North Carolina State University Athletics
Senior Spotlight: OT Rob Crisp
10/14/2014 12:00:00 AM | Football
RALEIGH, N.C. - If you ever saw Rob Crisp’s older brother Cedrick, you might not believe that the two young men were related. Rob stands at 6’7, while Cedrick is more like 5’8. Rob’s hair is cropped close, while his brother’s is styled in dreadlocks. Rob skin tone is fairly light, while Cedrick’s is darker.
If you ever saw Rob Crisp’s brother Pete, it would be even harder to believe that they were brothers. Pete doesn’t quite clear 6’0 and has a much slighter build than the Wolfpack’s starting left tackle. Their skin tone is even more different, because, you see, Pete is white.
Yet both are brothers to Crisp, who has been blessed to have the love and care of two families to help raise him.
Crisp and Cedrick grew up in and around Burlington, N.C. with their mother, Cassandra Platto, living in apartments or trailer parks. Crisp had no relationship with his father, but his mother was more than enough for the self-described “mama’s boy.”
“I was a loner and didn’t have many friends.,” Crisp remembers. “We really didn’t see my mom that much because she was a single parent working two jobs to try to feed us and clothe us and keep a roof over our heads. She did everything she could to take care of us, but that meant that she sometimes wasn’t there to wake us up or make us breakfast so we were just sort of on our own.”
By the time Crisp, who had always been a “big boy,” reached middle school, he found a ready-made circle of friends when he started playing sports.
“I wasn’t always tall but I was always big. I used to be short and fat, then I hit a growth spurt in 6th or 7th grade. I was a basketball player. Not a good one - I could barely get up and down the court. But I took up a lot of space.”
Crisp’s best friend was playing AAU basketball at the time and his team needed a big man. He talked Crisp into giving it a try and so Crisp joined the squad. The coach was a man named Peter Singer, whose son Pete was also on the team.
Crisp played for Coach Singer for a couple of years and, for reasons Crisp says he still doesn’t fully understand, the coach took an interest in the young player. Not long after Crisp’s 14th birthday, Coach Singer paid a visit to Ms. Platto.
“I’ll never forget that day,” Crisp says. “My brother and I sat on the steps of the trailer and Coach Singer and my mom talked for 2-1/2 hours. They brought me in and Coach Singer told me what he wanted to do. My brother just got up and went in his room and my mom wouldn’t even look at me.”
What Coach Singer proposed to Crisp’s mother was that her youngest son come and live with him and his family. He would be treated like one of their own sons, with his own room and every advantage they could offer.
“To this day I don’t know why they were willing to do that for me,” Crisp says. “I didn’t steal their hearts, that’s for sure. I wasn’t driven to work hard. I was a horrible athlete - I was huge but I couldn’t move. I was stiff. I don’t know what he saw that made him think, ‘maybe I could help give this kid a shot to be successful.’”
The transition was hard for everyone at first. Crisp could listen to Coach Singer’s counsel, but had a harder time warming up to Debbie. Singer - as he felt it was disloyal to his own mother. “When I first moved in, I went home every single weekend unless I was traveling with AAU. It took me a long time to get comfortable. I could talk to Coach Singer but I didn’t really open up to the rest of them. Mrs. Singer was all for helping me but I wasn’t all for letting her help me. It was hard to allow her to come into my life because I had a great mother.”
Not long after Crisp moved in, Debbie, a retired nurse, started noticing that he was taking frequent trips to the bathroom and was drinking inordinate amounts of water. “She took me to the hospital and I was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. I had to take insulin shots five times a day, prick my finger and check my sugar before every meal. It was hard. I thought I was going to have to live like that for the rest of my life.”
Luckily, however, Crisp was soon able to manage with oral medication and then with just a controlled diet. He began to learn to play basketball and football and realized that he actually did have some potential. The college coaches began to realize that he did as well, as before long, he was a highly-sought-after, five-star recruit.
People began to liken his situation to the one in the movie “The Blind Side,” but Crisp is quick to point out that although there are similarities, it wasn’t like that. “I had a great mom who did her best, but she wasn’t able to provide me with some of the advantages that someone else could. For a long time I felt like she had given up on me and didn’t fight hard enough to keep me with her.”
Last season, when Crisp was unable to play, he began to spend more time with his mother. “I heard her side of the story with an adult’s ears,” he recalls. “It killed her to let me move out and it is still hard on her to this day. But she loved me enough to want me to have everything that it was possible for me to have so she let me live with the Singers.”
Crisp says that he has a lot to be grateful for as he finishes out his final campaign with the Wolfpack. “I am so appreciative of the Singers for taking me into their home and treating me like one of their own children. They showed me a life that I never would have seen otherwise and helped me grow. And I’m so grateful for my mom, who wanted the best for me, even if it meant doing something that tore her heart out.
“This year, I’ve gotten a lot closer to my mom. We talk every day and have really formed a relationship where she is teaching me about being an adult. My mom is my hero. For a long time I felt like it was an ‘either-or’ type thing - that I couldn’t be loyal to the Singers and to my Mom. Now it feels like it was a team that raised me. I’m lucky.”
