Having grown up in Tasmania, an island just off the Australian coast, Troy Robinson didn’t know much about the American system of higher education.

“From what I understood about the U.S. schooling system, I thought that colleges pound for pound were all the same,” Robinson says. “I didn’t know there was a difference between any of them.”

What he did know was that the men’s tennis head coach at Barton College, located somewhere in North Carolina, had made quite the impression.

“Tom Morris called me every Sunday on the dot,” Robinson said. “He was the only coach to do that. So that was a pretty easy decision for me.”

And so it happened that Barton ended up with the top-ranked player in Tasmania and one of the highest-ranked players in all of Australia.

Robinson qualified for the main draw of the Australian Open juniors in 1995, and was a two-time winner of Tasmania’s most prestigious junior award.

He arrived in the United States and gained some immediate insight on American culture and North Carolina living.

“I came off the plane and remember having to sleep in the airport,” Robinson said. “I tied my bags around my wrists because I thought in America, everyone got robbed at gunpoint all the time. I got into Wilson and saw my first squirrel, and we went to Wal-Mart to get all my stuff for the room. It was a time to take it all in.”

Those adventures aside, he arrived in Wilson in the dead of a U.S. winter, and between the cold weather and long distance home, he nearly didn’t make it through the first semester.

“At the end of my first semester, I remember sitting in the hallway of the dormitory crying,” he said. “I wanted to go home. So (my parents) let me come home, but they made me go back. They said, ‘you started this, you’ve committed to this and you’ll finish this.’

“So I took a hiatus, worked for a guy in Greensboro, got my feet under me a little bit. Once I had a summer here and started into the fall school year, I was good from there.”

With the adjustment to life far from home and in a strange culture now complete, Robinson began to produce the kind of dominant tennis performances he had been expecting from himself.

He was named the Carolinas-Virginia Athletics Conference (CVAC) Player of the Year three times and led Barton to two conference titles while ranking among the national top 10 individually in both singles and doubles. Robinson went unbeaten in league play twice, and over a three-year span lost just one CVAC match.

“It doesn’t matter the school, their No. 1 player is always pretty good,” Robinson said. “I thought the competition for me was as good as I could get anywhere. And I did a lot of tournaments in-between seasons against some pretty high-caliber players there, too. I found the standard of tennis here to be very high.”

Robinson said he was able to succeed in that environment due to a solid all-around game.

“I covered the court pretty well,” he said. “I did not make many mistakes. I didn’t do anything unbelievably well, but I did everything well, I think.”

Morris, a member of the North Carolina Tennis Hall of Fame who has been coaching the sport for more than three decades, says “Troy had the most beautiful slice backhand of any player I have coached. The ball looked like a Frisbee as it crossed the net.”

Under Morris’ guidance, Robinson led Barton to an NCAA Tournament berth in 1997, the first for the school as a Division II program. The Bulldogs captured the East Regional with a 5-2 win over High Point to advance to the Sweet Sixteen, still the only time that a Barton tennis team has reached that plateau.

Barton earned a second straight NCAA tourney bid the following season, Morris’ last as head coach with the Bulldogs.

Morris left Barton for East Carolina University, and Robinson joined him there as an assistant coach after completing his outstanding career in 1999. The two men spent four seasons together leading the Pirates.

“Troy, a natural coach, did an excellent job as an assistant coach before leaving to take the head pro job at Kinston Country Club,” Morris said.

His coaching experience didn’t start out that way, Robinson said.

“Tom should have fired me at least three times,” he said. “Two of them he actually told me to my face that I should be gone. But he is a very, very, very special person. I didn’t see it, of course, when I was very young. But as I got older, the more appreciative I became of that man.”

Robinson, who currently works for a medical device company and teaches tennis on the side, now joins Morris (1989 inductee) as a member of the Barton Athletic Hall of Fame.

“I can’t think of anyone else I’d rather have sitting at that ceremony than Tom,” he said.