Chris Vaccaro
MaxPreps.com
Longtime Levittown-Division high school baseball coach Doug Robins was a strong and influential man. So much so that he coached last season with head and neck cancer. However, he lost his battle with the disease Feb. 12. He was 58.
Robins, the second all-time winningest coach in New York State history with 674 wins, was diagnosed with brain cancer in March 2005 and had surgery to remove a malignant brain tumor along with rounds of chemotherapy shortly after. He beat that, but later developed the head and neck cancer. Typical to his strong-willed characteristics, he continued to carry on his normal activities, knowing the cancer was terminal.
He was a physical education teacher and athletic director at Division and spent 30 seasons at the helm of one New York's finest baseball programs. He lost just 149 games in that time, winning two Class B state titles (1984 and 1996), five Long Island titles, nine Nassau County titles and 24 league championships. He had 16 players become professional baseball players and 19 others are coaches at the high school or college level.
"It was one thing to teach the boys about baseball," longtime friend and assistant coach Tom Casey, Jr. said. "But teaching them things about life is far more significant. The players became good fathers, good husbands and good men because of Doug."
Robins' two sons, Doug Jr. and Steve, who both played for their father, went on to be high school coaches on Long Island. Doug Jr., a member of the 1988 Olympic Baseball Team, coaches at New Hyde Park, while Steve is a coach at Glenn.
Some of Doug Sr.'s notable players are Shawn Fagan, an All-America at Penn State, who briefly spent time with the Toronto Blue Jays, as well as Chris Flinn, a prospect in the Tampa Bay Devil Rays' organization. He was selected in the third round of the 2001 Major League Baseball Draft and shares the all-time strikeout record at Stony Brook University.
The first state title in 1984 came after the district merged Levittown and Division High Schools into one. Even through adversity them, Robins knew exactly how to handle the situation.
"He's one of the main reasons why I am who I am today," Newsday sportswriter Tom Rock, who played for Robins in 1990 and 1991, said. "I was kind of a quiet kid in high school and wasn't a very good baseball player and he helped me blossom into who I became."
Robins, a 1966 graduate of the Levittown School District, played at Nassau Community College and C.W. Post (Long Island University), and experienced the same success with baseball at an early age. He was offered minor league contracts to pitch with the San Francisco Giants and catch for the New York Mets out of high school, but chose college instead.
With Nassau, his 1967 team was ranked fourth in the nation and went to the Junior College World Series. In 1970 he signed as a free agent with the New York Yankees, but was released in 1971 by Bobby Cox from the Fort Lauderdale team of the Florida State League.
It was men like Cox that Robins learned to coach the way he did. Even as a grown man playing in men's leagues on Long Island, Robins was still learning and used his time as a minor leaguer as a stepping stone in life.
Robins was a coach who constantly looked for ways to improve his team, evolving his coaching skills with the evolution of the game. He preached the fundamentals of defense and base-running and took copious notes.
Robins and Casey met in October 1977 when they interviewed for jobs together and not long after began a friendship that Casey says bonded them like brothers. Casey says he will not coach again without Robins.
"If Doug's done, I'm done," he said. "I couldn't imagine being there without him."
The new head coach will be Tom Tuttle, a 1991 graduate of Division and one of Robins' former players. His assistant will be Kevin Daniel.
