FSU coach Leonard Hamilton exits ACC Tournament — and the game of basketball — with class
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Leonard Hamilton finished his career as a basketball coach on Tuesday night at the ACC Tournament in Charlotte, watching his team lose a first-round game to Syracuse, 66-62.
It wasn’t a great way to go out, honestly — on the first day of the ACC Tournament, with the upper deck of the Spectrum Center curtained off and the lower deck only half full for the third and final first-round game.
The announced crowd was 5,136 in a building that can seat 19,000. And it’s hard on a Tuesday to feel like the ACC Tournament has actually started. The first day of the tournament is very much a soft opening.
But few coaches get to take the exit of their choice when it’s time to walk out of an arena for the last time. And the 76-year-old Hamilton knows that ultimately he’s a very lucky man.
“I’ve done the very best I could,” Hamilton said.
Hamilton leaves as the ACC’s longest-tenured coach, having directed Florida State’s program since 2002. He was the last coach left standing in the most recent iteration of the great old guard in the ACC: Mike Krzyzewski, Roy Williams, Jim Boeheim, Tony Bennett, Mike Brey and Jim Larranaga among them. The league is poorer for their loss, and the drop in the ACC’s overall basketball prowess isn’t coincidental.
But back to Hamilton, whose departure Tuesday was a classy one, and something of a full-circle moment as well. He grew up in poverty in Gastonia, at a time where your color very much determined what you could and could not do. He sat in the balcony of the movie theater because Black people weren’t allowed downstairs. He drank from one water fountain while whites drank from another.
Hamilton told me this story once about his family and what it would do for a special night out in the 1950s in Gastonia: “On Sunday nights, many times with our family, we would get in the car. All four boys would be in the backseat. My sister would be in between my mother and father in the front seat. And we would go to this restaurant that Black folks were not allowed to come into.
“And my father would go to the window, ring the bell, order two hot dogs apiece for all of us and a milkshake apiece and come back and sit back in the car,” Hamilton continued. “Then they’d flag him, and then we’d sit in the car and eat those hot dogs and drink those milkshakes. That was an evening we looked forward to, but I always had mixed feelings about it. It was a little demeaning. You accepted it, even though you didn’t like it.”
So when you rise from that, losing a first-round game in the ACC Tournament to Syracuse to finish 17-15 on the season isn’t all that bad. Nor is this: Hamilton got to choose when he wanted to retire, and he has peace about it, and he is being replaced by one of his former players (Luke Loucks) who considers Hamilton to be like a second father to him. He also has plans for his retirement. Hamilton said he’s going to take voice, piano and guitar lessons, and that he hoped to be involved in some ministry work and in mentoring some younger coaches.
Does he believe he’s leaving FSU in “pretty good shape,” as he called it? Yes. Does he believe that college basketball itself is in pretty good shape? Not exactly.
“There was a time when if you didn’t have the right graduation rate, you couldn’t play in the NCAA Tournament,” Hamilton said. “Now, I haven’t heard anybody talk about academics in the last three or four years. It’s all been about the other things that we’re dealing with.”
Hamilton may look 56, but he’s actually older than the ACC itself. He was born in 1948; the league itself was born in 1953. He’s fought off Father Time forever, but it’s time. Florida State hasn’t made the NCAA Tournament for the past four seasons, including this one.
The difference in this game was Syracuse guard JJ Starling, who scored 27 points and put his team on his shoulders at the end. Florida State didn’t have anyone quite like that.
Was it important in the moment? Sure. Hamilton wanted to win. But in a larger sense, his basketball career has already been a raging success, because it led him to a college degree, and then it led a whole lot of other people to college degrees after that.
“I wasn’t thinking about professional basketball,” Hamilton said of his early life at a remarkable late-night press conference following FSU’s defeat. “I was thinking about setting the table for my brothers and sisters I adopted. ... They went to college, they married people who went to college, and their kids went to college.
“So me getting my education changed the whole culture of my family. Most of the guys that we recruited over the years ... they were first-generation college students. ... I’ve never lost sight of that, and I’ve made it an emphasis wherever I’ve been. I was at University of Miami for 10 years, and we had three kids that didn’t graduate. And I think I’ve been 23 years at Florida State. So in the 33 years I think I’ve had maybe four or five kids not graduate. That is probably the biggest satisfaction I’ve received.”
That’s a nice legacy, isn’t it? To say Hamilton never coached a team to a national championship is true, but it misses the larger point. He changed hundreds of lives over the course of a career. We should all be so lucky.
This story was originally published March 12, 2025 at 5:30 AM with the headline "FSU coach Leonard Hamilton exits ACC Tournament — and the game of basketball — with class."
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