Men's Basketball 8/5/2019 11:47:00 AM Chris Brannick

Bob Hoffman Introduced As Head Men's Basketball Coach

EDMOND – The University of Central Oklahoma athletic department introduced Monday Bob Hoffman as its new head men's basketball coach at a press conference in the Stampede Club Theatre at the Sports Performance Center.

Hoffman becomes the 18th head coach at Central Oklahoma, which began play in 1921.

Hoffman is an Oklahoma City native and played his high school basketball at Putnam City High School in the early 1970s. He then moved on to play collegiately at Oklahoma Baptist in Shawnee, Okla., where he would spend the next four years scoring more than 1,000 points. To this day, Hoffman still ranks among the all-time scoring leaders for the Bison.

Hoffman accepted his first head coaching job at Piedmont High School and coached there from 1982-86 while simultaneously attending graduate school at Central Oklahoma, earning his master of education in 1985.

After working with OBU as an assistant coach for a couple years, he took is first head coaching position at the college level at Southern Nazarene in 1987.

At SNU, Hoffman averaged 29 wins per season, going 88-16 in a three-year stretch. He took a program that never had a winning season and won a national championship in 1989, earning Sooner Athletic Conference, District 9, and NAIA Coach of the Year honors for his efforts.

Hoffman then returned to Shawnee to become the head coach at his alma mater and would soon leave a mark on the program still remembered today.

Now a member of the OBU Athletics Hall of Fame, Hoffman led the Bison from 1990-99 and won 243 games along the way. He led OBU to the national tournament six times and had three teams win 30 or more games. The Bison finished second in the national tournament in 1993 and 1997, while finishing third in 1994. He reached the Sweet 16 in 1996 and the Elite Eight in 1999.

Hoffman was named SAC Coach of the Year in 1993, 1996, and 1997. He was the District 9 Coach of the Year again in 1993, and earned National Coach of the Year honors for the second time in his career in 1993.

He moved on from OBU in 1999 to Texas Pan American and won 68 games there over the next five seasons. He guided the program to its first winning season in over ten years, and its first tournament victory over 15 years while also helping UTPA to its first ever national ranking.

After spending a few seasons as an assistant coach at Oklahoma, and leading the American Basketball Association's Arkansas Aeros and the NBA Development League's Rio Grande Valley club, Hoffman would move to Mercer University in Georgia and again, leave his mark on a program.

Hoffman won 209 games at Mercer from 2008-19, including 119 conference games. He led the Bears to its first ever NCAA Tournament win in 2014 – a major upset of Duke in the opening round of March Madness. And he also became the first coach in NCAA history to win a tournament game in all four Division I postseason tournaments in a four-year span.

Hoffman directed Mercer to six postseason appearances over the past seven seasons. He was named Atlantic Sun Coach of the Year three times during his tenure at Mercer.

Hoffman now takes over the reins of a Central Oklahoma program looking to rebound after a rare sub-500 season in 2018-19. UCO has won over 1,300 games in its illustrious history that includes 22 conference or division championships and 17 national tournament appearances.

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