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WHERE ARE THEY NOW?
Ernie Chatman, a 1967 graduate and former coach at Hernando High, displays the plaque presented to him for induction into the school’s Sports Hall of Fame earlier this month.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the eighth and final story in a series highlighting Hernando High’s 2011 Sports Hall of Fame inductees.
Ernie Chatman was never supposed to end up in Brooksville. Not if things had gone according to plan.
Born in Washington, D.C., Chatman arrived in Florida at the age of 3, his family intent on moving to Miami. Along the way, they decided to pay a visit to an old neighbor from Massachusetts who had relocated to Masaryktown.
His father would end up buying a Buick dealership, and the Chatmans never left Hernando County.
Fate, it seems, had looked out for the community.
Now 62, Chatman remains in Brooksville with his wife of 39 years, Linda. He has three adult children — Erin, Beth and Bret — plus one grandchild and three more on the way.
He also has over 40 years of coaching experience on his resume, a lengthy list of accomplishments including a state championship, school records and a combined 700 victories — the vast majority them for his alma mater, Hernando High.
Then there are the many people spanning generations, whose lives he has impacted as a teacher, friend or colleague.
“When he calls you, you don’t ask why,” said Tim Sims, Hernando’s current baseball coach. “If he needs something, the list of people he could call is probably infinite in the state of Florida. That’s the respect he has in the state of Florida. From Pensacola to Key West, he has just as high respect as he does among his friends and peers.”
All of that made him a more than fitting inductee into the Hernando High Sports Hall of Fame earlier this month.
“It’s an honor to have played here and coached here so man y years, and to be recognized with guys I went to school with,” Chatman said. “To be standing with those people is certainly an honor.”
He was already inducted into the Florida Athletic Coaches Association Hall of Fame in 2004 and received the organization’s Life Membership Award in 2001.
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Sims knows as well as anyone the impact the man he calls “Big E” has had at the school and in the town. He recalls his own father coaching against Chatman in youth baseball during his childhood.
Later Sims would play for, coach under and eventually replace Chatman with the Leopards.
“A big brother, an inspiration, a disciplinarian and probably the most honest man I know on the face of the Earth, him and my dad,” Sims said. “He’ll tell you your strengths and weaknesses, and as a coach that’s what you should do. He tries to help you work on your weaknesses.”
Sims went on say plenty more about his former mentor, calling him a problem solver, fair, regimented, a great evaluator of talent with a knack for handling athletes and parents alike.
“He has the innate ability to communicate and recognize the will to succeed in people,” Sims said.
But in truth, that only scratches the surface of Chatman’s story. He certainly didn’t see it leading to this point in the midst of a nondescript prep career playing basketball and running in track and field prior to his graduation in 1967.
As freshman he was 4-foot-11 and 87 pounds, and didn’t get much bigger until he grew three inches and put on 25 pounds within six months after his senior year.
He admittedly sat the bench quite a bit during his time donning Purple and Gold, all the while observing.
“I learned a lot from a lot of different coaches,” Chatman said. “I played a little bit more my senior year, not a lot. But it was enjoyable and obviously I learned a whole lot sitting and listening, watching.”
From Hernando he went to Central Florida Community College — now the College of Central Florida — in Ocala, and was introduced to the sport of cross-country.
When he transferred to St. Leo University two years later, it was with the intention of running cross-country, but the school folded its program. Instead he improbably ended up starting for the basketball team as a senior.
“I played probably more than I deserved to,” Chatman said. “It was fun and it was a good experience for me, and not something I dreamed of doing necessarily.”
Having earned his bachelor’s degree (he would add a master’s at USF several years later so he could coach in college), Chatman returned home and became a physical education teacher at Parrott Middle School.
Technically he began his teaching career at Hernando, as a couple football coaches were temporarily assigned to Parrott.
After the football season he transferred to the middle school and remained there until 1983.
Parrott had also hired him to guide its baseball and basketball teams. He had already begun coaching Dixie baseball in 1970.
His desire to coach stemmed from his youth, when he noticed that his coaches “were held in such high esteem from us as players and I felt that was pretty neat. I wanted to be like them.
“I wanted to do what they were doing. They were having such a good time. Everyone liked them. They were well-respected in the community, people liked them and I said ‘I want to do that.’ ”
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Chatman spent two years as baseball coach and nine years as basketball headman at Parrott. In 1975 he took over as Hernando’s baseball head coach and added the cross-country post the following year.
He would take the baseball team to the Elite Eight in 1977 and 1979. Then in 1983, he dropped all of his prep positions to coach St. Leo baseball in 1984.
That season the club set a still-standing school record for wins, going 46-13. However, he was talked into returning to Hernando after that lone campaign.
“It was a unique experience,” Chatman said of St. Leo. “It was a good experience. They treated me well. A lot of things went very well for us and we won the most games that had ever been won which was pretty neat. I don’t have a negative thing to say about it.”
He remained a P.E. teacher at Hernando from 1984 until his retirement in 2009. He became baseball coach again in 1987 for one season, then resumed the duties again from 1991-93, compiling an overall record of 295-122-1.
His final run with the Leopards in baseball included a regional appearance in 1993. By that point Sims had become his assistant and took over the program in 1994.
Chatman also coached boys basketball from 1984-89, compiling an 86-61 mark that featured a 25-5 record in 1986-87.
From 1997-2002 he was Hernando softball coach, going 136-48 with three conference championships, four district crowns, two regional titles and two Final Four appearances (2000, 2001).
Additionally he took Hernando Christian Academy to consecutive Final Fours (2009, 2010) and amassed a 68-11 record coaching the Lady Lions from 2009-11.
In boys track and field he was head coach from 2003-07, leading the Leopards to county championships in his first and final two years. He served as athletic director from 1986-95, as well.
Meanwhile, he had his second stint in boy cross-country from 1989-2008 and enjoyed his greatest success. Hernando won the state championship in 1997 and was the runner-up in 1998, 2005 and 2006.
All told in cross-country, Chatman’s teams were conference champs nine times, district champs 11 and regional champs seven.
Drew Martucci, a 2007 graduate who just completed his first year as the Leopards’ head coach, ran for Chatman during those glory years.
“He’s like a second father to me,” Martucci said. “He’s one of those guys you find to be everything you look up to; anywhere to his running to his family life to the way he lives his life.
“… I think it was his popularity (that led to success). He won a lot of runners over. He also made it very easy to go out and recruit guys (in the school). They wanted to be part of a winning team and tradition.”
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Anyone that knows Chatman knows that distance running his is greatest hobby. He has run a marathon in all 50 states, and has run every day since July 23, 1991.
He still has goals of running in 100 marathons (he’s currently at 95), running under four hours in 100 marathons (he’s 11 away) and going under four hours in all 50 states.
He’ll try to achieve that last one in a couple months when he runs in Hawaii.
As his age creeps up, he figures his window is closing to get it done.
Add that to his two pregnant daughters, one with twins, and his son’s impending marriage, leading him to decide not to coach a team for the first time in 42 years — for now.
“When I left HCA I didn’t tell anyone I retired,” Chatman said. “I just said I will not be back. But I left the door open. I was contemplating something this year, but there’s just too many things to do to be coaching this year. I’ll get through this year and next year is a new year.”
His accomplishments as a high school coach don’t account for his 30-plus years involved in Dixie baseball and softball.
He started the Hernando Youth League’s Dixie Pre-Majors and Major program, winning a World Series with the Majors in 1983 after being runner-up the previous two years.
Even now, though he primarily helps run D’Lites Emporium of Spring Hill, his family’s ice cream shop in the Barclay Crossing plaza, he gives softball players private pitching lessons.
So the odds are he will return to coaching, and probably soon. It’s simply what he loves to do.
“I guess my parents would be pretty proud of me,” Chatman said. “It was not their desire initially that I be a coach. Back then every dad thought their son would take care of their business, but that wasn’t my passion.
“I think they’d be pretty happy and happy I’ve done it here with a lot of friends around.”
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