"I've taken the hard road," the soft-spoken native of Germantown said the other day. "Getting to this point is a blessing."
So, don't tell Hartwell that the chances Chattanooga, the Southern Conference champ with an 18-16 record and the No. 16 seed in the West Regional, will knock off No. 1 seed Connecticut tomorrow are slim and none. Don't remind him it's never been done, that No. 16 seeds are 0-96 against the No. 1 seeds since the tourney expanded to 64 teams in 1985.
"One of these days, history is going to happen, so . . ." he said.
It's not likely UConn's 7-3 all-American, Hasheem Thabeet, or the Huskies' talented 6-7 forward, Jeff Adrien, are shuddering at the thought of matching up against Hartwell, the Mocs' best defender.
But that's not the point. Hartwell's is a story of a young man who's made the most out of what he had, which really wasn't much. He was an athlete, but not a basketball player, and a struggling student when Darryl Schofield, then the coach at Lutheran Christian Academy in North Philly, took an interest in him.
"When I first saw Khalil, he was in a school yard," Schofield said. "I approached him about the opportunity to finish up his education, and he wanted to learn how to play basketball. He was raw, but he worked. He didn't have much knowledge about the game except what he knew from the school yards. When I saw he had a chance, I told his mom he should have a fifth year. Academically, he wasn't bad at all. It turned out he was so good in math, he was tutoring some of the other guys. Once he realized he could amount to something, he really started working."
At Lutheran Christian, Hartwell played on a team with Temple's Dionte Christmas, La Salle's Vernon Goodridge, and Texas El-Paso's Stefon Jackson.
