The legacy of Dave Hart Sr. with the Southern Conference is inextricably linked to the city he made his home and headquarters for the conference office—Asheville, North Carolina. Hart’s efforts to promote the SoCon basketball tournament in Asheville, his involvement there in the local community, and his tireless efforts to promote and market the league helped elevate the conference in numerous ways.
The basketball tournament had been in Asheville since 1984, but it truly gathered momentum as a hot ticket after Hart became commissioner in July of ’86. He worked to enhance the tournament on several fronts. He sold a title sponsorship to First Commercial Bank, and a significant corporate package to Coca-Cola. He negotiated coverage of the championship game in prime time on ESPN. He worked with city and county officials, most notably the Junior League of Asheville, to sell tickets and raise awareness. Soon, the SoCon was routinely averaging more than 5,000 fans per session in an Asheville Civic Center that held right around 6,500.
Hart arranged to bring baseball and tennis championships to Asheville as well. “The Southern Conference/Asheville marriage is a good one for both parties,” he told a feature writer in 1987. “I want to bring as many Southern Conference events to Asheville as possible.”
A native of Connellsville, Pennsylvania, Hart earned his undergraduate degree as a football student-athlete at St. Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, hometown of Arnold Palmer. He went on to coach high school football before moving on to the collegiate ranks. From 1966 to ’68, Hart was the head coach at the University of Pittsburgh. After a brief stint as a scout for the Dallas Cowboys, he was appointed athletic director at the University of Louisville, and five years later, in 1978, at the University of Missouri.
“He kept the program clean,” wrote Don Kausler in the Columbia (MO) Tribune when Hart announced he was leaving Mizzou for the SoCon in March of 1986. “You never could question his integrity. And he recognized the value in maintaining a good relationship with the media.”
Looking for a new challenge, Hart found it at the Southern Conference, but he didn’t back away. “We’re not trying to be something we aren’t—that’s why I wanted this job,” he told the Huntington (WV) Herald-Dispatch in October of ’87. “We have good academic institutions and good people.”
Hart was the first Southern Conference commissioner to truly emphasize the league’s TV and corporate marketing efforts. He hired a TV consultant and eventually signed agreements with the Liberty Sports Network and the cable channel SCORE.
“I know a lot about television and know how to increase the chances of a lesser-known program getting on television,” he once said. “We’ve got to knock down doors. We’ve got to be aggressive and go all out and sell ourselves.”
He also operated the first truly modern conference office with more personnel than had ever been employed before. In 1988 Hart hired Wright Waters from Tulane to become assistant commissioner for rules compliance. Jimmy Wilder was hired that same year to succeed John Geis as director of the service bureau, a position Geis had held for ten years.
Also in ’88, Hart hired the office’s first intern, Geoff Cabe, a UNC Asheville graduate. Cabe would go on to serve the SoCon for more than thirty years, skillfully handling such varied areas as media relations, scheduling, championships, and marketing. The internship program Hart started has been in place continuously to the present day.
His football roots convinced Hart that the SoCon should strengthen its pedigree on the gridiron. Toward that end, he led discussions that resulted in the addition of Georgia Southern as a full league member in 1991. The Eagles’ program had already captured four national Division I-AA championships as an independent.
Hart also laid the groundwork for the first postgraduate scholarships awarded by the Southern Conference in the spring of 1991.
At the 1990 June spring meeting in Myrtle Beach, Hart announced he would retire after one more year. “I feel I need to spend more time with my family,” he told reporters. “The job has been very time consuming in the last year. I’m a workaholic. I work too much.”
Hart was the first of three generations of successful athletic administrators. His son, Dave Hart Jr., served as athletic director at four large state institutions—East Carolina, Florida State, Alabama, and Tennessee. His grandson, Rick Hart, spent six years in the Southern Conference as the athletic director at Chattanooga before becoming AD at Southern Methodist University in July of 2012.
Dave Hart and his wife, Earlyn, remained in Asheville after he left the SoCon. He continued to follow the athletic programs headed by his son and, later, his grandson. He stayed active in the community and helped sponsor a fundraising golf tournament for UNC Asheville. In 2006, he attended his final Southern Conference football media day. At the event’s golf outing, he played in a threesome with grandson Rick and new commissioner John Iamarino.
Dave Hart Sr. passed away on March 14, 2009, at the age of 83.
Bio taken from "A Proud Athletic History: 100 Years of the Southern Conference" by John Iamarino