Robert L. Carothers is completing an 18-year term as president at the University of Rhode Island. Carothers has been involved in the athletic program as much as any university president in recent years.

 The man billed as a poet when he arrived turned out to be as hands-on in sports as in academics. From providing new facilities, to hiring staff, to making decisions on whether to admit individual student-athletes, Carothers did not hesitate to get involved.

 He made it a point to have the buck stop in his office.

 “I do that in everything,” Carothers said in a wide-ranging interview with The Providence Journal discussing his time at URI. “I’m very much into managing the image of the university. When I came here I knew there were two things we needed to do. We had to improve the quality of the institution and we had to improve the perception of the university. Those things fed each other.”

 Athletics, he feels, is a prime way to accomplish those goals.

 “Athletics is, as they say, the front porch to the university. Every night they’re on the news. Every day, you put out a sports section,” he said. “It’s important to try to manage that.”

 “It may not be fair, but there isn’t a physics page or a math page in the newspaper,” he famously pointed out. “There’s a sports page, and it makes a difference.”

 This story is the first of six on Carothers’ impact on the URI athletic program.

Outgoing URI president Robert Carothers, right, flanked by CVS CEO and URI booster Thomas M. Ryan, knew that the Ryan Center probably wouldn't have been built if not for the success of the 1997-98 men's basketball team that reached the Elite Eight.

Journal photo / John Freidah

SOUTH KINGSTOWN –– It is not often that a university president makes a major impact on his school’s athletic program, but it has happened regularly at the University of Rhode Island over the last two decades.

 Robert L. Carothers, who leaves after 18 years as school president at the end of the month, has left his imprint all over Rhody athletics. Nowhere was his style more evident than with the men’s basketball program.

 What other president would have a recruit write a three-paragraph essay before agreeing to admit him? What other president would cite Greek tragedy and the willingness to give a person a second chance when hiring a coach with a questionable background? What other president would attend games regularly –– not only at home, but at times on the road as well?

 Carothers did all that and more.

 As he looks back, Carothers said his decisions involving the basketball program leave him with both positive and negative feelings. The most dramatic example of that was bringing in Jim Harrick as coach in 1997. Harrick had been fired by UCLA after leading the Bruins to a national championship. But he also committed NCAA violations that led to the school being placed on NCAA probation. Harrick had tried to get other jobs, but schools stayed away from him until URI agreed to give him, as Carothers noted, “a second chance.”

 Harrick had much the same impact at URI as he did at UCLA. And then later at Georgia, as well. He proved to be an excellent coach, but one with questionable ethics. Both URI and Georgia, like UCLA, were put on NCAA probation for rules violations after Harrick left.

 “He’s a classic Jekyll-and-Hyde figure,” Carothers responded when asked about Harrick, who led URI to the NCAA Elite Eight in 1998 and then to the school’s only Atlantic 10 title in 1999 before leaving for Georgia.

 “That’s the single best basketball season we’ve had in the history of the university,” Carothers said of the 1997-98 season. “Whatever else you can say about Jim, that team built the Ryan Center . . . We would not have been successful in building the Ryan Center without it.”

 Former Gov. Lincoln Almond, a URI grad, and former coach Al Skinner had been the prime movers behind the drive to build the new facility. But the success the team had under Harrick was the key in raising the money needed to make the building a reality.

 But the success came at a price.

 “On the other hand, he was a great embarrassment,” Carothers said. “The same character flaws he had at UCLA ended up here, and he passed them on to another generation, too [at Georgia].”

 “No question he’s an excellent coach,” the president said, “but not necessarily a great man.”

 In hindsight, Carothers views the experience with mixed emotions, but feels there were more positives than negatives.

 “We were out there flying with the big boys,” Carothers said. “When we beat Kansas that year [1998], the president of Kansas was a classmate of mine in graduate school. He came over before the game and I was joking with him, telling him to take it easy on us.

“We were joking, but when we won he didn’t come back.”

Carothers was critical of Harrick for the way he acted in the final minute of the loss to Stanford in the Elite Eight.

 URI, led by a total of 44 points from guards Cuttino Mobley and Tyson Wheeler, had led most of the way against Stanford. The Rams were up by six with less than one minute left. However Stanford, helped by several steals, rallied and won, 79-77.

 “Here, he was not such a great coach,” Carothers said. “During that critical last 20 seconds [when Stanford rallied] he’s down there arguing with the referees instead of coaching the team. We could have still pulled that out if he was paying attention to the game. You don’t win games arguing with the referees.”

 Carothers labeled his decision in hiring Jerry DeGregorio, a Harrick assistant, to replace Harrick “the single worst personnel decision I ever made in my life.”

 “I don’t do this very often, but at that time I listened to the alumni,” Carothers said. “He’s a nice guy, but it was a bad situation.”

 The hope at the time was that hiring DeGregorio would help keep Lamar Odom, now an NBA star with the Lakers, at URI. Carothers had been the one who made the decision that allowed Odom, who had a controversial background, to attend URI. Carothers said his role, in which he had Odom write a short composition, has become a bit distorted.

 “There was never a question of admitting Lamar. The question was, could he come here as a non-matriculating, non-playing student to take some courses to see whether he could get his academic profile up sufficiently to be admitted,” Carothers said. “There was a lot of concern on the staff whether we would look bad if they brought him in after he was rejected by UNLV.

 “I taught English a long time,” Carothers went on. “I gave him a topic to write about. What I could see is that he could structure sentences. He knew how to spell. He knew how to use grammar. Anyone who has those basic tools, the odds are he has enough intelligence to do the work.”

 Carothers feels his decision was a good one.

 “I thought it was the right thing to do,” he said. “People act like we admitted him on the basis of that. We just gave him a chance to take some courses to see if he could prove himself . . . He’s a very volatile, unstable kind of a guy, tortured a bit because of his childhood situation. He does seem to have settled down the last couple of years.”

Carothers is satisfied with the current state of the program, which has won 63 games over the last three seasons under Jim Baron.

 He spoke highly of Baron as a person. He praised how much he has done for the university in bringing order to what was a bad situation when he arrived. But the coach focuses so much on his team that he is not always the easiest person to work with, Carothers said.

 “He’s a very challenging personality,” is the way the president described Baron. “He’s so single-minded in what he does . . . The program is a winning program. We’re respectably in the mix season after season. We had two bad seasons [under DeGregorio] but Jim came in and he’s pulled it together.”

URI basketball coaching records with Robert Carothers as university president:

Al Skinner: 99-81

Jim Harrick: 45-22

Jerry DeGregorio: 12-48

Jim Baron: 131-118

pkenyon@projo.com