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UNC Asheville honored a program legend on Feb. 15, retiring Josh Pittman’s No. 4 jersey between the women and men’s basketball games.
“Josh was a sophomore my first year at Asheville, and I was shocked at how naturally talented he was,” said Eddie Biedenbach, who coached UNC Asheville from 1996-2013. “He led us the next year with his scoring and his play. The best part about him was that he was a great teammate and a great leader.”
Pittman, Davie’s third-year coach, played at Asheville from 1994-98. He became the first Bulldog to ever be named Big South Player of the Year in 1997 as a junior. He was then named Big South Player of the Year in 1998 as well. He became just the second player in league history to repeat as Big South Player of the Year. He completed his career with 1,547 points, which at the time made him the school’s third all-time leading scorer and leading Division I scorer. He is currently eighth in that category. Pittman also completed his career as the program’s all-time leader in steals with 175. He is now fifth all-time in steals. He helped lead UNC Asheville to the program’s first ever Big South Conference regular-season titles in both 1997 and 1998. In 1997, the Bulldogs were a preseason pick to finish in sixth place in the league but led by Pittman, Asheville finished first for the first time in school history. He helped lead the Dogs to their best Division-I record at the time at 18-10, which included a win over South Carolina, which would win the SEC that season.
Pittman led the Big South in scoring in 1998 with an 18.4 average, becoming the first Bulldog to ever lead the league in scoring. Asheville was 24-4 in league games during Pittman’s final two seasons. In addition, he was a first-team all-conference performer his final two years and made the Big South All-Tournament team twice.
He was elected to the UNC Asheville Athletics Hall of Fame in 2010 and the Big South Hall of Fame the same year. He became the first UNC Asheville men’s basketball player to be enshrined in the Big South Hall of Fame. He graduated from UNC Asheville in 1998 and was the first Bulldog to ever be invited to the prestigious Portsmouth Invitational following the season. He received an invitation to the Los Angeles Lakers training camp before settling for a successful 17-year professional career in Europe and South America, where he was named league MVP three times.
“This is a tremendous honor for Josh and for our men’s basketball program,” Director of Athletics Janet R. Cone said. “To have your number retired anywhere is an unbelievable accomplishment and we are proud of his time as a Bulldog.”
Pittman’s tryout with the Lakers never materialized.
“I never had the chance to go,” he said last week. “If you remember, 1998 was the year of the lockout. Mitch Kupchak called my mom and said there’s going to be a lockout so I’m not gonna be able to talk. So I went to Argentina with a new agent. With me being young and naive, I just went back over there for the next three years, I was making good money and I didn’t think anything of it. But I never got a chance to (try out for a NBA team). It was one of those things that I tell the kids that you don’t get do-overs and sometimes you wish you could.”
One of Pittman’s favorite moments in college was dunking on Arizona star Miles Simon.
“I held my own against some big-time players, guys like Paul Pierce and Mike Bibby,” he said. “We played (Bibby, Simon and Arizona) in ‘98. That’s the game that I made SportsCenter for the first time because I dunked on Miles Simon.”