LAFAYETTE — Bob Marlin’s long road to becoming a college basketball coach began in the warehouse of a wholesale grocery store in northeast Mississippi.

It was the summer of 1978 and Marlin, who had just wrapped up his freshman year at Mississippi State University, was working at Malone & Hyde Food Distributors in his hometown of Tupelo. The young Marlin worked five days a week from seven in the morning to four in the afternoon unloading box cars of soup and cereal and stacking them high on pallets with a worn stomp jack.

Then one day his life changed.

Marlin was on his lunch break, and in walked none other than Jim Hatfield, the new head men’s basketball coach at Mississippi State. Hatfield had just come off three straight 20-plus win seasons at Louisiana-Lafayette (then known as University of Southwestern Louisiana). As unbelievable as it may have seemed to the future Cajuns coach, Hatfield was not there to pick up groceries.

“Coach Hatfield walked in,” the 58-year-old Marlin remembered. “He had come from USL and when he got there he had spoken to the late Jack Cristil (the voice of the Mississippi State Bulldogs), who also called our high school’s games. He was looking for a student manager. I think Mr. Cristil told him that I was a guy that loved basketball and I would be a good fit. That’s how I jumped in and started helping the team. Everything worked out from there.”

Shooting hoops until dark

Marlin grew up in the heart of football country, but basketball proved to be the game to which he gravitated. His father, who owned a Lincoln Mercury dealership in town, recognized his son’s love for the game and even had a concrete slab poured for a basketball goal in the backyard. 

It was there that Marlin worked on his shot everyday after school — once he finished his studies and fed the dogs, catfish, horses and cows. 

“As a young boy I grew up out in the country and I didn’t have another boy my age in a few mile radius,” Marlin remembered. “So it wasn’t like I could go next door and get a pickup game going. I would just stand out there and shoot for hours and that’s how I fell in love with the game. It was always a place that I go and get away from academics and the stresses of life.”

Marlin was not a sensational athlete. He played on the varsity basketball team in high school but didn’t start until his senior season. The point guard received a few late offers from small schools in May, but he had already made his mind up. 

Marlin was going to attend Mississippi State, a university that held a special place in his family’s house. His grandfather would take the young Marlin to football games when the Bulldogs played in Jackson, and his older brother was about to start his senior year there. 

Marlin originally majored in general business as his family thought after graduation he would join the family business. Marlin had other ideas.

“I knew I wanted no part of that car business,” Marlin laughed. 

After spending one season with Hatfield, Marlin knew what he really wanted to do with his life. He wanted to coach. There was only one problem. He had trouble finding anyone that shared his belief.

“I remember calling up my high school basketball and baseball coach and told him what I wanted to do and he told me no,” Marlin remembered. “I then called my mother and she said what you think she would have said, she said ‘Follow your heart.’ That was the best advice I have ever received. I have been fortunate to have been coaching college basketball now for 36 years.

Learning on the job

Marlin continued to learn under Hatfield but after after graduating in 1981, he went to ULM (then known as Northeast Louisiana), where he served as a graduate assistant under future Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame coach Mike Vining. 

After graduation, Marlin struggled to find work but that August he finally got a job as an assistant at Houston Baptist University under Gene Iba and then later Tommy Jones, helping the team earn a berth in the Division I tournament in 1984. After HBU shut down the program, Marlin took an assistant’s job at Marshall working for Dana Altman. 

Along the way, Marlin gained knowledge from everyone he coached under.

“I really learned how to coach and about man-to-man defense from Iba,” Marlin said. “Vining taught me how to deal with players, Tommy Jones knew how to work people on campus, and I learned even more on defense from Hobbs. Dana taught me zone defense and how to recruit.”

Then in 1990, Marlin got his first head coaching position at Pensacola Junior College. Marlin had almost instant success, going 123-35 in five seasons, and leading the team to its first NJCAA National Championship in 1993. 

Marlin may have had plenty of success but the job presented a slew of challenges. 

“My experience at HBU was good because Houston Baptist had a Division III school budget posing as a Division I school budget,” Marlin said. “We had to do everything. We had a limited budget and two assistant coaches. I learned how to do a little bit of everyone there. So when I got to Pensacola and I have no assistant, no sports information director, no trainer and no strength coach it makes you have to do everything. It makes you very appreciative.”

Marlin tried to parlay his success at Pensacola into a Division I head coaching job but was unable to secure one of those jobs. In 1995 he joined the staff of David Hobbs at the University of Alabama. Marlin loved his time with the Tide, which was his first time coaching at a big time school — a football obsessed one at that.

“When football is winning and doing well it helps everybody,” Marlin said. “It was a great experience except for my brother not speaking to me for three years. It was a lot of fun.”

His time in Tuscaloosa came to end after Hobbs was fired following the 1998 season but Marlin wouldn’t be unemployed for long.

Bob and the Bearkats

Marlin came across the opening at Sam Houston State University, a program with little tradition. In its first 11 years playing at the Division I level, SHSU never won more than 10 games. 

SHSU Athletic Director Bobby Williams hired Marlin shortly before the start of the school year to turn things around. Marlin was curious why Williams chose him, a reasonable question after so many years of disappointments.

“I asked Bobby Williams what was the difference,” Marlin said. “He said, ‘I got a lot of calls from people but the call that really made the most, was when Coach (Gene) Stallings called.’”

Marlin got to know the famed football coach during their time together at Alabama, so when he originally applied for SHSU job he called up Stallings. 

“I said, ‘Coach do you mind calling Bobby Williams for me?’” Marlin said. “He hesitated for a minute and then said ‘I can’t do that,’ My heart just sank. He then said, ‘I never came and watched you guys practice. I don’t know if you can coach or not. He just had an old-school guy’s train of thought which I loved. But he then said, ‘I would be happy to call Bobby and tell them you are a good boy.’ That call meant the world to me.”

Despite inheriting a struggling program with budget and scheduling issues, Marlin turned things around quickly. In his second season, Sam Houston State went 22-7 and won the regular season conference championship. In his 12 seasons there, Marlin led the team to a 235 wins, won at least 18 games nine times, claimed three regular season titles, won the Southland Conference Tournament twice and advanced to the NCAA Tournament twice. 

Not surprisingly, Marlin became a coveted candidate for several head coaching positions at bigger schools, including TCU, UTEP, and twice at the University of Houston.

“I thought it was going to happen the second time but then Tom Penders got it,” Marlin said. “But when I accepted this job they had just fired Penders and they drove to the Woodlands to talk to me for five hours about the job. I wouldn’t do it.”

Leading the Cajuns back

That right place just so happened to be the same program the first coach he worked for got his start — Louisiana-Lafayette. Marlin knew it was going to be rebuilding project takin over a program that hadn’t posted a winning record in six seasons. 

“It was changing the culture,” Marlin said. “Those words get thrown around a lot in this business — just like chemistry does, but we had to get a different mentality.”

That change started painfully slow for Marlin and his staff as that first season as the Cajuns started off 3-14.

“I had never been 3-14 in my life,” Marlin said. “It was extremely difficult. We played good at times just not good enough to win. On a Sunday afternoon we played Texas College and that was the first and only time in my career that I had lost to a non-Division I school. It was a low point for me. I remember that night a coaching friend of mine took me to dinner and I was ready to jump off the Cajun Dome and he was like ‘Do you remember your first year at Sam? It takes time. Just stay the course.’”

The turning point of that season arrived when the team played ULM in a reunion game that celebrated 100 years of basketball at the school. In attendance was the late Beryl Shipley. The former USL coach, who passed away from lung cancer in April of 2011, led the program to great heights from 1957-73 but his relationship with the university had soured after the program was disbanded for two seasons for alleged NCAA rules violations. 

Marlin had become fast friends with Shipley after taking the job. 

“My relationship with him was special,” said Marlin, whose team opens up the season at Ole Miss on Friday. “I spent a lot of time with him and (Shipley’s wife) Dolores. I felt that I was here for a reason. People had some things about him but I felt that it was important to bring him back to the family.”

That night, the Ragin’ Cajuns won 84-75 and wouldn’t lose another regular season game as the team ended the season on a 11-game winning streak. 

“I told him (Shipley) he was the reason for the streak,” Marlin said. “I am proud of that group as any of the teams I have ever had. We were 14-15 that year and it was the best 14-15 team I ever had.”

In the years since, Marlin has helped lead the Cajuns back to prominence, winning 128 games and a Sun Belt Conference Tournament title in 2014 which gave the program its first appearance in the NCAA Tournament since 2000. Along the way, the Cajuns also had a player turn into a NBA Lottery Pick (Elfrid Payton) and another become a NBA G-League All-Star (Shawn Long). 

For Marlin, the success of his program comes from a simple life lesson he learned all those years ago in that grocery store warehouse.

“Relationships are the most important thing in college basketball,” Marlin said.