Franklin and Marshall's Robinson nears another milestone

LANCASTER - He's won more NCAA men's basketball games than any coach who couldn't offer an athletic scholarship, more Division III games than any coach in history. He learned some of his greatest lessons from up-close sessions with one of the legends of his sport, Dean Smith. He grew up in Delaware County.

Franklin and Marshall coach Glenn Robinson isn't a household name. In his sport, he isn't even the most famous Glenn Robinson. (Glenn "Big Dog" Robinson played a decade in the NBA.)

Yet four decades after Robinson began at F&M, he's still winning - about to win his 800th game - with little intention of letting up.

"I get up in the morning, it's the first thing I think about. I can't wait to get in here and look at Ursinus on tape," Robinson, 66, said the other day in his one-man office just off the gym lobby.

F&M played Ursinus that night, winning No. 798 for Robinson, improving its season record to 16-4. The Diplomats then beat Muhlenberg, 80-73, on Sunday for No. 799. Next up is Gettysburg on Wednesday.

"I told the team, I'm going to do this exactly as I ask you to do it - go as hard as you can as long as you can," Robinson said.

Over four decades, Franklin and Marshall's basement locker room hasn't changed.

"Identical," confirmed the man in charge of it the whole time.

The room is straight out of Hoosiers. Past a wooden door, the same narrow blue metal lockers, benches in front. On a board against the back wall, just past the shower opening, there is the diagrammed scouting report for Ursinus and three highlighted words - the same (Teamwork . . . Intensity . . . Poise) every F&M men's basketball player has seen before every tip-off for 40 years.

This isn't Hoosiers, though. Franklin and Marshall basketball isn't about being an underdog. Players generally leave that room expecting to win. Robinson's teams have made five Division III Final Four appearances. The first was in 1979, the most recent in 2009. They've won at least 21 games in 22 different seasons.

But Robinson is no relic. At a recent game, F&M's coach took exactly one second to get out of his seat, throwing his arms up in quick protest: "He stole the tap!"

His vision of how the game should be taught hasn't changed much. "Every time the ball would go into the post, you had to bend your knees, turn your body to the side, ball fake, throw a bounce pass," said former Robinson assistant Tom Sterner, now an advance scout for the 76ers.

Only then Robinson allows his players freedom they may not realize they have.

"I think we had three set plays," Sterner said. "A lot of times coaches don't want to take that risk because it puts the decision-making in the hands of the players."

"I can't imagine there is a better practice coach than he is," said David Rosenfeld, an F&M manager in the '90s who later worked in sports information at Princeton and Loyola (Md.). "The game was almost easy for the team."

However, on-court freedom exists within a narrow construct.

"Glenn had a lot of rules," said Matt Steinmetz, a 1980's-era F&M point guard who is now the pregame and postgame host for Comcast Bay Area's coverage of the Golden State Warriors. "One rule was, if there was ever a turnover, no matter what, it was always the passer's fault, even if it went right through the guy's hands."

That drove him nuts, Steinmetz admitted. He had his tussles with Robinson, once leaving the team for two games during his junior year over a battle of wills he had no chance of winning. ("Do you think we can win with you taking 25 shots?" "You know what, I do." . . . "Do you think we can win with you taking 25 shots?" "Yeah." . . . "Do you think . . .")

But Steinmetz swears by his old coach. Some lessons you can learn after graduation, he said.

"The funny thing is, it's still not too late," Steinmetz said.

"One of the things he does best - at a Division III level, you'll get guys, D-I guys who fall through the cracks. Most are at guard - one of the pillars of his program is his ability to develop big guys over a four-year period, teaching those guys how to play offensively and defensively," said Chris Finch, a former F&M all-American who is head coach of the Rio Grande Vipers, the D-League farm club of the Houston Rockets. "This may be one of the most unrecognized traits. Those guys end up being the bedrock by the time they are seniors or juniors."

Robinson is a precise man, even when carefully folding his handkerchief after blowing his nose at halftime of a game. He won't go so far as to say he is a superstitious man, but let's allow that he believes in the power of ritual. For years, he had to wear a blue shirt and blue tie at road games and white shirt at home games. On game days, he used a blue cafeteria tray if F&M was going on the road but went with the white tray for home games, matching his team's colors. That tradition went away, the coach explained, only because the trays are all wood-grain now.

"Some of them I've kind of broken," Robinson said of the rituals. "There are new ones to take their place."

Three decades back, North Carolina coach Dean Smith told the young coach who had just finished conducting a clinic with him at the Final Four, "If you ever want to come down to Carolina . . ."

Robinson interrupted Smith: "Don't finish that sentence . . . because I'm booking the next flight."

"No, no, I really mean it," the Tar Heels coach said. "You're really welcome to come."

Robinson booked the flight. He can still recall most details of his first trip to Chapel Hill, seeing an attention to detail by Smith that he still marvels at, remembering how Smith listed two heights for each Tar Heels player in the locker room - the height listed in the program and the actual measured height.

Robinson spent a week down there just before F&M's workouts were to begin. At the end of each practice, Smith came up to him and explained the goal of everything that had been done. At the end of the week, the two coaches sat in a corner of the Carolina Inn and talked hoops for 21/2 hours.

"I would ask a question - to me it was a legitimate question," Robinson said. "It would probably be Basketball 101, and he would answer the question with Basketball 660. I wasn't smart enough to ask the 660 question, but I was just smart enough to realize what was happening."

On the flight home, Robinson rewrote his notes. He'd done some things in the sport already. He'd taken F&M to its first Division III Final Four the year before. But he also knew how lucky he was to be able to pick Dean Smith's brain. He planned to implement a lot of what he saw when his own practices began the next day. Thirty years later, that is still in place. For instance, Robinson saw how injured UNC players didn't sit in the bleachers. There was a seat for them two feet off the court at midcourt so they wouldn't miss anything.

"One time when I was there, Michael Jordan, he was injured. He was supposed to be in that chair," Robinson said. "Every time Coach Smith would turn his attention elsewhere, Jordan would put himself in. He'd go, 'Michael get out.' Jordan could not stand to sit and watch somebody else play basketball. He would keep taking him out, but he would not yell at him, just, 'Michael, get out.' "

"We still only have a couple set plays - one is still the Carolina play that I got on that visit. We still use it to this day," Robinson said. "It has about 12 options - a quick hitter, a semi-quick hitter, a double screen, a back screen - and it has built into the play, if they deny this side, it's called the kickback option, which is everything on the other side of the floor from where you normally throw the ball. It actually takes the players a little while to learn it. It's the toughest thing that we have offensively for them to remember."

Over the years, Robinson tried not to bother Smith when he saw him at coaches' conventions, but the UNC coach would almost uniformly make his way over to Robinson, even as Smith moved to No. 1 on the all-time Division I victory list, since passed by Bob Knight and Mike Krzyzewski.

"He would almost always know what kind of year we had," Robinson said of Smith. "He had that followed in some way."

Robinson grew up in Yeadon until he moved to Aldan in eighth grade. He graduated from Lansdowne-Aldan High School. He played football, basketball, and baseball in high school and added soccer senior year, a new sport that needed players.

"I loved anything with a ball," Robinson said. "I could never get enough. I was always the last kid off the field, the last kid off the playground, and I'd be out there shoveling the court so we could play and then entice others to play."

Robinson played baseball and basketball at West Chester University. Baseball was his best sport, he said. He was a pitcher who played shortstop when he didn't pitch. He stayed at West Chester a fifth year and got his master's degree, he said, and went to F&M right afterward, becoming an assistant basketball coach and then the head coach three years later. He also was in charge of intramural sports for 25 years.

"He has done a fantastic job of making Lancaster his special place," said Finch, the D-League coach who also is head coach of Great Britain's national team.

"I'm from Delaware County, and I like Delco," said Robinson, who has a Phillies World Championship bumper sticker on his door and a Phillies trailer hitch on his truck. "I still enjoy going back. There's a certain way you talk when you're from Delaware County, and there are certain phrases you use. They all use 'em. So I love going back and being part of something.

"But I really do love it up here. We were so fortunate. We found a property that is very historic. The home was built in 1735. Nobody had lived in it for 14 years. A stone house, 201/2 miles from a here, due south. It was built on a land grant from William Penn. It obviously had an important place in the world because, the attic steps - it has a huge attic - are worn to being cupped. So many people went up to the attic, it wore the steps down. That takes thousands and thousands of steps. It had a hidden room for the Underground Railroad. The road now is actually closed, and it's our driveway. At one time it was the 'Road to Philadelphia.' "

Robinson made F&M, already a highly competitive academic school, into a basketball school. There are no team tutors, Robinson said. No mandatory study hall. His job is to concentrate on basketball.

During a game, Robinson will yell and grouse like every other coach and definitely work the officials. This particular game was the 1,090th of his F&M career. Late in the first half, the Diplomats ran a play, and apparently they ran it right. A sort of half-smile crossed Robinson's face as he turned to an assistant. It had nothing to do with the score or the opponent or any approaching milestone. Just a smart basketball play.

Within a minute, the smile was a memory. Robinson yelled in the direction of the same player: "You didn't hedge on the screen!"