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BY MICHAEL DOBIE
STAFF WRITER
October 13, 2004
The door to the head coach's office opened and there was Norm Roberts. Right beside him was Maurice Brown, looking as fit as he did when he was leading St. John's University in assists in the mid-1990s.
Both men smiled as they shook hands.
"I've got one more year of eligibility," Brown said, pausing for a beat and then laughing.
Roberts laughed, too, then told Brown to make sure the
office had his contact numbers.
"Help us out there, Mo," Roberts shouted as Brown headed for the exit.
"You know I will, coach," Brown replied.
Roberts went back into his office and plopped down in the cushioned swivel chair behind the big wooden desk.
"You think Mo really has a year left?" Roberts asked a visitor. He smiled wearily, and rubbed the top of his head.
Roberts was dressed in a red T-shirt and shorts. There was stubble on his cheeks and chin, the product of a second straight night sleeping a few hours on an office couch in late September. Hurricane Jeanne had wreaked such havoc with airplane flights that Roberts had returned from a North Carolina recruiting trip at 3 a.m. Individual workouts with players began at 6. No time to go home.
Outside, the rumble of dump trucks and the staccato jabbing of jackhammers reverberated through the window. Roberts could see the workmen erecting St. John's new basketball practice facility as he hammered the keys on his phones.
Six month ago Roberts was hired as St. John's men's basketball coach. Today he is surrounded by metaphors, every sight and sound pointing to the task he was given back in April: Rebuild a ravaged program.
Three days before practice officially begins, the progress report is clear: So far, so good.
"Everybody's been great, the kids that we do have are working hard, so I'm happy," Roberts said. "We have a long way to go." No major Division I men's program has further to go than St. John's, which ended last season in a shambles.
Head coach Mike Jarvis was fired in December. A sex scandal on a road trip to Pittsburgh resulted in the suspension or dismissal of six players. Another player was suspended for academic reasons. An eighth was dismissed for smoking marijuana. Suspended center Abe Keita alleged that someone on Jarvis' staff gave him monthly cash payments, sparking an ongoing NCAA investigation. St. John's finished 1-15 in the Big East, missing the conference tournament for the first time, and was 6-21 overall, the most losses in school history.
Worse from a recruiting standpoint, relationships with local high school and summer coaches were frayed after years of neglect and aloofness -- whether perceived or real -- by Jarvis and his staff.
But Roberts, 39, is an unsinkable optimist.
"We've got a great opportunity ... to get the program to where it was," said Roberts, who attended Springfield Gardens High School and Queens College in the 1980s as Chris Mullin was leading St. John's through its glory years. "There was a blip on the screen, a big blip. I'm not going to say there wasn't a blip. There was a huge blip. But you know something? St. John's is a winning program, a tradition of winning for years, and we can get it back and we will get it back. But we're going to have to do it right."
To Roberts, that means recruiting "low-maintenance players" who will not embarrass the university off the court. It means bringing basketball alums such as Brown back into the fold as mentors. And it means leaving no stone unturned -- and no gym unvisited -- in the effort to restock a program that has only four returning scholarship players.
"As far as reconnecting with city coaches and the AAU programs, I would give them a grade of an A," St. Raymond's coach Oliver Antigua said.
Roberts began by attending the first Catholic league coaches meeting held after he was hired. "He wanted to make sure he got to know all of us and told us St. John's was our program. I was really impressed with that," Antigua said. "From that day on he's been active and involved and calling coaches and inviting them to his office and stopping by open gyms and saying hello."
In six years at St. Raymond's, Antigua never was invited to St. John's until Roberts got the job. Christ the King coach Bob Oliva has seen Roberts four times since June; Oliva said Jarvis came to CK's gym once in his five-plus years. Gary Charles, coach of the summer powerhouse Long Island Panthers, was conducting practice with his 15-and-under team when Roberts called to invite them to Alumni Hall.
"Going to St. John's University and sitting in front of the head coach on his couch and him saying, 'Maybe one day you'll be wearing this uniform,' made them feel good," Charles said. "He was planting seeds for the future."
Roberts and his staff -- Glenn Braica, Fred Quartlebaum and Jose "Chuckie" Martin also are metro area natives -- have been planning for the immediate future, too. At least one of them was present at every Panthers summer game they were allowed to attend. Antigua said Roberts was the most visible head coach recruiting St. Ray's star Ricky Torres.
The attention paid dividends. Torres, a 6-5 guard who averaged 14 points and six rebounds last season, committed to St. John's last month.
Roberts scored points in the spring by filling out Jarvis' last recruiting class with three local high school players -- Eugene Lawrence (Brooklyn's Lincoln High), Dexter Gray (Mount Vernon HS) and Cedric Jackson (North Burlington HS in Columbus, N.J.). Torres was a significant step up.
"It's the first major player from New York City that St. John's has gotten over stiff Big East competition in a while," said East Coast recruiting expert Tom Konchalski. "It's the symbolism of reclaiming the city." It also was a symbolic break from the Jarvis regime.
"St. John's in the last couple years has not really recruited that type of player, a heady player that can shoot the ball," Xaverian HS coach Jack Alesi said.
Getting Torres might be the first in a series of dominoes.
"A prominent New York City player making a move to St. John's kind of makes it easier for the next guy who wants to go," Alesi said.
That might be Xaverian's Levance Fields, a bulldog of a point guard who tops Roberts' wish list. Fields, who visited St. John's during the weekend and also is considering Pitt, Miami and South Florida, is the type of player St. John's never used to lose -- a tough city guard with moxie and confidence.
"I tell him to stay home, we could make this happen at St. John's," Torres said.
Torres and Alesi have been impressed with Roberts' easy-going style.
"He's a nice guy, somebody you could talk to," Torres said.
"They connected right away," Alesi said about Roberts and Fields. "He didn't try to be anything other than what he is to the kids. The Norm Roberts you see on TV, that's the same Norm Roberts the kids see."
Charles said his star player, St. Mary's senior Danny Green, liked the way Roberts made him feel comfortable. Green did not consider St. John's until Roberts was hired and made the 6-5 guard a priority.
Still, Green chose North Carolina over St. John's and Pitt. Similarly, Brentwood's 6-8 senior John Garcia selected Seton Hall over St. John's and other Big East schools. Although Roberts could not comment on either player specifically, he made clear his disdain for losing any recruiting race -- even one that he was not in at the start.
"Coming in second means nothing," said Roberts, who assisted Bill Self at Oral Roberts, Tulsa, Illinois and Kansas before coming home to St. John's. "For me to feel good about doing my job, what I'm supposed to do, is a bunch of crap. I don't feel good about it."
Roberts has impressed locals with that passion, and with his humility. He often tells visiting coaches that sitting in the chair behind the big desk does not make him the better coach.
"I've worked hard to get the opportunity," he said. "But that doesn't mean I'm better than anybody else. I can learn from going to a high school practice. I can learn from going to a junior high school practice. There's always things you can pick up."
The message has resonated outside the city, too. Roberts landed verbal commitments this month from 6-9, 250-pound Marcus Spears, a junior college player Roberts successfully recruited to Illinois, and 6-6 swingman Anthony Mason, Jr., a high school senior from Memphis and son of former Knick Anthony Mason, who played with Roberts when Springfield Gardens won the public schools city championship in 1983.
Slowly but surely, Roberts is closing the credibility gap.
"It's going to take a while," Konchal.ski said. "They've got to re-establish St. John's as a major player in the Big East. They've got to give people reason to believe in them, that they can be competitive in the league. That's the big thing."
The task will become more difficult when Louisville, Cincinnati, Marquette, DePaul and South Florida enter the Big East in 2005.
"It's going to become a ridiculous league," Konchalski said. "Kids want to go where they are going to play, but also where they are going to win."
To that end, Roberts asked St. John's for three upgrades and got all three. He wanted his players housed on campus. He wanted a fulltime basketball strength and conditioning coach. And he wanted a training table for dinner.
"There's a reason why athletes at certain schools look the way they look," Roberts said.
Despite the many demands on his time, Roberts has refused to shortchange his current players. He knows his first team will set the tone for his program with its play on the court and behavior off it. He has tried to get back from every recruiting trip in time for morning workouts. Back-to-back one-day visits to hurricane-battered Florida and North Carolina were a challenge, but each time he managed to return to campus -- albeit barely -- before six the next morning. But the pace seemed to be taking its toll.
Two hours later, however, Roberts was a new man. Freshly-shaven and showered, wearing gray slacks and a collared shirt, he strode briskly toward the parking garage outside Alumni Hall.
"I've got to see a kid," he called out on his way to his car.
The keys already were in his hand.
Note: Newsday.com
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