Leonard Hamilton was the first Black player at Tennessee-Martin, the first Black assistant coach in the SEC when he took a job on Joe B. Hall ’s staff at Kentucky.

Coaching his final basketball game at Charlotte’s Spectrum Center, so close to his hometown, would represent something of a full circle moment for Florida State’s Leonard Hamilton.

Leonard Hamilton, the conference’s longest-tenured men’s basketball coach, ended his collegiate career with an opening-round loss to Syracuse on Tuesday night at Spectrum Center in Charlotte, not far from where he grew up in Gastonia.