Jimmy Salmon glanced up at the scoreboard. TJ Robinson pierced his eyes right at Jimmy Salmon.
Salmon knew what that look meant. He’d known Robinson since birth, helping guide him to being one of the best players in New Jersey’s 2024 high school class. But during the 2023-24 high school basketball season, Immaculate Conception played without Robinson, who was out with a knee injury for the team’s first 28 games.
Once he was cleared to start working out, Robinson began to overwork the recommended allotment of workouts. Salmon said he was working out three times a day. Robinson even admitted that how quickly he recovered made people around him, including his coach, nervous.
“They felt like it was a risk,” Robinson said. “They didn’t want to rush me back in.”
“He was putting a lot of pressure on me for me to put him in games,” Salmon added. “And I just never wanted to, I was afraid that he was going to get injured.”
At the time, Robinson was verbally committed to Louisville and then-head coach Kenny Payne. Salmon didn’t want to jeopardize that.
Eventually, he acquiesced, but only for a brief cameo in Game 29, a blowout win over St. Mary (Rutherford). He started the North Jersey Non-Public B Tournament Final against Morris Catholic on the bench, still on a pitch count.
Then the scoreboard showed Morris Catholic 14, Immaculate Conception 2.
“He kept looking at me like ‘what are you waiting for?’” Salmon recalled.
But once he saw that look, he couldn’t resist.
Robinson checked in the game and immediately flipped it on its head. He scored 30 points, and his team won at the buzzer. That’s a pretty wild story itself, isn’t it.
But that was only the start of another story.
With just a few days to recover from the Morris Catholic game before playing in the overall New Jersey Non-Public Championship Game against St. Rose, Robinson’s knee swole up. But he wasn’t going to let that keep him on the sidelines, even clearly not at 100%.
After a 73-29 loss to St. Rose in the final, where Robinson scored just five points, they learned that he’d re-injured his knee. All of Salmon’s worst nightmares had come true.
“That’s where I felt the guilt,” Salmon said. “I let him play in that game.”
The re-injury hit Robinson hard, too.
He had to put his life on hold. He decommitted from Louisville. He’d been extremely anxious to get back on the court once, and now, he’d have to wait again.
He didn’t enroll in college until a year after his high school graduation. When he finally returned to competitive basketball in November 2025, he found himself not playing in front of 20,000 people at the KFC Yum! Center in Louisville, like he thought. Rather, he was playing just 10 miles from his alma mater in front of 500 people at Saint Peter’s. Heading into his first January of college hoops, Robinson has reminded many of how good he is, averaging 12.3 points and 3.2 assists per game for the Peacocks.
“I was ready to get back in the flow of just playing and getting ready for college basketball,” Robinson said. “It was definitely a blow. It was tough on me. But I had to do what I had to do.”
The decommitment from Louisville was probably going to happen regardless of the injury, as Payne was fired shortly after the Cardinals’ season ended. That wouldn’t make Salmon feel any better about it. The next month, Robinson signed a letter of intent to play for Bart Lundy at Milwaukee, assuming that he’d be able to join the team and make an impact that year.
As he learned more about his injury, it became clear that that wouldn’t be the case, so he never enrolled at Milwaukee and decided to take a gap year.
“I didn’t want to rush into it knowing I had an injury,” Robinson said. “I took a step back and took a gap year to work on myself, get stronger, and fully recover.”
A year in between high school graduation and college enrollment isn’t out of the ordinary for basketball players looking for a place to play college ball. However, Robinson didn’t go the traditional prep school route. After all, if he wouldn’t be able to get on the court, how would that help him? Would a prep school coach even bring him in knowing that he wouldn’t play?
Robinson had a different plan. He connected with trainers in California and flew across the country to focus on rehab. And it was a full-time thing.
Robinson would wake up and go straight to physical therapy for two to three hours every day. His workouts consisted of weights, squats, and more, so he could build back the strength in his knee. Then, he’d go to the gym and do a basketball workout.
As his knee recovered, his capabilities on the basketball court expanded. He gradually worked his way from stationary shooting to more intense workouts throughout the year.
For some, going across the country to a place where you don’t know anybody could have been the worst thing to do in Robinson’s situation.
“Sometimes, with having two back-to-back injuries, time did feel a bit longer just because of how long I had been out,” Robinson said. “So sometimes it would feel like it was going by slow or that it’s taking a long time, but in reality, I was recovering in the time that I was supposed to.”
While Salmon still felt guilty, Robinson never felt a strain in his relationship with his coach. Robinson understood that Salmon’s initial hesitance came from a place of care and love. It’s a relationship that goes back to when he and Robinson’s grandmother grew up on the same street, sharing a fence.
That relationship continued when Robinson’s father, Tarik, played for Salmon’s AAU program. Tarik became a well-known basketball trainer in New Jersey, staying close with Salmon along the way.
He trained TJ on and off the court and put him in Salmon’s program. From a very young age, he stood out.
“I remember TJ as a little five-year-old kid going to Kyrie Irving camp trying to show everybody that he could do a eurostep,” Salmon said. “TJ has always been good. I think maybe when he was seven, he was playing on our 10-year-old team.”
By the time Robinson got to ninth grade and Salmon manned the sidelines for his team for the first time, he was one of New Jersey’s best players.
“He was on the same team as Dylan Harper,” Salmon said. “And it’s a fair discussion to say who was the best player at the time.”
That’s all part of the reason why going to California made sense for Robinson.
He has enough drive to be great through all of the time that he’s dedicated to the game through the years, that putting away all distractions didn’t isolate him, it motivated him.
“He’s been groomed mentally to be a basketball player,” Salmon said. “I think TJ doesn’t see himself as a non-player in any entity of his life. He’s a basketball savant. TJ has never backed away from a basketball challenge.”Even though this basketball challenge took him 3,000 miles from home, it was a new experience that he grew from.
“It was good for me mentally,” Robinson said. “Just to be tough and ready for whatever is thrown at me now. I feel like getting through that, I could get through anything.”
“He’d been playing basketball his whole life, and that was put on pause for a year,” Salmon said. “He never let on that he was depressed, although I’m sure he was. How could he not be?”
The next challenge was being re-recruited.
Robinson had to put feelers out there, sending coaches messages and workout film to let them know that he was available in the Class of 2025. He’d gotten back on the court playing local pickup with friends by April, but was still unsigned into May and June.
@ThePortalScoop on Twitter posted that Robinson was available on May 18, and things started to pick up from there. He had conversations with a few different schools, but Saint Peter’s stood out.
“I was just looking for an opportunity,” Robinson said. “I feel like the staff had good belief in me, just knowing what I did on the high school level. It wasn’t like they were taking a risk.”
He signed with the Peacocks in June, and after over a year of not being part of a basketball team, Robinson all of a sudden had teammates again.
Peacocks’ head coach Bashir Mason has talked in the past about how everybody has a transition period when they first come to play for him, no matter where they previously played. For Robinson, who hadn’t been part of organized basketball for over a year, it was especially exaggerated.
“It took him some time,” Mason said after Saint Peter’s beat UMass Lowell on Nov. 22. “Being here in the summertime, there was a lot of rust with his game and his understanding.”
Robinson said that he had to get used to getting back in the team flow, but that he was glad to be back doing “what I was used to doing.”
Heading into the season, despite seeing him go toe-to-toe with returning point guard Bryce Eaton in practices in the fall, Mason held modest expectations for his freshman.
“The plan with TJ was to make sure that we threw him into the fire early,” he said. “Let him get beat up by college basketball. By January, we were hoping to have a seasoned player.”
But that’s not how Robinson is wired.
“I can’t see him not being mentally ready, making sure that he’s physically ready,” Salmon said.
He immediately scored 11 points in his collegiate debut against Seton Hall, then scored 16 with six assists to help Saint Peter’s defeat FDU the next weekend.
Robinson may have been ahead of Mason’s schedule, but he wasn’t ahead of his own. He was just making up for lost time.
“I wouldn’t say I surprised myself, I feel like I actually could play better,” Robinson said. “I really don’t even think that start I’ve had is really good for my standards.”
Salmon is excited to see him back on the court.
Looking back on it, he called the decision to let Robinson play during his senior playoff a “selfish decision,” not on Robinson’s part, but on his own. The guilt he carried weighed on him, and it still does, but the last two months have eased his mind.
“I am relieved that he is back,” Salmon said. “He’s just as explosive as he’s ever been. And I’m thrilled that he’s performing the way he has.”
