After enduring many struggles, Lance Hartley is getting his shot committing to South Carolina

Lance Hartley couldn’t have been more ecstatic when the offer came his way. If somebody told him last spring that he’d be offered and eventually committed to an SEC school, he wouldn’t have believed it.

As a 6-foot-5, 220-pound JUCO pitcher, Hartley only had two offers, one of which was South Carolina, which he committed to on Oct. 20 before any other schools could come into the picture.

“It’s very relieving,” Hartley told GamecockCentral. “… I couldn’t be more excited about it.”

Hartley, a Cameron, West Virginia native, pitched his freshman season at Potomac State College, which is a part of the West Virginia University system. Things didn’t go as planned for the right-hander as he went 5-4 with a staggering 9.77 ERA and 54 strikeouts in 35 innings of work.

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It’s easy to wonder why South Carolina decided to take a chance on Hartley. There’s a reason for that. But first, it’s important to understand why Hartley didn’t do well in his time at Potomac State.

Hartley admittedly struggled with his command. He walked 31 batters with six hit by pitches and threw 11 wild pitches. He felt a lot of it had to do with the built-up stress from not knowing where his next stop in his baseball career would be, as he saw some of his teammates struggle to find homes at a higher level.

“Just about everything that could have affected my spring poorly affected my spring poorly, and it just kind of slowly slipped away,” Hartley said. “I started good, and then it just kind of got worse and worse and more walks, and then started giving up more hits, and then I had a velo drop, and then more walks and more hits until I finished with, I think, a 9.77 ERA, which doesn’t really play anywhere.”

There were other dilemmas far more out of his control and things that not even he could have seen coming.

Given how small Potomac State is, with fewer than 1,500 students, the resources were a bit limited for the baseball team. There wasn’t a weight-lifting program, like what all big-time programs, such as South Carolina, have. So Hartley would pay for his own gym membership and do his own lifts in his spare time.

He also didn’t have a true pitching coach to work with last season. Potomac State has three coaches on its staff, plus one volunteer. One coached the infielders and served as the hitting coach. The other coached the outfielders. Head coach Doug Little, who’s entering his 29th year with the program, was an outfielder when he played in college. But he still worked with Hartley and the other pitchers.

“It was kind of something that shocked me when I got there,” Hartley said. “… I love (Little) to death. He taught me a whole lot when it comes to myself, what type of player I am, and what it takes to be great. But he just didn’t have the pitching side, like the actual pitching side of things, and he admits that. It was something I wasn’t really ready for walking into there, because he has a very high reputation in my area for being a great coach, which he is, but I just wasn’t expecting that outcome.”

For the most part, Hartley was on his own when it came to being a college baseball player trying to move up from the JUCO ranks. One resource he did have, though, was David Carpenter, a former MLB pitcher who played for six different teams from 2011-19. Hartley previously worked with Carpenter at a driveline throwing program back when he was a junior in high school.

“When something came up where I had a bunch of questions, I would contact Carp. Because he was in the big leagues for 12 years. He’s been through it,” Hartley said. “… So he knows the game. He knows pitching, and I’ve worked with him for two years, so he knows how I move and what I like.

“So I call him and ask certain questions about certain things, pitch grips, where to throw pitches, the mental approach for certain pitches, you know, wherever my commands going, how to get it back, I’d send him videos of me throwing and everything.”

Even though it didn’t lead to overall improved results on the mound at Potomac State, it did help having someone like Carpenter, who had a career 3.69 ERA, being only one phone call away.

Still unsure when a bigger school would offer him, Hartley transferred to the College of Central Florida this fall, where he will spend his sophomore season in 2026. But it was here that things finally started to come together after working with pitching coach JC Sanner.

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Sanner helped him ditch two of his pitches and instead focused on throwing just his fastball and slider. When that happened, he started to see better results.

“Started throwing them for strikes, did some mechanical adjustments, and then the strike started coming. The more strikes I threw, the more outs I got,” Hartley said. “And then I got about 10 innings into this fall, and I’m low on walks, up to 97 throwing strikes.”

With help from his advisor, along with Sanner, who both had contacts at South Carolina, both Monte Lee and Terry Rooney came to see Hartley pitch and were immediately impressed. He was consistently throwing 93-95 miles per hour while reaching 96-97 at his peak.

“When they flew me up for that visit, we had the meeting about where they see me, where they think they can get me to, and where they’d like me to be,” Hartley said. “And Rooney said, with the short arm action, the big body, the big frame, the arm speed, he sees me sitting high 90s, throwing three pitches and being potentially a Friday night, Saturday night starter for the next year.”

This wasn’t how Hartley envisioned his college baseball journey going, but it has now led him to the Gamecocks, where he believes he can put his past struggles behind him and become the pitcher he knows he can be.

“I’ve kind of proven to everyone this fall that when I’m in the zone, I’m nearly unhittable,” Hartley said. “We’ve been working on metrics with the pitches, how much the pitches move, spin rate, spinning stuff. And I think that’s metric-wise, my fastball and slider are 10 times better than they were compared to last year, even though the velo is still around the same.”

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