It was a busy day in the IU basketball recruiting world as the Hoosiers picked up commitments from 2013 forwards Collin Hartman and Devin Davis Jr.
Inside the Hall caught up with the 6-6, 190-pound Hartman, a sophomore at Indianapolis Cathedral, for a Q & A on Sunday evening shortly after his commitment to the Hoosiers:
On what spurred his decision to commit early to Indiana:
“Actually, for two or three weeks I’ve been thinking about it. Thinking about all of the possibilities, ups and downs. And the more I thought about it, the more IU kept coming back. There’s nothing I don’t like about IU. Everything’s good. They are enthusiastic about what they do. The fans are in it, great fanbase. And everybody’s just like a huge family there. I’m a family guy. That’s what I want in a college. Being close to the coaches, being close with the players and having the fans want to be close with you.”
On the decision to tell his mother, Melissa, to stop the car on their way home so he could go back to Bloomington and commit:
“We got about 10 or 15 minutes down the road and I was like, ‘Mom, we’ve gotta turn around. I’ve got to commit. It’s right. It’s just a gut feeling.’ So I called my uncle, because he’s like a father figure to me, and I called him to see if there was any reason that he could find to think about not going to IU. Because I told him that I thought about it. But we couldn’t find any. So I was like, ‘alright, let’s go for it’ and we went and finalized it.”
On Tom Crean’s reaction:
“(Laughs) He was pretty speechless, very happy. Just hugs all around and a lot of smiles.”
On the impact of Cody Zeller’s commitment to IU on his decision:
“I didn’t follow it that much, but it definitely had an effect because Cody Zeller is a great basketball player and could have gone almost anywhere in the nation he wanted to obviously. But for him to have that faith in committing to a place that is going nowhere but up and just seeing that trust in the program and the trust in the coaches, because me and him are both family guys, and seeing him do that just really helped me with my confidence and saying, ‘yeah, we can all do this.’”
On his relationship with his future teammate, Warren Central’s Devin Davis Jr:
“Me and him are really good friends. We’ve been playing against each other since fourth grade. It’s just going to be great. We know each other pretty well. He’s a great player. Very athletic. He can anything he wants on the court. But he’s just a good kid off the court, fun to hang around with and all that stuff.”
(Photo credit: IndyStar.com)
