home in Richmond, Va.

“I feel like I’m very fortunate to be going into this situation,” Hartman said by phone Tuesday. “In the coaching profession, you don’t always know where you are going to end up living. I have a wife and four children who are very supportive of my career. Moving would’ve been a very hard thing to do.”

Hartman said he’ll make the roughly hour-and-a-half commute daily from Richmond to the James Madison campus.

This past season, Hartman worked as the associate head coach at Centenary College in Louisiana, having resigned after three seasons as a Richmond assistant. Hartman reportedly violated NCAA rules regarding communication with recruits.

“It was a mistake, something that I owned up to,” Hartman said. “I’m moving forward and trying to start a new chapter. I don’t believe it’s hindered me.”

Hartman said he’s excited to join a James Madison program that “has the resources there to win a lot of games.”

Matt Brady, the former Siena player and Marist head coach, took over the Dukes’ program last season and led the team to its first winning record in eight years. When Brady was an assistant coach at Wagner in the early ’90s, he tried recruiting Hartman.

Hartman wound up playing at Tulane, being the sixth man on two NCAA tournament squads. He played a few seasons in the Continental Basketball Association and the United States Basketball League before entering the coaching ranks. Before going to Richmond, Hartman worked at Louisiana-Lafayette, Rice and McNeese State.

“I think he’s proven to be a terrific assistant coach in all respects,” Brady said. “I think he’s a guy with a lot of intangibles, and I think he’s a proven recruiter and a proven assistant coach in terms of on the floor. I think he’s everything that we were looking for and I think he makes our program better.”

“As good a basketball player as Carlin is, he’s a better person,” said Jon Roth, the Vikings athletics director and former boys basketball coach. “He represents any college he has worked for with class. Great role model for college athletes. He has never stopped staying in contact with me, and when he comes home he always stops by my house and the school to see how things are going.

“He’s like a son to me. We have a special relationship that will never stop.”

Hartman scored 1,513 points in high school, graduating in 1990 as the Vikings’ all-time leading scorer, and one of the top 25 scorers in Western New York history.

James Madison now boasts two Grand Island greats — Jessica Remmes, the state’s all-time leading girls soccer goal scorer will be a junior in the fall.