Notre Dame’s Sam Hartman gets last shot at Clemson

“We had this tee ball team one year, and I think all twelve kids ended up playing Division I sports,” Grier said. “I don’t think that team lost a game all season. They were all just goofy kids back then but look at what they’ve accomplished now. It’s amazing.”

When Hartman played Pop Warner youth football, he was the quarterback and middle linebacker.

“He wanted to hit anything that moved,” Grier said. “When we realized how good of a quarterback he was going to be, we wouldn’t let him play linebacker anymore. I think it’s why he plays the way he does because he’s got that little bit of linebacker left in him.”

The defining play on the drive was a 17-yard scramble from quarterback Sam Hartman on 4th-and-16 to put the ball on Duke’s 30-yard line, setting up the game-winning touchdown.

It’s why Hartman didn’t flinch during Norte Dame’s fourth-quarter comeback against Duke earlier this season.

Trailing 14-13, with less than two minutes to play, and facing a fourth-and-16 play, Hartman took off after the play broke down, racing toward the first-down marker and launching himself into the air the final two yards to keep the game-winning drive alive.

“He’s just not going to slide or take the easy way out, that’s just Sam,” Grier said.

In 2017, When Grier left North Carolina to take over the program at Oceanside, Hartman came along for his senior season.

The year before, in the program’s first season, the Landsharks served as little more than a speed bump for most opponents, losing all eight games they played in 2016 by an average margin of more than five touchdowns.

Hartman led Oceanside to the program’s first victory in football in 2017 and helped the Landsharks to a 7-3 season.

“I like to think that we would have eventually been successful at Oceanside, but Sam sped up the timeline,” Grier said. “He got those other kids to believe in themselves. He showed them how to work, how to prepare, what to do in the weight room. He was a great leader for us.”

Former Oceanside Collegiate Academy quarterback Sam Hartman led the Landsharks to the program’s first victory in football during the 2017 season. File/Frankie Mansfield/Moultrie News 

One of the biggest question marks for Hartman going into his collegiate career, which started at Wake Forest in 2018, was making the transition from Oceanside to the ACC. He went from playing in front of a few hundred fans at the Park West field in Mount Pleasant to playing on national TV at places like Florida State and Clemson.