PirateCrew: Seton Hall Pirates Football & Basketball Recruiting
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By JP Pelzman
Like most Seton Hall alums, athletes and educators--and she happens to belong to all three of those groups--Robin Cunningham has fond memories of a three-week span in 1989, a time that will live on forever in Seton Hall history.
The difference for her is that she honestly can say that she played a key role in those three weeks, and the 1988-89 men’s basketball season as a whole. Not to mention being an important part of the lives of countless other student-athletes and just plain students as a tutor, advisor and mentor in her illustrious career in South Orange.
Cunningham recently announced her retirement from the University at which she first starred in three sports, including women’s basketball, and then became the director of Academic Support Services from 1984-2003 before moving on to hold numerous other important posts within the school’s academic hierarchy.
But Cunningham became best known to the fan base for her tireless work helping to set up and manage study halls for student-athletes, particularly the men’s basketball team, which she began working with when the legendary P.J. Carlesimo was the head coach. Cunningham quickly became legendary in her own right, at least on campus, for individually tutoring players.
Cunningham’s career was intertwined with that of Carlesimo's, who was hired by The Hall in 1982. At that time, Cunningham told PirateCrew.com in an exclusive interview, she was going to graduate school at Seton Hall. She was working on her Master’s degree so that she could become a teacher.
At least, that was the plan. Until Carlesimo asked her to start tutoring his players in English.
It wasn’t a hard decision to make, considering that Cunningham still knew pretty much everyone in the athletic department, including then-athletic director Richie Regan and associate athletic director Sue Regan, formerly Sue Dilley, who had coached Cunningham in basketball.
“Then it was just this snowball effect,” Cunningham recalled. “The two years I’m in grad school, I took over study halls for the men’s team, then I started tutoring the women’s (basketball) team.
“Then Shep came in and yelled at me,” she added, laughing, referring to former baseball coach Mike Sheppard Sr., “and said, ‘How can you not work with the baseball team?’ So, I'm like, ‘Oh, my God, now I’ve got to work with the baseball team.’ Of course, every student-athlete deserves this kind of attention, right? So that took me through two years.”
