By BRIAN TORTELLA
Correspondent
On X @tortreports
In search of a new girls basketball coach just two months prior to the start of the season, Pitman Athletic Director Grant Shivers didn’t think twice before he picked up his phone.
On the other end of the call was a familiar name in the South Jersey girls basketball world. Tara Hartwyk is back coaching at the high school level.
Hartwyk brings several years of coaching experience from across the region at both the high school and college levels. She started her career as an assistant at Gloucester County College before joining Washington Township High as the freshman coach.
She landed at Woodbury High in 2017 when she won the South Jersey Times Coach of the Year honors after leading the Thundering Herd to a South Jersey Group 1 finals appearance in her first season at the helm.
She was the head coach of Rowan College of South Jersey-Cumberland for three seasons and an assistant at RCSJ-Gloucester for the past two years before joining the Panthers this fall.
“Tara coached for me at Woodbury, and when I had an opening, she was the first person I thought of,” Shivers, the former longtime Woodbury athletic director said. “She comes with great experience and a good way to connect with the girls.”
Hartwyk takes over a Pitman squad that hasn’t had a winning season since the 2018-2019 campaign. That year, the Panthers finished 16-12 with a first-round playoff victory over Maple Shade before falling to eventual South Jersey champion Haddon Township, 31-14, in the quarterfinal round.
She said she’s hoping to bring a winning culture back to Pitman.
“It’s definitely the goal,” she said. “It’s hard to come in November as a new coach with new players. There’s a system that needs to be learned, and they’re still on the learning block, which is totally fine. We’re going to have some growing pains. There’s a lot of potential. Each of them has the ability to do some amazing stuff on the court and it’s my job to figure out what their strengths are, play to them, and work on their weaknesses.”
The Panthers won Hartwyk’s debut with a 42-32 season-opening win over Overbrook on December 18, but have dropped three games since to Wildwood, Gloucester and Palmyra.
“I love her, she’s amazing,” said senior Jessica Bretz, the team’s leading scorer. “She’s calm and collected. She’s less of a skill coach and more of a basketball coach, I would say. She is definitely able to get us where we need to be and she’s working on our skills.
“She doesn’t yell at us. She doesn’t pressure us. We’re not yelled at for making mistakes. She lifts us up rather than putting us down.”
Hartwyk said she’s fond of coaching high school players.
“I did kind of miss it — I guess I didn’t really realize that until I got back on the court here,” Hartwyk said. “These girls are pretty special. They make it easy.”
Known for its small-school pride, Pitman High had just 326 students for the 2023-2024 school year, the second-lowest enrollment in South Jersey behind Wildwood, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
The school and town have welcomed her with open arms.
“I like the pride aspect,” Hartwyk added. “There’s a lot of pride here, Pitman pride. I like that, and you can feed off that energy.”
WHAT’S NEXT: Pitman travels to Clayton on Friday at 5:30 p.m.
