9 minute read
A Winning Partnership
BY ADAM LUCAS // PHOTOS BY MAGGIE HOBSON
A chance meeting led Steve Robinson to find a kindred spirit and eventually turned him into a Tar Heel
Advertisement
In his longtime work career at the Dean E. Smith Center, Steve Robinson has coached in games to decide the regular season championship, buzzer beaters, and triple-overtime record-setters. But he has been nervous only once.
That day happened in July of 1988, and it was the first time a young Robinson had ever set foot in the building. It was an eventful summer in the world of college basketball. Kansas University had just won the national championship under the direction of Carolina alum Larry Brown. But Brown had bolted for the San Antonio Spurs in June, leaving the Jayhawks under the cloud of an NCAA investigation (and eventually one season of probation). Kansas’ best player, Danny Manning, left for the NBA Draft and was the number-one overall pick.
The Jayhawks inquired about several head coaches to fill their vacancy. But when Dean Smith made a trip to Topeka to visit his parents, he also met with KU athletic director Bob Frederick. That conversation convinced Frederick he should at least interview Roy Williams.
Frederick hired Williams on July 8, 1988. And just a couple days later, Williams— whose first contract in Lawrence was for $78,000 per year—was back in Chapel Hill, where he had served on Smith’s staff for ten years, to clean out his office.
Robinson, in his second season as an assistant coach at Cornell after starting his coaching career as an assistant at his alma mater, Radford, was on one of those multi-city recruiting trips that is a staple of summer life for college coaches. He’d been in Chicago, where he ran into Jerry Green, the longtime head coach at UNC Asheville who was headed to Kansas to coach under Williams. Green told Robinson that Williams had one spot open on his staff. And when Green and Robinson ended up on the same flight from Chicago to Charlotte, Robinson slid into an open seat next to the veteran coach and made his case for the next two hours.
That same evening, Robinson received a phone call from Roy Williams that would eventually change the course of his career and his life.
“He invited me to come see him,” Robinson says. “He said he only had about 30 minutes because he was packing up his office. I wasn’t that familiar with how far it was from Charlotte to Chapel Hill, so I drove up the next day and I was about an hour and a half early. I just walked around the concourse of the Smith Center, and I was nervous as all get out … The whole place was like, ‘Wow.’ It made you step
back and marvel. You could spend a lot of time just walking around being immersed in the history of the program. It was incredible.”
It was the first time the two coaches, born seven years apart, had ever met each other. The planned 30-minute session turned into 90 minutes. Two days later, Williams offered Robinson a job on his staff at Kansas.
“I went home that night and told my wife, ‘I think I’m going to hire him,’” Williams says. “She said, ‘You just met him.’ And I had just met him, but I got a great first impression.”
The fit was immediate and their backgrounds were remarkably similar. Both men once dreamed of being high school coaches. Robinson got into coaching because of his admiration for his high school basketball coach, Charlie VanLear. “In my mind,” Robinson says, “when I was deciding to be a coach, I thought I would be a high school coach.”
But VanLear also planted a seed of respect for the college game. Every year, the veteran coach would attend the Final Four. He’d bring a game program back to Roanoke, where young player
Steve Robinson would devour it, imagining what it might be like to attend—or even play in—an event as high-profile as the Final Four.
He carried that same dream first to Ferrum and then to Radford, where he was coached by Joe Davis. “Coach VanLear probably got me more involved with trying to understand strategy and why you play the way you play,” Robinson says. “With Coach Davis, I was constantly asking him questions, trying to find out how you recruit and other aspects of college coaching. I have a great deal of respect for both of them. I wanted to be them.”
Williams, of course, had the same admiration for his high school coach, Buddy Baldwin, and his college mentor, Dean Smith. Their experiences in those initial years in Lawrence bonded them even more. In the second season at Kansas, the Jayhawks attended a preevent dinner for the Preseason NIT at the Tavern on the Green in New York City. Some of the sport’s elite were on hand; Kansas had already beaten second-ranked LSU and was set to play top-ranked UNLV. Nationally ranked St. John’s was also in the field.
Each coach was announced to the gathering. When it was Kansas’ turn, the evening’s MC said, “And here’s the coach of Kansas, Ron Williams.”
Despite the case of mistaken identity, the Jayhawks went on
“I JUST WALKED AROUND THE CONCOURSE OF THE SMITH CENTER, AND I WAS NERVOUS AS ALL GET OUT…THE WHOLE PLACE WAS LIKE, ‘WOW.’ IT MADE YOU STEP BACK AND MARVEL. YOU COULD SPEND A LOT OF TIME JUST WALKING AROUND BEING IMMERSED IN THE HISTORY OF THE PROGRAM. IT WAS INCREDIBLE.”“
to beat the Running Rebels and win the tournament. The productive partnership between Robinson and Williams continued until 1995, with Kansas making Final Four trips in 1991 and 1993, both of which ended with losses to Carolina. Tulsa hired Robinson as head coach before the 1995-96 season, and he directed the Golden Hurricane to the NCAA Tournament for two straight seasons, winning a game in the 1997 event.
That opened the door for Robinson to become the head coach at Florida State, a difficult job with dated facilities and not always voracious support from the administration. His fiveseason tenure included one NCAA Tournament appearance, where they upended fifth-seeded TCU as a 12 seed and then were an overtime away from a Sweet Sixteen appearance.
When his stint ended in Tallahassee, Robinson went back to Kansas for one season—just in time for Williams to make the move to Chapel Hill after the 2003 campaign. That brought him back to the Smith Center, where the partnership had begun 15 years earlier.
Robinson had coached five games in the building as the head coach of the Seminoles (his team won during the 2000 season), so he knew exactly what to expect.
“When I had to coach against Carolina, I had to make our guys try to hate Carolina,” he says. “I felt that if they didn’t, we would lose by 120. You come in here and you warm up and start looking around and seeing all the banners and you’re mesmerized, and before you know it you’re down 25-0.”
His Virginia roots meant Robinson always had a deep appreciation for what it meant to coach in the Atlantic Coast Conference.
“I grew up watching ACC basketball,” he says. “I watched Charlie Scott and all the ACC guys who used to play, Thacker and Packer, all of those Saturday games on our black and white television. As a young kid, you always dreamed of having the opportunity to be part of a program like that.”
And Robinson has become an integral part of Carolina’s program. At practices, he can most often be found with the guards and perimeter players, and everyone from Raymond Felton to Cole Anthony has mentioned the benefits they received from Robinson’s tutelage. They also appreciate Robinson’s sly sense of humor (“People don’t realize how
hilarious he can be,” says Williams), and the perspective he has from 30 years of working with Williams. No matter what troubles a player is encountering, Robinson has probably seen it before. He’s the secondlongest tenured assistant coach in Carolina basketball history, trailing only Bill Guthridge.
“People on the outside don’t understand how much he does for our program,” says Brandon Robinson, who graduated in 2020. “When I got here, it was incredible how much he helped me.”
Tar Heel fans might forget about the luxury of having a former ACC head coach on the sideline, but they’ve been reminded of it on two separate occasions—when Williams had to leave games at Clemson and at Boston College because of vertigo episodes. Robinson took over to help lead Carolina to victories in both games, then quietly stepped back into the background after the wins.
The two games were occasions when the basketball world sees what the Tar Heels see every day in practice.
“Coach Rob has been in my ear since he started recruiting me in Concord,” says Leaky Black. “He might seem quiet, but he will talk to you every time he sees you on the sideline in practice or a game. He’ll make sure if you forget something, you won’t do it again. It’s not nagging, but he’ll coach you up.”
“I’ve been together with Coach Williams for so long that we know what each other are thinking,” Robinson says. “At practice, he can be on one side of the court and I can be on the other side, and we might separately say the same things. I’ve said something to a guy and then Coach says the same thing out loud, and they look at me wondering if we planned that. We didn’t. That’s just 30-some years together as coaches.”
Life has changed during the nearly 20 years that Robinson has been in Chapel Hill. His sons graduated from Carolina, with Denzel a member of the basketball team and Tarron playing for the Diamond Heels. He’s been inducted into the Assistant Coaches Hall of Fame.
And that kid from Virginia who used to gaze goggle-eyed at the Final Four program has climbed a ladder on three separate occasions to cut down the nets on the last Monday of the college basketball season. He’s done it all three times as a Tar Heel, a definition he’s learned to appreciate. Remember, this is someone who sat in the audience at graduation watching two of his children receive a diploma. He understands there is a broader institution beyond just the basketball program.
“The pride of wearing that Carolina blue is such a big part of Carolina,” Robinson says. “It’s not just basketball. It’s all of the sports and they have the same passion in the School of Dentistry or education or business. Everything at Carolina is at a very high level, and there’s a support for each other that is a special feeling. What I’ve given to this University and what this University has given to me, I’m a Tar Heel, and I’m proud of it and very honored and blessed that I had the opportunity to be a Tar Heel.”
