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Robinson wants to blaze winning path
By Chris Murray • cmurray@rgj.com • November 22, 2008
Oregon State coach Craig Robinson was asked a simple question and gave a simple answer.
The question? Who has a more difficult job over the next four years, you or your brother-in-law?
The answer? His brother-in-law.
Of course, Robinson doesn't have your run-of-the-mill brother-in-law. No, his brother-in-law, President-elect Barack Obama, will soon be the most powerful man in the world.
And while Obama will be dealing with a sunken economy, international wars and several other crises that will likely pop up, Robinson will have his hands full, too.
His job is to breathe life into a program that hasn't reached the NCAA Tournament since 1990.
His job is to sell a belief of winning to a team that lost its final 21 games last season -- and all 18 games in conference play.
"We've got a challenge, no doubt about that," said Robinson, who leads his team against Nevada at 7:05 p.m. tonight at Lawlor Events Center. "The biggest challenge is moving past 20 years of futility. It just hangs in the culture around the team, and that's the biggest job we have is putting that in the past."
A change of course
Of course, Robinson, the elder brother of Michelle Obama, never had to take on the challenge.
Ten years ago, he was a successful bond-trader who was earning a six-figure salary in his native Chicago. After growing up on the South Side, Robinson graduated from Princeton before earning his MBA in finance from the University of Chicago and was living an affluent life.
But something was missing. The game of basketball was missing.
Robinson, a 6-foot-6 forward, was a two-time Ivy League player of the year while at Princeton from 1980-83. Basketball was in his blood.
So, even though Robinson was making a good living, he wasn't completely fulfilled.
"When I was still working in corporate America, I had always thought that if I could manage to sock away enough dough to take care of my housing needs and my children's college education, then I wanted to teach seventh grade and coach high school basketball as my retirement plan," Robinson said.
So, in 1999, he coached a season of high school ball while still working his day job. A year later, came the big leap of faith.
Robinson, in his late 30s, quit his job (and took a 90 percent pay cut) to become an assistant coach at Northwestern.
"At the time, it seemed like a nutty thing to do," Robinson said. "My co-workers especially thought it was crazy, but the way things are on Wall Street now, it looks like I knew what I was doing all along, even though I didn't."
Working his way up
After six seasons at Northwestern, Robinson rekindled his Ivy League roots when he was named the head coach at Brown.
He inherited a team that was 10-17 the season before he arrived. Two years later, he led the Bears to a school-record 19 victories, guiding the team to its fourth postseason appearance in school history.
Then, the Oregon State job opened. Robinson's phone didn't ring at first.
Instead, Beavers athletic director Bob De Carolis interviewed St. Mary's Randy Bennett, San Diego's Bill Grier and ex-Stanford coach Mike Montgomery, among others. He offered the job to Bennett and Grier. Both turned him down.
Finally, after a meeting between De Carolis and Robinson at the Final Four, the coach got his interview.
"It didn't take more than one meeting," De Carolis told the Los Angeles Times. "He had a great story to tell about growing up on the South Side. He told us, 'I'm the poster child for what parents want their kids to be.'"
The job that so many coaches didn't want was Robinson's. So, why did he want the job many considered to be a dead end?
"Two reasons," the 46-year-old Robinson said. "One, the fact that there had been a history of winning here; it's certainly not impossible. It's not a case where the team has never won. The team was ranked in the top 10 for several seasons, so there can be success here. The second reason, it's in the Pac-10, arguably one of the best basketball conferences in the country."
Reviving the program
So, Robinson began rebuilding a program that won five Pac-10 titles and appeared in eight NCAA tournaments from 1975-1989.
He has already hooked two top-150 national prospects in his first recruiting class. But before they get to campus next fall, Robinson has started chipping away the losing culture. That was part of the thinking behind having his players practice at 5:30 a.m.
"When you're trying to change a culture, you put yourselves through tough times and see how people respond," Robinson said. "It helps you build that new culture. That way, it's easy to find out who's committed, it's easy to find out whether basketball is really important in their lives."
When Oregon State takes the floor with Nevada tonight, Robinson's players will see a Wolf Pack program that has the winning culture their coach is trying to build.
"That's a successful program, and they've been successful for quite a few years," Robinson said. "There's a culture of winning, a culture of work ethic and a history of players who are now playing at the next level. This is a very, very tough game for us and those guys are tough at home, but that's what we want to do with our program."
And while none of his current players have experienced the fruits of a conference championship or a NCAA Tournament berth, Robinson doesn't want his team to completely forget its losing past.
"You can't just remove that," Robinson said. "It sort of gets less and less of a factor as you go along, but it's not something you forget all together, nor do I think you should forget it. You want to keep that memory somewhere in your mind, so you remember why you are working so hard to change the culture."
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