City of Basketball Love

Stephen Pianovich (@SPianovich)
--

Joe Crispin admits his professional career did not go exactly how he planned it.

The former Penn State sharpshooter envisioned himself playing in the NBA for years, but he never stuck. He appeared in 21 games in his rookie season (2001-02), playing for both the Suns and Lakers. He bounced around in the summer league and some smaller North American leagues afterward, eventually going overseas.

The playing career wasn’t perfect. However, the point guard spent time playing for an impressive list of coaches.

With the Lakers and Suns, his head coaches were Phil Jackson and Scott Skiles. Crispin was on a Miami Heat summer league team that had a coaching staff featuring Pat Riley, Stan Van Gundy and Erik Spoelstra. In Europe he played for a handful of coaches – some great leaders, others not so much, Crispin will say – and saw what resonated and what didn’t among different groups.

Crispin estimated he played for somewhere between 25 and 30 coaches in his pro career and called it “an incredible coaching education.”

He’ll put it to the test starting next season at Rowan.

Crispin – who has been an assistant with the Profs men’s and women’s teams for the last two seasons -- was named Rowan’s head coach on May 9 as Joe Cassidy stepped down. In a rare reshuffling of the coaching staff, Cassidy will stay on as the associate head coach, and Crispin said the rest of the assistants will remain with the program.

“Naturally I’m very excited. This is home base for me,” Crispin said. “We have a lot of great things going on at Rowan, and we want Rowan basketball to follow suit.”

Crispin isn’t lying when he says it’s home for him. He and his family live about four blocks away from where he grew up (his new house is technically in Glassboro, though he was raised in Pitman, NJ). And it takes the former point guard all of five minutes to drive to his new office.

At 36, Crispin is a first time head coach. But with his knowledge of the team and familiarity with the area, it shouldn’t be too much of an adjustment.

Communicating his expectations and roles to the current players is his No. 1 priority. The second comes on the recruiting trail where his south Jersey and Pennsylvania backgrounds will undoubtedly pay off.

“When I go out recruiting, or make calls or emails, often times it’s not making connections so much as it is reconnecting,” he said. “It’s a huge help from a recruiting standpoint. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to be here, this is my home. We will recruit a lot of kids in PA/New Jersey area.”

With coaching in his blood – Crispin’s father, grandfather and an uncle all were coaches – and playing point guard throughout his career, his path to the bench seemed obvious. Well, at least to everyone except for Crispin.

Crispin got so wrapped up in where he was headed as a player, he didn’t really think about a job in coaching until about halfway through his playing career. A telecommunications major at Penn State, Crispin even entertained the thought of being a broadcaster (his brother Jon took that route and currently calls games on the Big Ten Network) before he decided to get into coaching.

“It was like getting hit on the head with a hammer, like ‘Duh, of course I’m going to coach,’ ” Crispin said. “Naturally, I filled that role on the court. That was always my role. So the coaching thing, that was kind of ‘How did I not see that all along?’ ”

For the last decade, Crispin has been preparing for that future. He read books, paid more attention to how his coaches handled things and spent some time at his alma mater working out and observing how practices were handled.

He gets to put that all into motion now at Rowan, where he says he wants to “make it the best program in the country.”

“It’s super lofty, but our university is growing and, lord willing, athletics will follow,” he said. “…I don’t just want to be the best, I want to play a fun style of basketball. That’s the way I loved to play, and that’s the way I want our team to play. I want to win, but I want you to want to come watch us play.”

Crispin’s self-described playing style was flair and fearlessness. Crispin – who loves watching the Warriors -- played like a 2000 version of Stephen Curry when he was at Penn State, where he scored 1.986 career points and 55 percent of his shots came from beyond the arc.

Crispin will still go out the court to “humble” some players with a shot he says will never leave him, though his playing career has been over for a few years.

But his coaching career is just starting, and Crispin has aspirations to be a Division-I head coach.

He’s just not in a hurry to leave home again.

“I’ve had a house here for the last 15 years, but I was never here. Now I can raise my five kids here,” he said. “So from a family perspective, I’m very driven to make Rowan the best in the country. My vision is much more long term, in Division I and maybe even at a professional level. I have very lofty goals. I’m not nearly in a rush to get there. I want to do something great here first.”