Generals name St. John new boys basketball coach

William Campbell’s new boys basketball coach Robbie St. John, named to succeed Mike Cheek on Tuesday, knows the sport ranks a distant second to football on the school’s totem pole.

And he understands he will have his work cut out for him to get the Generals to be competitive in the extremely challenging Dogwood District.

But the 33-year-old first-year head coach, who got his start coaching at Linkhorne Middle while completing his degree in physical education at Liberty University in 2000 and 2001, is undaunted.

It doesn’t matter that the Generals, coming off a 3-17 season, haven’t won a district championship since 1969, or that William Campbell is the smallest school in the Dogwood, with an enrollment of 350.

“No one roots for Goliath,” said St. John, who served as an assistant coach at Patrick Henry in Roanoke from 2002 to 2006 before spending the past three seasons as JV head coach at James Island Charter High in Charleston, S.C. “If we embrace that underdog mentality and realize the pressure’s on other schools who play us, I’m confident the climate’s going to change, if, for no other reason than you know that when you play us, you’re going to have a fight on your hands.”

After talking by phone with new head football coach Dwayne Hamlette, St. John expects the Generals’ football team to maintain its standard of excellence next fall, and hopes his team can feed off of that success in the winter.

“Basketball’s a unique sport,” he said. “It seems like it’s not foreign to anyone. Going to a school that already has a core of athletes there, even if we have to recruit non-basketball athletes to play, any time you have athletic bodies on the floor, you’ll have a chance. If you have a winning football team, you have athletes in the school. I don’t see a reason why we can’t (win).”

He hopes to develop the type of athlete that never quits.

“In smaller schools, you see more of the traditional three-sport athletes, and that makes a difference in the way kids compete,” he said. “It makes kids hungry.”

At the same time, he’s not going to take a win-at-all costs approach.

“Coaching is an awesome responsibility in the fact that you have an opportunity through a game that the kids enjoy to teach them something much bigger than wins and losses,” St. John said. “Hopefully, after four years, these players will be better men in their households and more productive in their communities.”

He will expect a lot from his players, especially in terms of effort.

“In the past, I’ve been a very high-tempo press and trap, get your offense from your defense kind of approach,” he said, noting he will wait to determine how the Generals will play until he assesses the personnel he has to work with and gets a feel for how the rest of the district’s teams attack.

Though he has yet to meet with the Generals’ returning players, St. John has established a positive rapport with athletic director Rick Purcell and Cheek, who has “gone out of his way … to make the transition as smooth as possible,” he said, noting Cheek sent St. John film of William Campbell’s district games this season.

“The administration and the athletic director are very committed in helping to change the climate of that program,” St. John said, adding it’s good to know he won’t “have to fight against people to get things done.”

A former Liberty baseball recruit out of Monacan High in Richmond, St. John tore the rotator cuff in his shoulder a few weeks before he was to join the Flames. His wife, Mandi, is entering her first year of law school at LU.