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player ready...Barack Obama is doing everything in his power right now to win and win big, including in Rhode Island.
So is his brother-in-law.
Chicago native Craig Robinson is the head basketball coach at Brown, one of the Ivy League’s top teams.
By defeating either Harvard or Dartmouth in its last two games, Robinson’s team could break the Providence school’s all-time record for victories in a single season.
But before that, he has a key date to keep in a voting booth.
“I’ll definitely be at the polls first thing,” he said of Tuesday’s primary election. “I’ve been out doing a good bit of campaigning myself.”
Robinson is the older brother of Michelle Obama, the candidate’s wife. They both went to Princeton, which is where Craig became acquainted with Bill Carmody, the coach he would later work beside at Northwestern.
Brown hired him away from Carmody’s NU staff to be head coach in 2006. After an 18-loss first season there, Robinson now has his 17-9 Bears vying for a postseason bid and is becoming one of the hot coaching names in college ball.
“We probably don’t have a shot at the NCAA tournament unless something crazy happens,” he said Monday on the phone. “But we should get a pretty good look from the NIT if we can win one or both of these games we have left.”
As invitations go, either one would be a good one.
One to the Inaugural Ball a year from now might be one of the few events that could top it.
There are all kinds of campaigns, both athletic and political. Robinson finds himself actively in the middle of both, with his brother-in-law having a shot at the ultimate final bracket of anybody’s office pool … the White House.
Obama’s campaign trail took him to Rhode Island for a quick visit on Saturday.
“I meant to go hang out with him a little, but it’s a good thing I decided not to,” Robinson said. “There were so many people trying to get at him, I probably would have been late for the beginning of our game.”
His team had a date with Penn, which had won the Ivy League championship three years in a row.
The coach was concerned about a letdown for his second-place squad because Cornell had just clinched the Ivy League’s automatic bid to the NCAA tournament.
“I thought no way were we going to play well,” he said. “Shows you how much I know.”
His team was up 44-14 at the half.
Not only did the Bears win, they won by 32 points, handing Penn its worst Ivy League loss ever.
Among the standouts with a game-high 16 points was Peter Sullivan, a freshman guard from Loyola Academy who has since been named Ivy League rookie of the week for the fourth time this season.
Robinson’s recruiting knowledge of the Midwest paid off. As an assistant to Carmody from 2001-05, he took a good look at hundreds of blue-chip prospects while helping Northwestern win 57 games during his years there.
Alas, the Wildcats have again fallen on hard times, going 1-15 this season in the Big Ten.
“I know their day will come,” Robinson said. “If I found out the secret to success, I would give Bill a call this very minute and tell him.”
The relationship between the coaches is so close that their schools now have each other on the schedule. Brown won a November game in Evanston 73-67 and Northwestern is supposed to visit Providence next season.
Robinson grew up on the South Side. He went to Mt. Carmel and later received an MBA from the University of Chicago’s business school.
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A career on Wall Street was a definite possibility and Robinson set out in that direction, landing a job with a Chicago-based branch of Morgan Stanley.
But his heart remained in hoops and he found entry-level coaching positions at the U. of Chicago’s lab school and the Illinois Institute of Technology.
“I wasn’t sure where my future would take me,” he said. “I thought after being in basketball and business, I might eventually end up teaching 7th grade.
“That would have been fine. It still would.”
Life appears to have larger plans. Robinson’s team is a victory away from a single-season record 18th victory. He could be bringing back the glory days to Brown, a school that was one of the eight invited to the first NCAA basketball tournament in 1939.
In this day and age, you never know how far you can go.
“Fate does tend to lend a hand,” Robinson said. “It’s like with Barack. He had people around him who encouraged him to go for it eventually, some day down the road. But he also had others who urged him, ‘No, don’t wait. Go for it now.’
“And just look at where he’s at right now.”
No. 1 in the polls, which is right where a college basketball coach some day hopes to be.
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