Kent State offers Senderoff second chance
This is a profile on Rob Senderoff, the former Indiana assistant who was found guilty of several NCAA violations as part of the recruiting scandal of 2007. This story was written after Senderoff was named head coach at Kent State.
Rob Senderoff got word of his promotion, sprung from the chair he was sitting in and bear-hugged his superiors.
Three-and-a-half years ago, when he was fired as an assistant coach at Indiana, he had braced himself to accept that news like this might never come his way. Even if it did, it certainly wouldn’t be this soon.
In the NCAA’s eyes, he was a criminal. In many athletic directors’ eyes, he was radioactive. So he imagined years, if not decades, would pass before he ever found this level of redemption.
But there were Kent State athletic director Joel Nielsen and executive associate athletic director Tom Kleinlein sitting across from him earlier this month, telling the 37-year-old Senderoff that, for the first time, he would be in charge of his own program. After seven years as a Golden Flashes assistant — four before his time at Indiana and three since — he would be the head basketball coach of the most consistently successful program in the Mid-American Conference.
“What went through my mind was elation,” Senderoff said. “I can’t describe it any other way than that. Professionally, it was the best moment of my life. The birth of my children was the best moment of my life, but professionally, this was the best . My negotiation strategy for my contract was, ‘Where’s the pen?’”
• • •
Senderoff isn’t the target of nearly as much disdain from Indiana fans as his former boss, Kelvin Sampson. The most cynical among them may view Senderoff as a henchman, but most consider him more of a scapegoat or fall guy for a coach who was looking to use his underlings to get around the sanctions he brought with him from Oklahoma.
Still, seeing quick success for the perpetrators of the recruiting scandal that brought Indiana to its knees still has to sting a bit. Tom Crean’s in-state recruiting haul provides hope, but the Hoosiers are still coming off their third straight 20-loss season. Meanwhile, Sampson already has an assistant coaching job in the NBA with the Milwaukee Bucks. Now this.
Elation? How, IU fans must wonder, does Senderoff get to experience elation already? Isn’t there still some smoldering ash he has to answer for? Why does he get to move on while Indiana continues to suffer?
Senderoff broke NCAA rules. He made a list of impermissible phone calls to recruits. He set up three-way calls with Sampson and recruits that were not legal because Sampson already was under sanction and found other ways of involving Sampson in recruiting contacts he was not supposed to be involved in. Those violations helped lead to a litany of self-imposed penalties by IU, three years of probation set forth by the NCAA, the firing of Sampson, and, eventually, the roster purge that sent the Hoosiers into the 2008-09 season with two returning players. After a last-place finish in the Big Ten in 2010-11, Indiana still can’t say it has fully recovered.
Senderoff regrets this, he says. He declined comment when asked why he did what he did, but stressed that he wishes the program, the city, and the state the best, knowing well that within all three there are many who don’t feel the same way about him.
“I made some mistakes while I was there,” he said. “I wish it didn’t happen. But there’s nothing I can do about it now except be apologetic and take responsibility for my actions. I feel like I’ve done that ever since it happened.”
Indeed, at a certain point in time there was nothing else Senderoff could do to seek forgiveness. His only road to redemption involved moving on with his life, finding a way to provide for his young family and hoping he could convince an employer that what he did was not who he was.
Fortunately for Senderoff, he still had friends at Kent State who believed that.
• • •
Laing Kennedy was staggered when he saw the news come across the ESPN ticker at the end of October 2007. He’d heard that Indiana was in trouble and Senderoff might have been involved, but it didn’t truly strike him until he saw his former employee’s name next to the words “forced to resign.”
“I said ‘Oh My God,’” Kennedy said. “We’d heard that Indiana had problems, but I had no direct knowledge, and I had heard that Rob may be involved. But when you see it on the ticker, it hits you pretty hard.”
To Kennedy, then Kent State’s athletic director, it just didn’t make any sense. In Senderoff’s four years as an assistant coach under then head coach Jim Christian, he couldn’t have been more by-the-book. He’d never committed even the tiniest of secondary violations. Compliance personnel described Senderoff as their “go-to guy” on the men’s basketball staff. He was ambitious, clearly a rising star in the profession, but he never stepped outside the lines to move up in the world.
“It was just not Rob,” Kennedy said. “I said that to many people. ‘I just don’t understand this. I really don’t understand how he could’ve ever got wrapped up into something like this.’”
At the time there was nothing Kennedy could do to help. The season was about to start, and Christian didn’t have any openings.
Senderoff, meanwhile, had to make some tough choices. He and his wife Lauren already had one daughter, and Lauren was pregnant with a second. He decided to move his family in with his parents — a humbling move for the then 34-year-old — in Spring Valley, N.Y. He found volunteer work with the Hoop Group, a New Jersey-based organization that runs basketball clinics and AAU level tournaments. He had his expenses paid for the two-hour commute, but otherwise, he and his family were living and paying his legal bills off his savings and a severance deal from IU that, combined with unbalanced leave, amounted to around $66,000.
It didn’t take much time to go through that, though, and Senderoff started to make plans to get into another profession.
He was lucky fate moved quickly. Christian left Kent State in March 2008 to be the head coach at Texas Christian. As they so often do, the Golden Flashes promoted from within, making assistant coach Geno Ford his successor. Before a two-year stint as the head coach at Muskingum, Ford spent three years with Senderoff as an assistant under Christian. The Golden Flashes were a combined 64-31 in those years, and Ford wanted to bring Senderoff back to the staff.
Kennedy was willing to make that happen, even though he knew Senderoff would likely carry with him some form of NCAA cloud.
“Clearly he made some poor decisions and got involved in something that he shouldn’t have,” Kennedy said. “But at the same time, I sensed his honesty in his full disclosure to me. He shared everything with me. So did his attorneys. There was total transparency, I was pleased with that. There was no attempt on Rob’s part to sugarcoat this thing, ‘It wasn’t my fault.’ No, he stood up and took it.”
So Kennedy agreed to stand with him, and so did Kent State president Lester Lefton. Senderoff was hired as an assistant in April 2008 and that June, when Senderoff had to go to Seattle for a hearing with the NCAA about his Indiana violations, Kennedy went with him. Senderoff was handed a three-year show cause penalty (later reduced to 30 months on appeal) which meant that if Kent State were to hire him, he would be held to recruiting restrictions, and the school would have to show it had a plan to keep him compliant. The school did and agreed to keep an assistant coach who would not be able to recruit at all his first year and would be restricted for each of his first three.
“A lot of people wanted me to come back,” Senderoff said. “And I’m very fortunate that they did. If I didn’t have the support of all those people, who knows what would’ve happened. I’m eternally grateful to them.”
• • •
Senderoff was determined to earn the trust Kent State had invested in him, so he was even more of a stickler for details and documentation than was expected.
In his first year, he wasn’t allowed to be involved in any off-campus recruiting. In his second year, he was allowed to make half the recruiting contacts and evaluations that other assistant coaches were. In his third year, evaluations and e-mail restrictions returned to normal, but he was only allowed half the typically permissible phone calls. Those restrictions are still in effect until May 25.
He made it crystal clear to compliance personnel that he was abiding by the rules.
“He’s been very proactive with a lot of these things,” said Randale Richmond, Kent State’s assistant athletic director for compliance. “We were supposed to check his home phone twice a year, we’ve gotten those records every month. We’re supposed to get his phone logs every month, he goes through those with us every Monday. If the team is on the road Monday morning, he hand delivers the logs himself the next day. He’s been very proactive.”
Said Senderoff: “I went above and beyond what was asked of me to ‘A’, assure that I’d never put myself in a situation like the one I was in, and ‘B,’ so that they knew that I was not having a cavalier attitude toward this. It was really important for them to know that this means a lot, and that I wanted to make sure there was never an issue, never a doubt or a question of any form on that end.”
And he also wanted Ford to believe he was getting his money’s worth from an assistant who couldn’t do much recruiting, so he took responsibilities that are typically evenly distributed among the assistants. In his first year on staff, he did the scouting reports for every game. He assembled the non-conference schedule. He even had the freedom to design and run the offense.
And in his limited recruiting capacity, he was still effective. Before the show-cause penalty took effect, he helped land forward Justin Greene, this year’s Mid-American Conference Player of the Year. He was instrumental in grabbing several other Kent State stars, and the Flashes won the MAC regular season title each of the past two seasons.
“In 20 plus years in this business, I don’t think I’ve ever seen an assistant coach more motivated to be a head coach,” said Nielson, who took over as athletic director when Kennedy retired a year ago.
Ordinarily that would have made for an easy decision for Nielson when Ford left in March to take the head coaching job at Bradley. Kent State, which has won at least 19 games each of the past 13 seasons, has built its reputation on continuity, so the Flashes wanted to keep that tradition going.
Nielson felt mostly comfortable in Senderoff, but before handing him the job, he needed to know about what happened at Indiana.
“It came down to me sitting down with Rob, and absolutely we talked about this,” Nielson said. “It was important for me to understand that this was an error in judgment. It was a one-time mistake, something that was not, as I would call, part of the fabric of him as a person.”
Nielson believed that it wasn’t and signed Senderoff to a three-year contract at $250,000 per year. But there’s a way in which Senderoff’s errors are part of his fabric, not because there’s a chance they could re-occur, but because of the way they have tested him.
“Having gone through what I’ve gone through, I think it certainly makes you a stronger person,” he said. “I think it’s made me a better husband. I hope it’s made me a better coach. I think it has. It’s given me a lot more perspective on things. And I’ve learned an incredibly valuable lesson. The lesson you learn is you have to do things exactly by the letter of the law. You can’t do it any other way.”
Cynics may find that line insincere, but the people in the Kent State athletic department believe he means every word of it.
And on Rob Senderoff’s road to redemption, they’re the only ones that matter.
Dustin Dopirak 