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Conwell-Egan grad Pat Robinson III playing major part in Charleston's success

02/14/2023, 2:00am EST
By Josh Verlin

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)

Patrick Robinson III began his college years couch-surfing in a teammates’ dorm, his only scholarship offer, at the Division II level, coming too late for him to get his own room.

He’ll end them a major contributor for a Division I team having one of the best seasons in program history, having proven not only to himself but the entire Philadelphia basketball community — and beyond — that he can play with anybody.


Conwell-Egan grad Patrick Robinson III (above) is having a successful final collegiate season with Charleston. (Photo: Anthony Pompilii/CoBL)

Coming off a win over Northeastern on Monday, the Robinson’s College of Charleston squad is 25-3 (13-2 CAA), one of the best mid-major teams in the country. Robinson’s right in the thick of it, one one of the Cougars’ leading scorers and a key part of their leadership group, playing a significant part in one of the best success stories in collegiate hoops this year.

After getting passed over by every Division I school in the region coming out of Conwell-Egan, Robinson’s showing he absolutely belongs at the D-I level.

“It’s really satisfying,” Robinson said. “I’m just glad that I guess it happened for a reason. I couldn’t understand it, but now it just feels good to not just prove to other people but for sure to myself that I am a D-I player and I can be successful with the bright lights on a hot stage.”

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Robinson was a standout at Conwell-Egan, earning second team all-Catholic League honors as a junior and first team all-league as a senior in 2017-18, when he averaged more than 24 points for an Eagles squad that finished just 9-16 (2-11) in the top league in the area. 

Despite the high scoring average in the high-level PCL — averaging more than Isaiah Wong (Miami), Andrew Funk (Bucknell/Penn State), Seth Lundy (Penn State) and more — Robinson didn’t have a single scholarship offer to commit to, planning on taking a year of prep school to see what would happen.

“I feel like I had a really good high school career from my junior and senior year on, and to not really get any attention or phone calls or texts from anyone in the city that I was playing [in] was just alarming to me,” he said. 


Robinson (above, in 2017) was a big-time scorer at Conwell-Egan, but didn't get any scholarship offers. (Photo: Josh Verlin/CoBL)

“A lot of the guys in the Catholic League were really good, but I felt like I could compete with those guys, and they were getting a lot of scholarships and offers and attention that I wasn’t.”

It wasn’t until August that fall, his bags packed for prep school, that Holy Family head coach R.C. Kehoe and staff finally extended an offer for Robinson to join his squad that season. Too late to get a meal plan or find a dorm room, Robinson spent his first semester crashing with Holy Family and former Egan teammate Vinny Dalessandro. (“That’s a real teammate,” Robinson said.)

Robinson found instant success at Holy Family, averaging 18.9 ppg and winning CACC Rookie of the Year honors, though Kehoe stepped down after the season as the struggling institution reworked its athletics budget and made the basketball coaching job a part-time one. Robinson transferred to West Liberty (W.Va.), which had become a powerhouse in the Mountain East Conference under Jim Crutchfield (2004-17), with Ben Howell (2016-present) continuing a run of 12 conference titles in 13 years, with 13 straight NCAA Tournament trips. 

Robinson fit right in on the Hilltoppers, earning first team All-MEC Honors as a sophomore before the pandemic and a junior and senior after it, averaging more than 20 points per game his last two years there, scoring 1,656 points in 85 games at WLU. 

With one year of eligibility remaining thanks to the blanket NCAA Covid waiver for the 2020-21 season, Robinson knew that his proven ability as a scorer at the highest levels of Division II hoops would make him an attractive one-year rental for Division I programs. 

“I didn’t think I was ready to play pro yet, I thought there was a lot of stuff for me to learn, and me playing at West Liberty it was all pressing school and that’s cool, it’s a great school, a lot of success there, but I felt like I didn’t know the game well enough,” he said. “So when I went into the portal, I definitely knew I was going to go D-I, I just didn’t know where I was going to go.”

The Cougars had an edge in the form of Dalton Bolon, who’d played with Robinson for a couple years at West Liberty and then transferred to Charleston the year prior, though an injury allowed him to come back for a sixth and final season of college hoops. 

When Bolon heard that Robinson was entering the portal, he made sure to pitch his teammates’ name to Charleston coach Pat Kelsey, who has had plenty of success with transfers from D-II, NAIA and even D-III talent during his years at Winthrop (2012-21) and now at Charleston.

“I just knew he would fit in here and he would love it, I just wanted to play with him,” Bolon said. “I think we’ve got good chemistry [...] Off the court he’s just a great guy that everybody wants to be around, [and] on the court, you know what you’re going to get from him, he’s a great scorer, one of the best I’ve ever played with. That’s my guy.”

“We’re not scared away that a guy comes from a different level if the metrics and the numbers translate to a fit to our system, which they do for a Dalton and a Pat,” Kelsey said, “and [if they have] those intangibles, then we’re going to recruit the heck out of them.

“We say ‘how tough, how competitive, sport IQ, do they make people around them better and are they adaptable,’ those are the five big things, and you’ve got to do a lot of due diligence and a lot of homework. With the help and assistance of Dalton knowing him very well, Pat’s an emphatic check in every one of those categories.”

Bolon also made the pitch to Robinson, who had also been hearing from the likes of Stetson, Winthrop, Indiana State and more since putting his name in the NCAA’s online database of transfers. Having someone he could trust made a major difference. 

“He told me how much he liked it, and when I was on my visit, they treated me well, the city was nice, the food was good, I had a nice place to live that Dalton helped me find,” Robinson said. “It fits my play style, fast-playing team and I like to get up and down the floor.

“Everything was just lined up for me to go here.”


Robinson (above) joined a Charleston program guided by second-year head coach Pat Kelsey. (Photo: Anthony Pompilii/CoBL)

At Charleston, he was joining a program still transitioning under Kelsey, who’d led the Cougars to a 17-15 season his first year around but graduated a couple key seniors and had a number of new faces incoming for 2022-23. Kelsey came to Charleston after a successful nine-year run at Winthrop (186-95, .667), leading the Eagles to two NCAA Tournaments, and the expectation was he would bring the Cougars to March Madness after they made it in 2017 under Earl Grant, now at Boston College.

Charleston was picked fourth in the Colonial Athletic Association preseason poll this season, though someone knew what they were doing when they handed the Cougars the only first-place vote that preseason favorite Towson didn’t receive. 

It became clear enough to Robinson, who arrived at the school in June, that the team he joined was one that very much expected to take a big step forward in 2022-23.

“I think I probably realized that in meetings,” Robinson said. “(Kelsey) was expecting so much from all of us in terms of, like, offensive rebounding, we’re getting graded for everything on defense [...] and everyone was so committed, it didn’t seem like anyone was nervous or was at the wrong school because they were asking for too much. 

“Every one of our teammates, everyone loves being in the gym. We’re just filled with hard-working dudes that are dedicated, so I knew we were going to be good, not just in our conference but I felt like we had a shot to be nationally good, and of course we exceeded that.”

His “Welcome to Division I” moment came early, Charleston playing at North Carolina in the second game of the season, the Dean Dome’s 21,000-strong crowd dwarfing anything he’d seen before, not to mention the high-major and future NBA talent on the Tar Heels’ roster.

“(There) was a drop-off pass and the big guy tried to rip the rim off,” Robinson said with a laugh.

Three days after that 102-86 loss on Nov. 11, Charleston beat Richmond 92-90 in overtime, and didn’t look back. The Cougars ripped off 20 straight wins, 19 against Division I opponents, the longest winning streak in the country before being tripped up by Hofstra this past weekend. It was a run that took them all the way up to No. 18 in the Associated Press poll; they’re currently in the ‘others receiving votes’ category, even though they’re the first Division I team to 25 wins this season.

Robinson (above) is averaging 11.3 ppg for the Cougars, including 16.0 ppg over his last seven games. (Photo: Anthony Pompilii/CoBL)

Robinson’s been playing a big role all season long for the Cougars, serving as the team’s sixth man, third on the team in scoring 11.3 ppg, shooting 50.2% from the floor (best of the five) and 37.7% (20-of-53) from the 3-point arc, playing just under 20 minutes per game. It’s not as many minutes as he’s used to, but the job is the same: play hard and put the ball in the bucket.

“It was definitely an adjustment, it was kind of weird, but I try not to let it affect me,” he said. “I know what kind of player I am, what I bring to the table, I trust what the coaches are doing. But I know when it’s time for me to make a play, coming into the game, I’ll always be ready [...] starter or not, I’ll just be ready to go.”

The knock on Robinson during his years at Conwell-Egan was always the same: the left-hander was too reliant on his dominant hand, Division I coaches worried that he would be too predictable with the ball in his hands. 

That right hand? It’s “coming along,” Robinson said, but it’s become clear over the years that his left hand is plenty good enough.

“My favorite thing about Pat is the whole entire gym will know he’s going left and you just can’t stop him,” said Eric Esposito, Robinson’s teammate at both Conwell-Egan and Holy Family, where he’s now a fifth-year senior. “Over the years, his right hand has gotten better, which just made him that much harder to stop — plus he’s built like a running back and runs like a wide receiver.”

Robinson just set his season high on Saturday, going for 30 points in 25 minutes in a win at Hampton, then followed that up with 14 against Northeastern on Monday, his seventh consecutive game in double figures as Charleston kept even with Hofstra atop the CAA standings.

That included a game against Drexel on Feb. 2 at the Daskalakis Athletic Center. It was the first collegiate game Robinson had played in Philadelphia in 1,433 days — from March 2, 2019 to Feb. 2, 2023, one month shy of four years, since the regular-season finale of his freshman year at Holy Family. 

It was also his first start of the season, and though Drexel pulled the upset, it was a thrill for those who’ve known Pat since his high school days to see him play back home in a Division I game, and belong.

“It’s awesome. I always knew that this is the level he could play at, even when he was my teammate, I knew that he could go higher than that,” said Esposito, who was there with some family and friends to see Robinson play, rooting against the local squad for an evening. “It’s awesome to just see it all come together; he works harder than anyone I know. You see it every year in his body, he comes back 20 pounds stronger, faster. I’m just really happy for him, it’s great to see him.”

Robinson III always thought he was good enough to play D-I basketball. He’s proven that he is, beyond a doubt. 

There’s one more goal left: a trip to March Madness, which would almost certainly take a win in the CAA Tournament in Washington D.C. in early March.

“I do think about that and it makes me appreciate every win that we get, and that’s important,” he said. “I think we have to win out for that to be true [...] it was always my dream to play in (the NCAA Tournament).”


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