Craig Robinson

Craig Malcolm Robinson (born April 21, 1962) is an American college basketball coach, basketball executive, and broadcaster.

He is a former head men's basketball coach at Oregon State University and Brown University.

Craig Malcolm Robinson was born on April 21, 1962, in Calumet Park, Illinois, to Fraser Robinson, a city water plant employee and Democratic precinct captain, and Marian Robinson (née Shields), a secretary at Spiegel's catalog store.

Robinson grew up in Chicago's South Shore with his younger sister, Former First Lady, Michelle Obama.

He learned to read by the age of four at home and skipped the second grade in school.

He attended the parochial Mount Carmel High School, graduating in 1979 as class valedictorian.

When Robinson was considering what college to go to, his father insisted that he attend Princeton University for its Ivy League academics, rather than either the University of Washington or Purdue University, which offered scholarships and major basketball conference play.

He was a star forward as a player at Princeton University in the early 1980s and a bond trader during the 1990s.

He currently is the Executive Director of the National Association of Basketball Coaches.

He is former First Lady Michelle Obama's brother.

Robinson, who stands 6 ft and played forward, was a two-time Ivy League Player of the Year at Princeton University, in 1981–1982 and 1982–1983, leading the league in field goal percentage both years.

He is the fourth highest scorer in school history.

He graduated in 1983 with a B.A. in Sociology.

His senior thesis was on social stratification in prisons.

Robinson and former teammate John W. Rogers, Jr. were among those invited to practice with Michael Jordan as he prepared for his comeback.

Robinson was drafted in the fourth round of the 1983 NBA draft by the Philadelphia 76ers, but never played in the league.

He played professionally for the Manchester Giants in the British Basketball League for two seasons and returned to the U.S. in 1988 to become an assistant coach at the Illinois Institute of Technology, a position he held until 1990.

Robinson worked in the 1990s as a bond trader.

He became a vice president at Continental Illinois Bank and worked there from 1990 to 1992.

Robinson left basketball partly on the advice of his Princeton coach Pete Carril and pursued a business degree, earning an M.B.A. in Finance from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business in 1992.

He was then a vice president, from 1992 to 1999, at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter.

Later, he was a managing director and partner at Loop Capital Markets, a minority-owned boutique investment banking firm.

When Robinson's sister, Michelle, began dating her law firm colleague, Barack Obama, who played basketball recreationally, she asked her brother to play with Obama and give her a character assessment so that she would know whether she could become serious with him.

He gave an encouraging report to her.

As he later related, "When I played basketball with Barack, he was quietly confident, which means he had good self-esteem without being cocky. He was certainly a team player – he wasn't a pig, he passed when he was supposed to pass, and he cut when he was supposed to cut. To me, that speaks to a lack of selfishness. He had natural leadership ability because he didn't just pass me the ball because he was dating my sister. Whenever a player gets tired, he reverts to the player he truly is. That's how you tell. And we played for hours. That's how I could tell."

The story of this pick-up game and of a "test" being passed became a key part of the Obama narrative.

While working in the business world, Robinson kept a hand in basketball by doing area scouting for Princeton and coaching one year at University of Chicago Laboratory Schools.

He earned a high six-figure income in his business career, but he eventually decided the financial world had lost its appeal and found his luxury lifestyle was not enough to save his marriage to Janis Robinson.

Robinson has two children from his first marriage, a son Avery (born 1992) and a daughter Leslie (born 1996).

Robinson returned to coaching in 1999, making one-tenth his former salary.

He was an assistant for six years to Bill Carmody at Northwestern University, where he was an effective recruiter.

By 2000, Robinson was going through a divorce.

Robinson remarried in June 2006 to his current wife Kelly.

He then became a head coach at Brown University in 2006, where he ran a variation of the Princeton offense which he learned from Pete Carril during his years at Princeton.

In improving a mid-level basketball program, he stressed work ethic, used tough love, and tried to improve the players' vocabulary.

Having placed fifth with a strong finish to the season garnered Robinson the Ivy League men's basketball Coach of the Year for the 2006–2007 season by Basketball-U.com.

The following year, the Brown Bears finished second in the league, and their 19 wins for the season was a team record.

Robinson assisted his brother-in-law throughout the latter's 2008 presidential campaign, including campaigning for him during the Iowa caucuses and campaigning and giving speeches for him in a number of other states, sometimes combining campaigning with recruiting visits.

They became parents of sons Austin in 2010 and Aaron in 2012.

His daughter Leslie played for the Princeton Tigers women's basketball team as a forward.