Spotlight on Hoover's Robinson

Every year, Don Robinson hints it may be his last coaching at Hoover High.

The comment does not go over well with his students.

“We all cry and whine because we want him to be or coach,” said Kayla Moua, who graduated in June. “He’s a very cheerful man. He always brings a smile to my face.”

Robinson started his coaching career 50 years ago. He has been at Hoover High since 1975. The former physical education teacher currently coaches badminton and is an assistant for the cross country team. He was the head track & field coach for many years, including when future NFL wide receiver Henry Ellard won the state triple jump title.

Ellard, now a high school coach himself in San Antonio after a 16-year NFL career, was pleased to hear Robinson is still influencing young athletes.

“That’s amazing that he’s still coaching,” Ellard said. “To coach as long as he has, the fact that he’s still doing it shows his passion for it.”

Hoover High athletic director Tim Carey marvels at how his longtime friend is able to connect with high school students and is confident that Robinson could do it in any sport.  

“If he had to coach lacrosse, he’d learn it in about a week and he’d be a better coach than I could ever dream of being,” Carey said. (Carey has coached Hoover’s girls lacrosse team for 12 years, with six league titles.)

Robinson, 74, has a lot of time on his hands these days to master a new sport if necessary. The corona virus pandemic has upended everyone’s routines, even semi-retired coaches.

Gone are the regular afternoon practices teaching students the finer points of hitting the birdie over an opponent’s head. His weekly cribbage nights with friends were suspended, as were church choir practice and Bible study nights.

As bereft as Robinson feels without his regular activities, he also hurts for the young athletes missing traditional class time, their friends and physical activities high school sports provides.

“There’s nothing you can do,” Robinson said. “I feel really bad. I talked to so many kids, especially in badminton because the badminton kids are not likely to be in other sports.”

The lessons Robinson imparts go beyond the playing field. His experience navigating world hardship goes back a half-century, too. 

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Robinson has always been active. He grew up in Orosi, about 45 minutes southeast of Fresno, the middle child of Allen and Dorothy Robinson. Their home was often full of children as his parents ran a sort of daycare, including taking care of a disabled girl during the week at one point so she could attend a better school than was available in her hometown. She went home on weekends. Dorothy Robinson took care of other children in addition to rising Don, his older brother Jerry and younger sister Barbara. The Robinsons owned and operated a sundry store.

His father, nicknamed “Babe”, kept score for high school basketball games and clock operator for home football games until the age of 80. He installed a basketball hoop on their garage and his sons built their own track on the property behind their house by dragging around a pick box typically used to hold fruit. The homemade oval even had sawdust pits for the high jump and pole vault areas, where Don spent much of his time. The Robinsons lived across the street from Orosi High – pronounced “A-rose-ah” by the natives – and inherited the high school pole vault standards when Orosi acquired new ones. 

One year, Don’s brother Jerry organized a track meet for their friends, complete with blue, red and white award ribbons on which he wrote each event. “A small town is a very good place to grow up as a kid,” Don Robinson said.

Don, four years younger, went on to break his brother’s track & field records, including in his specialty of pole vault. He said he was the first Class C athlete in the area to clear 12 feet. His highest mark at that level was 12 feet, 4.5 inches, though he reached higher marks in high school. While he learned on bamboo poles, Robinson said he preferred his brother's old fiberglass pole, which was lighter than the steel ones high school athletes had moved on to. Even then, he said, he was too light to bend it appropriately. 

Robinson graduated from Orosi High in 1965, a four-year letter winner in basketball and track & field. His smaller size kept Robinson from playing football until his junior year, and then he got so beat up on the gridiron that the basketball coach asked him not to play the next year. The coach couldn’t afford to lose one of his star players. 

Robinson didn’t know what to do after high school. He thought about what he liked to do and it seemed natural that he would teach physical education. He worked for a fruit packing company in the summers and continued his education at the College of the Sequoias before transferring to Fresno State. He had finished his student teaching when he was drafted into the Army in 1970.

Robinson views certain decisions in his life as if guided by divine intervention. He was slated to enter the Vietnam War, but a series of events kept him from going. First, his boss made a case that Robinson was a skilled worker who was needed to make boxes through the summer at the fruit packing plant. His deployment was delayed.

Then Robinson was sent to Fort Ord for training, where he was identified as someone with leadership potential. He still sounds mystified to be selected. “I have no idea how,” Robinson said. “All I know is it saved my life.”

Robinson was sent to a separate two-week training session to learn how to be a platoon leader before moving on to advanced traning. The role reminded him of being a student teacher. It was suggested to the trainees that they sign up for an extra year and enter service as sergeants. No way. Robinson wanted to do his duty and leave as soon as possible. He didn’t fear dying, he said. He feared having to kill someone in close combat and of being crippled himself. 

The week he was to report for duty, Congress said there were too many soldiers in Vietnam and no one was being sent in order to reduce the number of troops. Robinson was sent to Germany instead, where he guarded the Berlin Wall for a year. He would not be in a position where he’d be near the front lines. He returned to the United States in 1972 and resumed his education at Fresno State, pursing a masters in physical education. 

Moua said Robinson sometimes brings up his military experience in the context of telling his students they never know what turns their lives are going to take. Those words seem especially poignant now. Moua said she and her classmates are in awe that their easy-going badminton coach was a soldier. He tells them to “stay in school, get good grades and go outside to walk so you’ll clear your mind,” Moua said. “He cares a lot about our well-being and what we eat. He’s kind of like a dad.”

Robinson said he wasn’t always so dedicated to his classes and hopes his students take his advice about being a good scholar to heart. Robinson considered studying to be a physical therapist and said his eyes were opened to what it took to get through college, and life, early on.

“Things happen for a reason in life, I believe,” Robinson said. “I was a good student (in high school), but I was there to play. I was an athlete first. My first test in kinesiology, I flunked. I just did the bare minimum. It opened my eyes. Ever since then, I was prepared.”

He earned his masters in physical education at Fresno State. He met the woman he would be married to for 32 years and they raised two children together. He taught for a semester at Bullard High before taking a full-time teaching job and head track & field position at Hoover. 

As an eager new teacher, Robinson did whatever was asked of him. That included coaching boys and girls junior varsity basketball teams when there was a need and teaching biology for a couple of years – or being “allowed” to teach in that department when there was a shortage of science teachers. He said the department staff was generous with their time and patience as he sometimes learned on the job – about the subject matter and how to present it.

“I knew more than the kids did,” Robinson said. “I would go and watch the teachers (in their class) before mine. Classroom management is all different. I like being outside. I did not like being indoors all day long.”

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Robinson thinks his philosophy on coaching is a little different than most people. To him, winning isn’t everything. For that reason, he’s a self-described “oddball.” 

“I like the kids. I like to see them improve,” Robinson said. “I like to see them set a goal and try to get to it. Some of them did and some of them didn’t. The ones that got the most out of the sport were not necessarily the best kids.”

He doesn’t say that he predicted Ellard would be successful, but Robinson definitely saw ability at a young age. Robinson had a part-time contract at Fort Miller Middle School early in his career and one of his duties was setting up the pits after school. While they waited for the bus, some students took an interest in what he was doing and practiced jumping, too.

One of those students was Ellard. Despite Robinson’s encouragement, Ellard couldn’t stay and work out with the team. He lived across town and his mother wanted him to come home.

“I was always riding the city bus and time was an issue,” Ellard said.

Besides, he said, football was his first love. It wasn’t until high school and a sub-par sophomore season that Ellard was finally talked into joining the track team. He saw it as a way to stay in shape for football, Robinson’s advice that track would help him with his footwork echoing in his head.

“I loved Coach Robinson,” Ellard said. “He always wanted you to be the best that you could be. I don’t know if I would have had that state championship if not for him.”

Ellard means that figuratively and literally. He was part of the 4x100 and 4x400-meter relay teams in addition to his field events. He qualified for the state finals in the triple jump his junior year, but said his roommate at the meet didn’t make it to the second day in his event. The roommate stayed up all night, disturbing Ellard. Robbed of a good night’s rest, he did not do well the next day.

“I don’t know how the story got back to coach, but the next year, I stayed in the room with him,” Ellard said. Then he laughed. “I learned my lesson. I wasn’t going to let that happen again. He just wanted to make sure.”

Ellard was the state triple jump champion in 1979 with a mark of 49 feet, 2.5 inches. He went on to play football and ran track at Fresno State – the only school that would allow him to compete in both sports, Robinson said – and still holds the NCAA record for yards per catch in a single season (24.4). His footwork helped make him an NFL star for 16 years, leading the league in receiving yards in 1988. Now he’s a nominee for the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Ellard’s biggest challenge these days is reaching his students as the head coach of the San Antonio Christian High football team. He said he’s always making adjustments as a coach, especially in how to reach teen boys who are not as athletically motivated as he was. It makes him that much more appreciative of how Robinson has done it for 50 years.

“You’ve got to be able to relate,” said Ellard, 59. “That’s not generally an easy thing to do, especially for an older coach set in your ways. You want to do things a certain way. Don did a great job with it.

“He didn’t raise his voice often. He was able to get along with a lot of kids. That comes, of course, with the results of it. When you’re doing well, they buy into it.”

Robinson said he didn’t count league or Section titles. (Hoover’s David Cox won the CIF State pole vault championship in 1991 at 16-6. The track & field team won league titles in 1979, ’98 and ’99.) Robinson used to make a yearbook for the track & field athletes each year, listing their meet results and personal bests. He has them all, but he doesn’t look at them often. Those results have no bearing on the next year, after all, or his approach. They didn’t change the way he coached. Carey said he can’t imagine not having Robinson on staff.

“He may not be in spotlight,” the athletic director said. “He’s not going to be on front page for winning all these championships or whatever. But I’d rather have him on my staff than some high maintenance person. He is kids first and he teaches ’em and the kids love him.”

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Even Carey is still learning from Robinson. Rather than wait for his cross country runners to return from their off-campus training route, he ran with them. Now he rides his bike alongside them in order to keep up. He can still hit a 3-pointer effortlessly. Forget about facing him with a racquet. 

“Watching him coach, the technical skills …” Carey marveled. “I went in the other day and played a little badminton with his assistant coach (Dara Johnson). She whooped me. She said, ‘You don’t want to play Don. It would be embarrassing.’”

Carey knows. Early in his career, Robinson asked him to help demonstrate to students how badminton is played. Carey was so slow that eventually Robinson picked one of the students he knew could play for the lesson and told Carey he could sit down.

“He kinda taught me right then and there, you’ve got to be prepared,” Carey said. “You can’t just step in and think you can do it. From that point on, every unit that was coming up, I was on to the next one. ‘What are the skills? What’s he going to make me do here?’ So I was preparing myself to be a better teacher because of Don.”

Moua said Robinson has made her want to coach. She is taking classes at Fresno State, but hopes to come help the Hoover badminton team when it’s safe to gather for sports again. She won the North Yosemite League title and was fourth in the Section her junior year. 

Robinson is famously “terrible” with names – “I tell them in class, ‘Ten years from now, I’ll know you, but I won’t know your name.’” Moua teases him that he better remember her. She first met him in seventh grade when her older sister played for him. Their younger brother wants to play, too. 

“I tell him, ‘You won’t ever forget about me, right?’” she said. “I won’t ever forget about him.”

- Kelly Jones, CIF Central Section