Local travel-team hoops honcho found that activism was in his blood | Mike Jensen

Skip Robinson connected the dots of his own actions during the historic year of 2020 back decades, to the front gates of Girard College ... to a mountain of a man, his own grandfather, walking to those gates once a week to see his grandson. Grandfather and grandson would talk about the importance of this new boarding school Skip was attending in seventh grade.

“I remember my grandfather telling me, he walked around the college walls to get acceptance of minority boys into the college,’' Robinson said, referring to a seven-month picket line. “He would walk from 22nd and Ridge to 19th and Girard just to see me at the gate. He’d tell me, ‘These same boots I’m wearing, I wore walking around those walls.’ "

A security guard would understand why this man was there and let the older man step just inside, to sit on a ledge inside the gate with his grandson.

“He would tell me, ‘Whatever you do, do it with a purpose,’ ’’ Robinson said of his grandfather.

Skip Robinson has made a mark in Philly hoops, starting as an assistant coach at Prep Charter back when the Morris twins were there, moving on to help found one of the most consequential local AAU programs, WeR1, a travel-team home to such players as Villanova’s Eric Dixon and Miami’s Isaiah Wong.

Basketball kept Robinson busy in 2020, and he feels it’s been a blessing to be able to impact young lives. In his mind, though, 2020 demanded more. He’d experienced most of what the year had to offer. Furlough from his job after working in logistics for 11 years? Check. A neighbor in South Jersey suddenly giving the cold shoulder because of a sign on his lawn, even though Skip’s own wife works in law enforcement? Check.

“I never imagined your political views would change someone’s perceptions of you,” Robinson said.

When social-justice issues moved front and center this summer, Robinson was outspoken on social media about how college coaches couldn’t keep quiet on this front and still expect his support while they were recruiting Black players. They had to at least check in about the strife going on. If they didn’t care now about how their recruits were doing, he said, they never would. Did he get feedback from coaches on all that? He did.

“Let’s be real, every college isn’t located like our dynamic we have here, an urban city with a melting pot of people,’' Robinson said. “We’re sending kids to Iowa and Kentucky, to Purdue and Kansas. Those coaches have a social responsibility as well … I feel as though those college guys need that assurance from those programs, ‘We have your back.’ ”

Robinson figures he heard from about 20 Division I coaches.

“Some said, ‘Skip, I understand, we’re doing the best we can,’ " Robinson said, noting that some were upfront about how they couldn’t necessarily sway influential donors who had different opinions.

“I wasn’t trying to hear none of that,’' Robinson said.

He took it in, though. He lives in the real world. Still, he thought, what else could he do? He’d always been involved in neighborhood initiatives, since the days when Girard College became “the most life-changing event of my young life,” preparing him for college at Penn State and life beyond.

Robinson had first lived around 18th and Berks in North Philly. Then his mom got approved for an apartment in the Abbotsford Homes on Henry Avenue. Skip was 8 when they made the move, just him and his mother, but they liked his elementary school, Gideon on Berks, so they kept his grandparents’ address and Skip kept going to school there.

“My mother taught me at 8 years old how to catch the bus at Henry Avenue,’' Robinson said, including a bus switch. “My mom had to do that, she had to be at work at 7. I had an old-school mom. She would get on the bus, tell the bus driver the exact situation. He’d make sure I got off at the right place, hit that horn, make sure I got on the next bus.”

Robinson thought of all this with the election coming up.

“I’ve never dealt in politics,” he said. “I don’t even like it. I’m pretty sure this was a first- and last-time thing for me because it was so strenuous.”

What Robinson did, he started a GoFundMe campaign to pay for buses to get people to and from polling stations. He’d already thought registering people wasn’t enough. He’d done that, making sure WeR1 players were registered. Getting them to polls? They were in college bubbles. Voting absentee was the way to go there.

“I didn’t want to make it about red and blue,” Robinson said. “I just wanted to give people an opportunity to vote.”

He ended up renting two 24-passenger buses, plus a 15-seat van and an eight-seat van. “Had one on Broad Street, one on 52nd, one on 22nd, one on like Girard Avenue,’' Robinson said of the offers to anyone they’d see.

The usual question Robinson got: “Who are you? Why are you doing this?”

Then there was the senior citizen who after voting got on the bus Robinson was sitting in, in West Philadelphia, whispered to him, “Honey, I appreciate what you’re doing, but I need to go to the supermarket.’ We took her to Fresh Grocer. She needed some corn starch, some milk, some eggs, and bread. I walked in and paid for it, just because she could have been my grandmother.”

Did the buses make a difference? It didn’t hurt anybody. Robinson takes it all back to his grandfather. Curtis Goodson stood 6-foot-8, his grandson said, weighed in around 320 pounds.

Whoa, did he play basketball? Nope, he was the oldest of nine. Stopping school at 13, he got to work, Robinson said, and stayed in charge of security at a pawn shop on Ridge Avenue for 45 years. If an alarm went off in the middle of the night, his grandfather got out of bed. If there was a hassle, they’d be dealing with the big man.

“He would get his mail,’' Robinson said, and here he got emotional for a second, thinking of a man who died a decade ago. “I’d read his mail to him.”

Yeah, those boots that walked around the Girard walls left a big footprint. Robinson tells about how he came back after Penn State and one of his Girard assistant coaches, Dan Brinkley, saw him at a car wash.

“He handed me a scorebook and a coaching pad, said to ‘Meet me at McGonigle Hall at 5 o’clock,’ ” Robinson said.

They were actually going to another gym, to work with middle-school players. Among the players? Markieff and Marcus Morris. It’s been a heck of a ride for Robinson, who has stayed close to the twins, who play in Los Angeles for the Lakers (Markieff) and Clippers (Marcus). It was Brinkley, he said, who eventually pushed him to go out on his own. He’s gotten more and more comfortable using his voice.

“The college student-athletes can’t just be there for entertainment purposes,’' Robinson said. “They’re still students. Only 1% play professionally.”

As for his bus initiative, Robinson had looked to go to shelters, things like that, getting rides for “disenfranchised” people, but saw the whole thing wasn’t easy. Still, voting just seemed crucial to him.

“If it goes left the next four years,” Robinson said. “Then we’ve got to try something different.”

He’ll just connect more dots, taking them all back to a giant of a man who marched with hundreds around the walls of a local school, part of a seven-month picket line that ultimately succeeded, and changed the life of a grandson not yet born.