By Ben LarrisonThe Daily Northwestern
For six years, Craig Robinson paced the sidelines of Welsh-Ryan Arena.
Tonight, the new Brown head coach and former Northwestern
assistant returns to Evanston to face a Wildcats team that he helped build.
“He was great,” senior Vince Scott said. “He was the one who really recruited me out of high school, so I was a little closer to him coming in … Every aspect of the game that I have learned here has come from him first and foremost, so it’ll be good to see him.”
Robinson, a six-year assistant to NU coach Bill Carmody, accepted an offer this summer to serve as head coach for the Bears. He brought with him an offensive philosophy that was developed as both a player and coach under the Princeton Offense.
Thanks to his involvement in both the Cats’ coaching and recruiting efforts, Robinson had a close relationship with many of the players on NU’s current roster. Sophomore Craig Moore said Robinson was a tough coach who demanded hard work on the court, but that he balanced it with a funny and social side off the court.
“He helped me a lot, so it’s going to be funny playing him,” Moore said.
Like NU (1-2), the Bears enter the game with just one victory. Four games into the season, Brown has gone 1-3, its lone win coming Saturday in a 51-41 upset of Providence College.
In their season opener, the Bears gave Michigan State a scare, trailing by just five with under four minutes to play before falling 45-34. After the game, Spartans coach Tom Izzo said that Robinson had Brown running the Princeton Offense just as well as NU.
Carmody said he hopes his former assistant will be successful – after tonight.
“I was really happy that he got his first win the other night against Providence, and that’s a heck of a win,” Carmody said. “Except now he might be a little confident and that team might be confident, which I don’t like.”
Robinson’s relationship with Carmody stretches back to their Princeton days during the early 1980s. Robinson was a star player for Tigers coach Pete Carrill, while Carmody was an assistant under the Princeton legend.
After playing professionally and coaching collegiately, Robinson took a nine-year hiatus from basketball until 2000, when Carmody hired him as an assistant coach at NU.
“It’s definitely like a ‘teacher vs. pupil’ kind of game,” senior Tim Doyle said. “It’s going to be a bragging rights game between the coaches. I don’t know why they wanted to play this game – both are going to know what the other’s going to do on every possession.”
Carmody said the game should feature teams that are “mirror images” of each other, while Doyle said it would be like “playing ourselves.”
“It’s going to be, I hope, a fun game to play in,” Doyle said. “But it could also be a painful game to be in and to watch.”
Reach Ben Larrison at [email protected].
