Craig Robinson has come full circle. As a collegiate player, he won two conference Player of the Year awards under legendary Princeton coach Pete Carrill. As a businessman with a Chicago MBA, he worked for a decade as a Master of the Universe in the financial sector. As a coach, he made basketball inroads at every level -- high school, mid-major college, even the vaunted Big Ten conference.
But now, the opportunity to finally lead a program has taken him back to where Robinson first made a name for himself. Back, that is, to the Ivy League.
The former 6-foot-6-inch forward, who has spent the last five years serving under former Princeton assistant Bill Carmody at Northwestern, accepted the top job at Brown last week. His hiring was made possible when Glen Miller left the post to assume Fran Dunphy's vacated spot at Penn.
Robinson was unabashed about his aspirations and enthusiasm, casting the hire as an "opportunity to help Brown University win an Ivy League Championship." That ambitious slant is significant simply because the team he will inherit is widely considered a rebuilding project, despite the progress Miller made in his six years at the helm.
"I'd like to get started yesterday," Robinson said.
Robinson first entered the coaching scene as an assistant at the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1988 after several years spent in England playing and doing front-office work for the Manchester Giants of the European Basketball League. It was there that he received his first taste of the business world, and despite his well-known basketball skills -- he was taken in the fourth round of the 1983 NBA draft by Philadelphia -- Robinson entered the American financial sector. He would remain there for a decade, logging time as vice president and managing director for several major financial groups.
He returned to basketball in 1999 and coached the University of Chicago High School for one year before being hired by Carmody at Northwestern, where he had remained until now.
"I think it's a good hire," said Miller of his successor at Brown. "The search committee worked for weeks, and they had a strong finalist pool. I think they're happy with their choice.
"From what I've seen of him on the road, he represents himself well. He's a professional. He's a classy guy."
Dave Duke, who had been an assistant at Penn for eight years before he followed Dunphy to Temple this month, was also in the running for the job -- but not, he says, as invested in it as many believed.
"I didn't really pursue that," Duke said after he jumped to the Owls staff. "It wasn't a rumor. I talked to someone up there, but I didn't pursue it."
The shuffling of basketball personnel around the Ivy League these past several months --- precipitated by Dunphy's departure -- has been the biggest shake-up to hit the conference's coaching ranks since John Thompson III left Princeton two years ago to take over at Georgetown. (He was replaced by former Air Force coach Joe Scott.)
It remains to be seen exactly what type of system Robinson, who played under the classic Princeton offense under Carrill in the early 1980s, will implement. Also murky at this point is whether he will have his leading scorer, All-Ivy junior guard Keenan Jeppesen, back next year. Miller confirmed this week that he and Jeppesen have been in contact regarding a possible transfer and that Jeppesen's application decision from the Penn admissions office was "pending."
The Bears are nonetheless a young team, and they have only lost one senior -- the 6-foot-7 Luke Ruscoe -- to graduation.
Miller, for one, sees the team to which he devoted six years of his life in good hands.
"We made a lot of progress in building the program up, so his starting point is much better than ours was when we first took over the program," he said. "But yes, there is still a lot of work to do, and [Robinson] will put his own mark on the program."
Leaving Northwestern does have its drawbacks, as the Big Ten Conference is coming off a banner year that saw six of its programs reach the NCAA Tournament. And the Wildcats, which had historically served as the resident doormats, notched wins over two of those teams (Wisconsin and Iowa), swept the season series against Minnesota and defeated Seton Hall, later a 10-seed at the Big Dance. More recently, the conference signed a 10-year deal with ESPN and ABC and created its own cable channel to broadcast Big Ten sports on a more expansive national scale.
Robinson will also leave Carmody. Their relationship dates back to 1983, when Princeton, led by Robinson as team captain and featuring Carmody as a first-year assistant, captured the Ivy League title and then won the opening-round game against Oklahoma State in the NCAA Tournament.
Now, Robinson could have a chance to taste postseason glory from the sidelines as well.
