Robert Joseph Cremins Jr. (born July 4, 1947) is an American retired college basketball coach. He served as a head coach at Appalachian State, Georgia Tech, and the College of Charleston. Early years Cremins attended All Hallows High School in the Bronx, New York, where he was born to Irish immigrants from County Kerry. In 1966, he entered the University of South Carolina (USC) on a basketball scholarship, where he played under coach Frank McGuire. While Cremins was there, the South Carolina team won 61 games, with 17 losses, while Cremins was the starting point guard for three years for the Gamecocks. Cremins, known as "Cakes", was also the captain of South Carolina's 1969–70 team which went 25–3 and won USC's first (and only) ACC regular season title. He graduated from USC in 1970 with a B.S. degree in marketing, before playing professional basketball for one year in Ecuador. Early coaching career Cremins started his coaching career in 1971 as an assistant coach at Point Park College in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He next returned to South Carolina to become McGuire's assistant coach and to earn a M.S. degree in guidance and counseling in 1972. Appalachian State At age 27, Cremins became one of the youngest NCAA Division I head coaches in history when he took charge of the basketball team at Appalachian State University. He inherited a program that had only won 22 games since joining Division I five years earlier, and had just come off the worst season in school history at 3–23. In his first year at Appalachian his team had a record of 13–14, but then they accumulated an 87–56 record over the next five seasons, with three Southern Conference regular season championships. The Mountaineers posted a 23–6 record, and received an NCAA Tournament slot in 1979 after sweeping the Southern Conference regular season and tournament titles. Georgia Tech Cremins's performance at Appalachian State gathered him some national attention in the NCAA coaching ranks, including catching the eye of Georgia Tech athletic director Homer Rice. After Rice persuaded him to come to Atlanta, Cremins was hired as the Rambling Wreck's new head basketball coach at the close of the 1981 season, on April 14, 1981. When Cremins arrived at Georgia Tech, he walked into a situation that was as bad, if not worse, than what he'd inherited at Appalachian State. Georgia Tech had only notched one winning season