Jan. 27, 2023
Hiram Green’s distinguished, 45-year career at USF – along with the scholarship he and his wife, Freida, established to help students in need – almost never materialized. As a basketball star at Bartow High in the 1970s, the dominating 6-foot-8 center/forward was one of the most heavily recruited prep players in the nation. He could have gone to any number of established Division I schools to play ball, and in fact signed a letter for a full-ride scholarship at the University of Mississippi.
Playing for the fledgling Bulls wasn’t on his radar, despite persistent recruiting efforts. “I was like, ‘I’m not going to South Florida,’” he recalls. “But as I reflect on it, there were two poems I read in high school that stuck with me.”
One was Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken. The other was by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Forging Your Own Path, with the often-quoted line, “Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”
Soon enough, just like the Frost poem, Green found himself at an unexpected crossroads. It happened one Sunday in his Bartow church, where he sang in the choir. An assistant Bulls coach, Dan Peterson, showed up and, to Green’s utter surprise, addressed the full congregation. “He was one of our white coaches, and this was an all-Black church – totally packed,” Green recounts. “He went on and on about why I should come to USF! Afterwards, my mother said, ‘Hiram, why don’t you visit USF one more time?’”
Even though he had signed a letter of intent with Mississippi, Green was allowed to make another official visit to a non-Southeastern Conference school. “So I went, and I’ll tell you what, those two poems made a difference,” he says. “I decided to go where there was no path and make my own at USF.”
Becoming a Bull placed Green, ’82, front and center as a starter on coach Chip Connors’ team for two seasons from 1978-80, where he played against the likes of future Boston Celtics star Kevin McHale and Denver Nuggets forward James Ray, and reached the Sun Belt conference finals. A lingering knee injury cut his playing days short. But as one door closed, another swung open after graduation as Green became a Bulls’ assistant athletic director at just 22 years of age. “It was like, ‘Whoa, look at this!’ – things were beginning to happen in my life,” he says.
That was an understatement. His next stop was the USF Alumni Association, where Green became the associate director and oversaw numerous revenue-generating initiatives engaging USF alumni – including the first membership program, as well as marketing Bulls license plates and credit cards. But just as the Emerson poem suggested, Green continued to blaze his own trail – and what a path it has been.
In the 1990s he moved to the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine as director of development. “These were areas that dealt with people, so I very much enjoyed that,” he says.
Green left USF briefly to serve as director of the Florida Classic, the annual football contest between Florida A&M University and Bethune-Cookman University. Upon returning to USF, he was involved in the coordination of the men’s Final Four tournament in 1999 held at the Florida Suncoast Dome, later named Tropicana Field.
Then came a return to the Morsani College of Medicine as director of development, and he continues to work for USF Health today as director of community engagement. Along the way, Green had a hand in USF’s Black Alumni Society, creating its first and only scholarship.
That set the stage for starting a new scholarship, Set the Captive Free – stemming from his work serving on the board of a Tampa program, Embracing Legacy, to keep high school students on track toward productive futures. Inspired by his religious background, Green thought of Jesus preaching to the downtrodden, setting the captives free. “I wondered, ‘How can we set people free if they are in debt?’” he remarks. “So many people have college debt. My hope is that people will support this scholarship, so it can grow and help as many underserved students as possible afford the costs of college,” he says. “I want them to be set free in terms of what they can do in school. I’ve been blessed to have had an amazing life at USF, and I want the same for them.”
Green was honored last year by the Tampa Organization of Black Affairs as the 2022 Unsung Hero, a recognition bestowed on those giving of their time and talent to support people in the community with the greatest needs. He sees this scholarship as doing precisely that.
“When you play basketball, you tend to think life is all about you,” he says. “But my life is about helping other people.”
Green hopes for the scholarship fund to reach $25,000 and become endowed, allowing the fund’s interest to be awarded in perpetuity, helping generations of students offset myriad costs related to their educational dreams. The “Set the Captive Free” scholarship stands at $21,000, and Green hopes that you can help reach the magic number and start awarding scholarships to deserving students.