“Jen, who is fantastic, identified Eric right away,” USC president Carol Folt said then, in opening remarks announcing Musselman as .

And Cohen’s influence has only become more apparent in the month and a half since, as USC has brought in trusted coaches from her longtime days at Washington to fill out Musselman’s armada of assistants.

On Thursday, former Washington assistant Quincy Pondexter announced he had been hired at USC as part of Musselman’s staff. A former seven-year NBA veteran, Pondexter returned to his alma mater as an assistant coach under former head coach Mike Hopkins in 2021, who had been hired by Cohen in 2017 during her time as Washington’s athletic director. Pondexter also played four years for the Huskies, from 2006-2010, while Cohen was working in development offices at Washington.

It’s Musselman and Cohen’s second hire out of Washington, as they have also plucked longtime assistant Will Conroy away from Hopkins’ staff after his two seasons as the Huskies’ associate head coach. Conroy, similar to Pondexter, played at Washington in the 2000s while Cohen was a department employee, and .

It will likely complete major hires on Musselman’s staff, as the program tries to put the In addition to Pondexter and Conroy, Musselman has brought longtime Arkansas staffers Anthony Ruta, Todd Lee and son Michael Musselman with him to USC.

“They were completely in sync,” Riley said then, speaking of USC president Carol Folt, the Board of Trustees and more, “about what they felt what USC football could be, what they felt like that we needed to do to make up the gap. And they were totally united on doing anything and everything possible to help get us to that point.”

And “everything possible,” it’s perfectly clear, meant backing up the truck to bring Riley aboard.

USC paid Riley $10 million in a combination of base salary and benefits in the 2022 calendar year, according to its newly released tax forms obtained via university request by the Southern California ɫ����̳ Group. That figure made Riley the fourth-highest-paid coach in college football in 2022, behind Alabama’s Nick Saban, Clemson’s Dabo Swinney and Georgia’s Kirby Smart, judging by reported compensation

That’s not all. Riley was paid $19.7 million by the university in total that 2022-23 fiscal year, thanks to an additional $9.6 million in what IRS form 990 labels “other reportable compensation.” In a statement to the Southern California ɫ����̳ Group, USC clarified that additional amount went toward Riley’s buyout at Oklahoma, in addition to paying the taxes due on that amount, which was classified as taxable income to Riley.

First reported by on Wednesday, the document is the first look inside the head coach’s much-discussed contract at USC, which places him squarely alongside some of the luminaries of college football. It’s unclear what Riley’s salary was in 2023 and what it will be in subsequent years, as tax records only become available a year after the previous fiscal year has been completed. Saban, Swinney and Smart, however, all saw their salaries jump from 2022 to 2023; given the commonality in how coaching contracts are structured, it’s highly likely that Riley’s base pay has only increased since.

He was hailed as a savior at USC in his first season in 2022, accelerating USC’s rebuild to a stunning 11-3 season. But USC stumbled in 2023, in a well-documented 8-5 finish. And the clear reality of USC’s investment into Riley, in addition to other financial commitments detailed in the tax forms, only intensifies the importance of continued progress in the program’s foray into the Big Ten Conference.

Consider this: USC’s second-, third- and fourth-highest paid employees in 2022 – then-defensive coordinator Alex Grinch, men’s basketball coach Andy Enfield and former football coach Clay Helton – are no longer with the university.

Grinch, in particular, was paid nearly $2 million in base salary in 2022, and was given an additional $2.3 million in “other reportable compensation,” like Riley tied to his buyout from Oklahoma. That solidifies him as one of the highest-paid assistant coaches in the nation during his tenure at USC, which ended in after a couple of years of shaky defenses under Riley.

Meanwhile, Helton, amid a highly scrutinized seven-year tenure at USC, made nearly $4 million off his contract buyout in 2022. In other words: Helton was , the program that knocked off USC, . Helton was paid more not to coach at USC than Folt ($3.7 million) was paid to run the entire school in 2022.

Between Grinch and Helton, USC committed more than $8 million in 2022 – in addition to the nearly $20 million it paid Riley – to two coaches who are no longer employed at the university. In due time, if the program reaches the heights on “the climb” Riley references, those funds will have been well spent in the eyes of USC fans for glory restored at the Coliseum.

But the climb, no matter the destination, has come at a steep cost.

Don’t play for Eric Musselman.

Dozens of programs reached out once Thomas hit the portal out of Northern Colorado, as would be expected for a 6-foot-7 forward who had just averaged 19.7 points per game. Thomas took a visit to Arizona State and to SMU, who had just imported Andy Enfield and USC’s old coaching staff. But they were all playing from behind because former Arkansas coach Musselman had established a strong relationship with Thomas through his hire at USC.

So schools started trying to sell Thomas against Musselman, a firecracker of a coach with a polarizing reputation. He’ll be hard on you, Thomas heard. He’ll pressure you.

“And I’m like, ‘But, his winning percentage is (70%),’” Thomas recalled. “Why wouldn’t I want to go play for somebody that’s winning and everybody’s hating on?”

Quite simply, Thomas wanted to be pressured. He craved it. It’s what has drawn him, and a carefully constructed squad of hired guns, to USC and Musselman.

When he arrived at USC in April, Musselman had a virtual blank slate, nearly every 2023-24 Trojan holdover transferring out with Enfield’s departure. In came Thomas and senior Boise State floor-spacer Chibuzo Agbo Jr., two of the best mid-major transfers available. In came Ivy League graduate transfers Clark Slajchert and Matt Knowling. In came Michigan’s Terrance Williams, and UC San Diego’s Bryce Pope, both of whom have played four years of college basketball. With the exception of star Xavier transfer Desmond Claude, every player coming into USC from the portal will be a senior in 2024-25.

That’s been highly intentional, players feel. Musselman’s Razorbacks stumbled to a 16-17 record last season despite a wealth of talent, and several USC transfers told the Southern California ɫ����̳ Group they sensed the coach was trying to build a different culture at this new stop in Troy. He hasn’t gone star-gazing this offseason; Musselman has intentionally brought in grinders, mid-major players who are looking to make a name, players with weights on their shoulders as heavy as the chip on his own 5-foot-7 frame.

“The year just didn’t match up like they wanted to,” Thomas said, of Arkansas’ 2023-24 season. “And I know he was trying to … get a lot of guys that just mold together and are willing to sacrifice.”

Production over potential

A little over a week ago, Harrison Hornery, , blasted out a group text to USC’s mishmash of new talent. Let him know if anyone had questions about classes or housing, Hornery wrote. Feel free to reach out.

“So, I guess, like, the nice text that usually the senior sends to all the incoming freshmen, in the world that was college basketball 10 years ago,” Slajchert cracked. “But that’s no longer the case.”

No, this was a senior sending a welcome to other seniors, because Musselman has hit the portal for veteran help as hard as any coach in college basketball this spring. Partly out of necessity. Partly out of philosophy.

Slajchert entered the portal in early March, determined to prove himself as a combo guard who could control a game at the Power Five level, a veteran two-guard who averaged 18 points per game as a senior at Penn. On a Zoom with Musselman and his staff, Slajchert said, they presented a PowerPoint with an intricate breakdown of his analytics and shot chart from Penn. The sheer effort stood out, to Slajchert.

Pope entered the portal in late March, determined to prove himself as a bucket-getter who could score at the Power Five level, a veteran shooting guard who had averaged more than 18 points per game for two straight years at UCSD. After taking a visit to USC, Pope said, Musselman called him daily. When Pope went on a subsequent visit to Maryland, Musselman called him again. Don’t commit, Musselman pleaded. The sheer effort stood out, to Pope.

There’s no secret to this pattern. Musselman was taking a different approach than he had in previous years at Arkansas, Pope felt, prioritizing “high-character kids.”

Each of the Trojans’ current seven transfers was a starter in their previous stops. Every player is coming off seasons averaging at least 10 points per game.

“I don’t think this is, like, a rebuilding thing,” Pope said. “I think this is like, a – we can definitely win with Coach Muss in year one at USC.”

‘You have no idea how motivated I am’

Coming off a 2023-24 season as one of the best players in the Big Sky, Thomas declared for the NBA draft while entering the portal in late March, invited to work out privately with a handful of NBA teams.

But at the end of an initial workout with the Brooklyn Nets, Thomas sprained his ankle, axing the rest of his scheduled visits. When the NBA announced its field of prospects last week for the G-League Elite Camp in Chicago, Thomas’ name was nowhere to be found.

Immediately after he learned of the omission, trainer and close friend Adam Barnes remembered, Thomas turned to his phone and texted Musselman, in a message that will stand as the prologue to USC’s season.

“I’m about to work my (butt) off so much for you,” Barnes recalled Thomas writing, some variation of. “You have no idea how motivated I am.”

Back when Thomas was a sophomore at Loyola-Chicago in 2022-23, he struggled so severely with his mental health that he stepped away from the program entirely, moving back home to Omaha, Nebraska, to focus on training with Barnes. In his second go-around in the transfer portal, it was important for Thomas, he said, to find a coaching staff that could understand him and where he could feel comfortable mentally.

On paper, Musselman’s fiery personality seemed a volatile fit. In 2022, he’d screamed “ according to the San Diego Union-Tribune. In 2023, he was ejected from a And Musselman was honest with Thomas in his recruitment: he would push him at USC.

But Thomas embraced that. He wanted to develop into a first-round pick, and he wanted to win in his last year of college, and USC offered a “solid number” in NIL opportunity, Barnes said. So Thomas specifically asked Musselman, in his recruitment, to “yell at me just to get out of myself.”

“I want to be not only better as a basketball player, I want to be a better man at that,” Thomas said. “I think he can push me to be both.”

The range of outcomes for USC in 2024-25 will be vast, Musselman tasked with somehow coalescing a completely new roster into a competitive product entering the Big Ten. The coach is under pressure, as Thomas affirmed, after a couple of underwhelming seasons at Arkansas, and asked to jolt a sleeping giant awake at USC.

Musselman has assembled a group intent on seeking out that pressure, behind him.

“I just think we’re going to come with so much fire, energy, and I just know nobody – and I’m not just going to say the Big Ten,” Thomas said, catching himself. “I think we’re going to be a problem for the whole country to deal with.”

They’d simply out-executed the Trojans in the second half of their Elite Eight clash a month ago, transcendent junior Paige Bueckers getting to her spots and keying . In a season recap conversation a couple of weeks later, USC coach Lindsay Gottlieb didn’t mince words, saying the Trojans were chasing both national champion South Carolina and UConn, “who just beat us.”

They have an opportunity for a rematch now, before March even rolls around.

On Dec. 21, USC will travel to Connecticut to take on UConn as part of a two-year series agreement, this 2024 meeting set to be broadcast on FOX (Ch. 11). It will stand as one of the most hotly anticipated games in collegiate women’s basketball in 2024-25, USC bringing a retooled roster with transfers Kiki Iriafen and Talia Van Oelhoffen to play against the program that ended JuJu Watkins’ freshman season.

The game , or at the XL Center in Hartford, Connecticut, according to USC. In 2025-26, the Huskies will come to the Galen Center to ensure three straight years of the USC-UConn matchup, by which point Bueckers will be graduated and in the WNBA.

It’s a continued push for USC to cement itself at the forefront of women’s college basketball, with aggressive roster-building around Watkins and a move into the Big Ten Conference that only promises increased visibility.

• 

  Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, center, listens during a groundbreaking ceremony for “Lulu’s Place”, a $150 million campus of recreational and educational facilities near LAX, honoring the late Carol “Lulu” Kimmelman, a former national champion women’s tennis player at USC. (Photo courtesy of Jay Andrino)

• 

  The plot of land in Playa Del Rey where Lulu’s Place will stand when it’s developed, by 2026. (Photo by Luca Evans/SCNG)

• 

  Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass speaks during a groundbreaking ceremony for “Lulu’s Place”, a $150 million campus of recreational and educational facilities near LAX, honoring the late Carol “Lulu” Kimmelman, a former national champion women’s tennis player at USC. (Photo courtesy of Jay Andrino)

• 

  Doug Kimmelman, right, hugs Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass during a groundbreaking ceremony for “Lulu’s Place”, a $150 million campus of recreational and educational facilities near LAX, honoring the late Carol “Lulu” Kimmelman, a former national champion women’s tennis player at USC. (Photo courtesy of Jay Andrino)

LOS ANGELES — On his first date with Carol “Lulu” Kimmelman, Doug Kimmelman suggested they play tennis, because he’d been taking lessons.

That was 1989, and back then, Kimmelman had no idea of what she had accomplished six years earlier at USC. So they strolled down the block to a court, only for Kimmelman to come up gasping and slick with sweat 20 minutes in and see his soon-to-be-wife completely unbothered. She hadn’t moved an inch, he remembered.

Tennis was one of Lulu’s lifelong passions, her husband would soon come to learn. She was a member of the Trojans’ 1983 national champion women’s tennis team. Education was the other passion. She was a longtime teacher at Raymond Avenue Elementary in South Los Angeles, with a particular goal of working with underserved children. After she died at age 53 in 2017 of ovarian cancer, Kimmelman and his kids set into motion a plan to honor her with a sprawling community center based in Los Angeles, with tennis courts and other sports facilities that would be readily available to the city’s youth.

“How do we get the convergence of tennis and education?” Kimmelman asked on Wednesday afternoon, speaking in front of a crowd of constituents personal and political who had come, in a way, to support his late wife. “So, look behind me.”

With a groundbreaking Wednesday at a 31-acre site in Playa del Rey, located adjacent to St. Bernard High and LAX, construction has officially begun on “Lulu’s Place,” a $150 million center for athletics and education that will honor the former USC star. With plans to be completed by 2026, the design for the grounds includes a variety of tennis and pickleball courts, soccer fields, basketball and volleyball courts, a dog park and more, all intended to boost recreational opportunities for a wide range of nearby schools in Los Angeles.

It’s taken seven long years to get the project over the hump, largely thanks to the lack of available land in Los Angeles. Originally, the proposal targeted a lot in Carson, but Kimmelman pivoted after deeming that area “too challenging,” he said, due to environmental concerns. In May 2022, the Kimmelman Family Foundation reached out to LAWA to place a bid toward .

Since then, in addition to funding from Kimmelman himself, longtime owner of private equity firm Energy Capital Partners, Kimmelman’s team has brought on a wide range of donors for Lulu’s Place: Disney, Tiger Woods’ TGR Foundation, and Clippers president Steve Ballmer’s Ballmer Group, among others. Mayor Karen Bass took to a podium at the groundbreaking site Wednesday to declare that the city was “very proud to be a partner,” and members of the LAWA and Bishop Matthew Gregory Elshoff delivered their own comments endorsing the project.

“Pull God, the city and the airport together and you’ve got the perfect parcel,” L.A. County Supervisor Holly Mitchell told the Southern California ɫ����̳ Group on Wednesday afternoon.

It is, of course, not completely perfect. Many community members are concerned with how the noise and field lights, and increased traffic, will impact nearby residential areas, with in a public comment to the Los Angeles City Council that it was a “grave disservice to the local residents of Playa del Rey.”

Advocates like Los Angeles Unified School District board member Nick Melvoin, though, emphasize that there’s a significant need in the area for the campus, citing the accessibility for thousands of students to simply be able to walk to Lulu’s Place after school and have free access to sports facilities and low-cost educational programs. Additionally, United States Tennis Association CEO Lew Sherr established that Lulu’s Place would become the “new West Coast player development home” for the USTA.

At the end of the day, though, behind a massive conglomerate of political and corporate power, it was simply Kimmelman’s way to “honor his bride,” as Mitchell put it.

“We want to honor her legacy and what was important to her,” Kimmelman told the SCNG on Wednesday, speaking of Lulu, “and what she stood for and what her values – we want those things carried on from generation to generation.”

An hour after beating Stanford in the title game on March 10, McKenzie Forbes, Kayla Padilla and Rayah Marshall sat with head coach Lindsay Gottlieb in a haze of emotion at the postgame podium, Gottlieb pointing out this was a group that would be remembered forever.

“These guys will be off running the world, and whatever they’re doing next,” Gottlieb pointed to graduating seniors Forbes and Padilla, “but Rayah will try and take the next thing to the Big Ten and say, ‘Let’s be the first ones to win the new Big Ten.’”

After an offseason landing Stanford transfer and Oregon State transfer , USC has a better sense of what that “new Big Ten” looks like, as the Big Ten released its home-and-away opponents for all teams in the conference on Tuesday. The Trojans will play an 18-game schedule in conference play, facing each Big Ten team only once with a single exception: UCLA, who they will play both home and away in 2024-25.

A major highlight for USC will be a trip to Iowa, after the Trojans came a game away last year from a JuJu Watkins vs. Caitlin Clark matchup in the Final Four. Clark is gone to the WNBA’s Indiana Fever, but the Hawkeyes are coming off a run to the national championship game and . USC will also host Ohio State at home, which it played in Las Vegas to kick off the 2023-24 slate.

Here’s the full breakdown of USC’s Big Ten home-and-away opponents for 2024-25, with exact scheduling to be released at a later date.

HOME (last year’s record)

Illinois (19-15, 8-10 conference)

Northwestern (9-21, 4-14)

Michigan (20-14, 9-9)

Michigan State (22-9, 12-6)

Ohio State (26-6, 16-2)

Penn State (22-13, 9-9)

Minnesota (20-16, 5-13)

Nebraska (23-12, 11-7)

AWAY

Indiana (26-6, 15-3)

Purdue (15-19, 5-13)

Iowa (34-5, 15-3)

Wisconsin (15-17, 6-12)

Maryland (19-14, 9-9)

Rutgers (8-24, 2-16)

Washington (16-15, 6-12 Pac-12)

Oregon (11-21, 2-16 Pac-12)

“We have to reinvent what we had,” Big Ten Chief Operating Officer Kerry Kenny told the Hotline last week at the annual Fiesta Summit gathering for college sports executives.

“What we had was based on divisions, and we didn’t have to worry about who missed who.”

The Big Ten went to the division format and implemented a championship game in 2011, after Nebraska pushed the membership to 12 schools.

It will remove the divisions but not the championship when USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington arrive this summer to create an 18-team behemoth, the largest conference in major college football. In the division-less structure, the top two finishers will advance to the title game.

Each team will play nine league opponents and miss eight.

It’s easy to see chaos coming, with multiple teams tied for second place, no head-to-head advantage, a dearth of common opponents and no way to break the deadlock with three or four of the standard tiebreaker steps.

If the issue isn’t at the top of Kenny’s priority list, it’s close. And because the 12-team College Football Playoff begins this year, there’s more to the Big Ten tiebreaker than simply identifying two teams for the title matchup in Indianapolis.

The Big Ten champion will receive an automatic bid to the expanded playoff, but a handful of non-champions could be under consideration for any of the seven at-large berths.

“As we transition to No. 1 vs. No. 2,” Kenny said, “we have to think through the entirety of the tiebreaker because there will be CFP considerations for the teams that finish fourth, fifth, sixth.

“It’s not just about No. 1 and 2. It’s about all of it.”

Kenny went through an intricate process last fall when the Big Ten formulated a conference schedule rotation for the next five years.

After assessing 262 different versions, the conference settled on the so-called “Flex Protect XVIII” model. It took into account travel by distance, regions of the conference and time zones. The model also considered what the Big Ten described as “historic competitiveness and recent competitive trends, including home/away balance of traditionally competitive schools.”

In one sense, the basketball tiebreaker provides a rough model for football because it’s designed to break deadlocks throughout the standings in order to establish seeds for the conference tournament.

But there are no misses in basketball. Each team plays every other team at least once, and the head-to-head results provide a baseline from which to break ties.

“The misses are the biggest issue with football,” Kenny said. “In divisions, you generally don’t have large clusters of teams that look the same.”

At no time during the 13 years of the division format did more than two teams tie for first place — head-to-head settled everything.

Without divisions, and with the likelihood that head-to-head won’t apply because of the misses, the formula starts to look less like subtraction and more like something suitable for Isaac Newton.

“If you have a group with one common opponent,” Kenny said, “it makes you go deeper in the process, and you want to have it figured out before you get to the coin flip.

“We’re looking at whether there are other analytics we can pull in.”

Whatever process the conference eventually implements, it must be ironclad at the top and the middle.

“With the CFP, you have to work up how you go deeper in the process,” Kenny said. “You have to make strong, educated assumptions. The goal is not to get into a situation you can’t resolve.

“We want something that everyone can agree with and allows us to put the best teams forward, to Indianapolis and into the playoff.”

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In a long-established bylaw, the organization allows student-athletes just 20 hours per week of “countable athletically related activities.” And Robinson had come to USC with grand dreams, a blue-chip prospect in both football and baseball, hell-bent on chasing both.

Trying to squeeze every minute he could out of his eligibility come spring football and baseball in March, Robinson poured forth his soul in that classroom into one request: give him an hour or two more.

He had a support system at home, he wrote. His mother Mary Beth had been a talented swimmer at Florida, and his father Dominic was the impetus for all this, and former two-sport athlete in baseball and football at Florida State. He had a support system at USC, he wrote, working with football coach Lincoln Riley and baseball coach Andy Stankiewicz to toe this tightrope.

“I was just kinda trying to tell them, ‘I know this isn’t very typical,’” Robinson reflected. “But what I’m trying to do isn’t very typical, either.”

The NCAA denied it.

Robinson’s father still hasn’t heard an explanation. When asked for a reason, the NCAA referred the Southern California ɫ����̳ Group back to USC, who asserted that all information around waivers was confidential.

In the spring that’s followed, the 19-year-old wide receiver-plus-outfielder has lived in a race against time. Time, often, has won.

The raw pop drew MLB draft buzz coming out of high school in Arizona, but Robinson had never played a full season of organized baseball, and he’d earned just a handful of at-bats in this USC (22-24) season. He’s not ready to play full-time at the moment, Stankiewicz said. And Dominic can’t help but think, ‘What if Robinson just needed 20 more minutes, at times, to hit?’

What if he had an extra hour?

“You’re fighting with one hand tied behind your back,” Dominic said.

So he fights. A direct path to the NFL awaits, a 6-foot-6 gazelle set to be a primary receiver for USC in the fall after racking up 351 receiving yards as a freshman. He has a murkier route to the MLB, with raw tools that nonetheless make him a unique prospect. For much of his life, in the era of youth sports specialization, Robinson has been told to pick, a fate that only inches closer with every baseball gameday spent languishing in a clean uniform.

He refuses, not just dismissive but defiant. The days are long, and the process is slow. But Robinson is in this for the longest haul, and so he’s taken batting-cage reps and dangled lanky arms over dugout fences with nothing but a marble-white smile.

“It’s kinda surreal, man,” the freshman said on a call in April. “It’s a dream come true.”

‘My favorite sport is the one I’m playing right now’

He was an oversized ball of energy from his youngest years, a kid with a million words and thoughts and sentiments building up in a vast heart, and Dominic quickly figured out Robinson needed a release valve.

Every night before bed, they’d play a game Dominic called “High-Low:” asking his son to tell him his highest point of the day, and his lowest.

A young Robinson would chatter, for half an hour on end. There were plenty of highs.

Back then, Dominic wasn’t far removed . And in Robinson’s 3-year-old mind, his father wasn’t some sort of superhuman. He was just the goofy dude who raised him.

“I was like, well, if he can do it,” Robinson remembered, “I can do it too.”

He’d tell anyone who asked, at that age, he wanted to be a “sports player.” It had no specific definition. And his parents never tried to give it one. He played 104 games of travel baseball when he was 11 years old, and played basketball and football in high school.

“We just kept asking him, like, ‘Dude, are you having fun?’ and waiting for that answer to change,” Dominic said. “And it never did.”

Two years ago, Robinson visited the Texas Rangers’ spring training facility in Arizona, continuing a sort-of mentorship under Rangers bench coach Donnie Ecker. On that trip, Ecker remembered, the Rangers’ general manager Chris Young came over to meet the kid. Young had played both baseball and basketball himself at Princeton, the first male athlete to win in two sports.

“So,” Young asked Robinson, “what’s your favorite sport?”

“Man, I love ‘em both,” Robinson replied.

Robinson paused. Young stared. And in a sort of mind-meld, Ecker remembered, they both spoke at the same time.

“My favorite sport,” they said in acknowledgment, “is the one I’m playing right now.”

He navigated his collegiate recruitment with a plan unlike quite anything seen before. He intended to get drafted by an MLB team the summer after high school, play collegiate football in the fall, then play in the MLB’s minor leagues in the winter and spring. Deion Sanders never did that. Bo Jackson didn’t, either. And Robinson had never played a season of organized high school baseball, but had .

“The mold of clay,” Ecker said, “is as high-end as it gets.”

After committing to USC, though, Robinson never heard his name in last summer’s MLB Draft, sensing teams felt his potential wasn’t worth the risk in his two-sport approach. And suddenly, his careful plan was dashed, pivoting abruptly to balancing football with collegiate baseball for a coach in Stankiewicz who hadn’t recruited him.

“High-Low,” as it was known then, stopped a long time ago. But Robinson and his father still play it, in a different way, through texts and phone calls over a decade later.

The highs, these days, come both elated and weary, that natural joy flattened by bureaucracy and the weight of his own self-expectation.

‘He will kill himself to get this right’

On the morning of April 9, back in Arizona, Dominic Robinson woke up, walked his dog, and wrangled Robinson’s younger brothers to school. Several hours later, he sped back home, showered, and hopped on a flight to Los Angeles, finding a seat that night in LMU’s Page Stadium for USC-UC Irvine baseball.

On the morning of April 9, back in Los Angeles, Duce Robinson arose and pulled on his pads for USC’s 5 a.m. spring football practice. 13 hours later, he assumed a spot in the dugout at Page Stadium, hardly moving save for mid-inning breaks to jog to the outfield fence to stay loose.

Eventually, as USC’s bats exploded in a 12-4 drubbing of UC Irvine, Stankiewicz called on Robinson in the later innings. The Anteaters’ dugout began to murmur as Robinson strode to the dish, a metal bat looking like an oversized toothpick on broad shoulders. “Duce!” one player whispered in curiosity, the freshman an unknown entity.

Dominic watched from above the third-base line, pensive. In his first at-bat in over a month, Robinson saw three pitches.

Swing and a miss.

Swing and a miss.

Swing and a miss.

He trudged back to the dugout. Dominic’s expression didn’t change.

“We’re trying to build an athlete to do something that nobody else is doing, nobody else has done,” Dominic said a month earlier. “So, we’re not going to try to throw it in the microwave. Like, we’re going to slow-cook with him.”

Slow-cooking is difficult, however, when a dish must split time between two separate ovens. And Dominic, having been through it at Florida State, knew his son would crash early in the spring.

In late February, Robinson’s wide receivers coach Dennis Simmons texted Dominic.

“Hey,” Simmons wrote, as Dominic recalled, “I think Duce is going through that little funk that you told me about.”

It persisted. On any given Tuesday across the past month, Robinson would get up and lift, hone some swings in the cages, dash to class, sit in on football meetings, suit up for a sliver of football practice, then be escorted by a USC-provided car service down to Orange County for a baseball game. The NCAA’s denial made it even more imperative for Robinson to maximize his time, and to make matters worse, USC has played the majority of its home games 50 miles south at Great Park in Irvine, as .

“There’s a skillset and a strength to him that can do it, right,” Stankiewicz said, when asked if he felt Robinson could eventually be a contributor in both sports at USC. “Now, is he going to have the time to develop? That, to me, is going to be the question mark.”

The frustration simmered into Robinson’s conversations with his father, eating at his self-confidence.

“Dad,” Robinson would tell his father, “I struck out again.”

“He will kill himself to get this right,” Dominic said. “He will go to the end of the Earth.”

A wiser perspective

About three years ago, midway through Robinson’s junior year at Pinnacle High in Arizona, the same pressure crept into his movements. If he dropped a pass, football coach Dana Zupke remembered, he’d turn visibly upset. And the he would probably drop a couple more.

So Pinnacle’s athletic director Patrick Hurley began a ritual. Before every game, he’d find Robinson on the field, grab him, and ask him something to the effect of: “Who’s the baddest dude on the field?”

“I am,” Robinson would repeat, on end.

He struck out, yes, against UC Irvine. But shortly before, he’d texted his father, excitedly: he’d torpedoed a ball in batting practice 425-feet to dead center.

“There’s a peacock thing,” Dominic smiled in the stands at LMU on April 9, as Robinson stood in the dugout. “There’s a, ‘Have you hit a ball 425?’”

Robinson suffered an ankle injury in USC’s spring football game April 20, one that’s limited him for baseball even after football’s been wrapped up. But he’s set to play summer ball, another sign to Stankiewicz of his commitment.

“I want to be able to be one of the reasons that, in the next generation, there’s a kid who ends up playing two sports and ends up being successful,” Robinson said.

Earlier in April, Robinson and his father were embroiled deep in conversation, and it became time for Dominic to get his own words out. A bus sat in front of them, blocking their sight. And Dominic pointed at it, suddenly sensing a metaphor.

A month later, the bus still lingers in Robinson’s vision. But it will pass.

“In my opinion, we get so caught up in this world of, ‘You have to be successful all the time,’” Robinson said. “We’re so focused on the results that we forget to just enjoy the moment.”

“Like, we forget to enjoy just the fact that we’re able to do this.”

It was the first championship — since the NCAA recognized the sport in 2016 — where all five matches went to a third game.

USC (37-5) has won six of the eight championships — the last four under head coach Dain Blanton. UCLA (35-7) won the other two titles in 2018-19.

USC jumped out to a 2-0 lead behind its No. 2 and No. 4 pairs.

Twos Madison White and Maddi Kriz dropped the first game 14-21 to UCLA’s Peri Brennan and Devon Newberry before rallying for 21-19 and 15-13 victories in the next two.

The Trojans’ fours Grace Seits and freshman Ashley Pater lost the opener 24-26 to the Bruins’ Jaden Whitmarsh and Tessa Van Winkle. Seits and Pater trailed 8-4 in the second game but rallied for a 25-23 victory before dominating the third 15-8. Seits and Pater won their final five matches and finished 12-1 as a pair this season.

The Nourse sisters edged UCLA threes Jessie Smith and Kenzie Brower 22-20 to open their match. Smith and Brower answered with a 21-15 win to even it at a game apiece. The third one was tied 9-9 before a Nicole Nourse service ace and her block at the net wrapped up a 15-11 win and the 2024 title.

USC seniors Megan Kraft, a three-time AVCA first-team All-American, and two-time first-teamer Delaynie Maple cruised to a 21-16 win over the Bruins’ Maggie Boyd and Lexy Denaburg in the opener for the ones. Boyd and Denaburg led by four in the second game before the Trojans pulled within 18-17. UCLA scored the final three points, capped by Boyd’s service ace to force a third game. Kraft and Maple had an 8-4 lead in the final game before the result became moot.

UCLA’s No. 5 pair of Natalie Myszkowski and Ensley Alden opened with a 21-17 win over USC’s Mabyn Thomas and Madison Goellner. The Trojans eked out a 23-21 win to force a deciding game. USC was up 4-2 when the match was called.

USC beat UCLA 3-2 in the championship match last season.

Anna Collier coached USC to its first two titles — a 3-0 sweep over Florida State in 2016 and a 3-2 victory over Pepperdine the following season.

The Trojans advanced to the final this season with a 3-0 victory over No. 5 Cal Poly in the semifinals. The Bruins advanced to the title match with a 3-1 victory over No. 11 LSU.

One year after USC vanquished UCLA for its third consecutive NCAA beach volleyball championship, the Trojans and Bruins will do it again Sunday in Gulf Shores, Alabama.

The Trojans and Bruins are scheduled for first serve at 8 a.m. PT live on ESPN.

Led by American Volleyball Coaches Association National Coach of the Year Dain Blanton, the top-seeded Trojans (36-5) swept eighth-seeded Loyola Marymount on Saturday morning and then fifth-seeded Cal Poly to advance to the final.

The second-seeded Bruins (35-6), under the guidance of first-year coach Jenny Johnson Jordan, swept seventh-seeded Cal in the morning before dispatching of 11th-seeded Florida State – which stunned third-seeded Stanford in five sets in the quarterfinals – in four sets in the semifinal.

The victories set up a seventh meeting in the championship dual between the archrivals, who split six regular-season and Pac-12 tournament contests.

Their last showdowns came April 26 in the Pac-12 Tournament. UCLA pulled off a reverse sweep to shock USC and send it to the contender’s bracket before the Trojans stormed back to sweep the Bruins in the final for their fifth conference championship.

The Trojans (2016, 2017, 2021, 2022, 2023) and Bruins (2018, 2019) are the only teams to have ever won an NCAA beach volleyball title.

USC leads the all-time series 26-20 over UCLA. In the championship dual, USC has a 2-1 edge and is 3-2 over its rival at the NCAA Tournament.

This will be the last NCAA final at Gulf Shores, Alabama, before it moves to Huntington Beach in 2025 and 2026.