At Swarthmore High School, Joe Paterno visited Craig Collins, a 1981 graduate, and convinced him to play basketball for Penn State. After his senior year of college, Collins later entered the Guinness Book of World Records and became the CEO of a $100-plus million dollar business.
At Penn State, Collins received an undergraduate degree in hotel, restaurant and institution management and broke the NCAA single-season free throw shooting record during his senior year.
According to the NCAA, Collins finished his 1985 season shooting 94 of 98 from the free-throw line, setting a single-season NCAA record of 95.9%. This record lasted 19 years until it was broken by Blake Ahearn from Missouri State in 2004.
Collins later played basketball for three years in Ireland, England, Belgium, and Russia for a team called Marathon Oil.
After that, he began working at AT&T before receiving his M.B.A. in Finance from Georgetown and working at Bell Atlantic (now known as Verizon). Since then, Collins changed jobs and companies multiple times, later becoming the president of Time Warner Cable, now known as Spectrum.
“There I ran a business services unit, which was over a billion dollars, 1,000 employees, and we were growing revenue year over year at a 20% clip,” Collins said.
Alfred Binford, the Head of Customer Communications Management at CSG International, worked with Collins at Verizon, Intermedia Communications, and Sungard Availability Services and recruited him multiple times. According to Binford, Collins had strong natural leadership tendencies, intellectual capacity, work ethic, and executive presence.
“When you give him something to do, he can drive it to growth and higher levels of performance once he gets his hands around the task,” Binford said.
Collins retired this May. His most recent role was the CEO and President of Logics Fiber Network, a company similar to Time Warner Cable that provides internet access and video and data services to businesses out of Houston, Texas.
“The company was the largest independent fiber provider in the Houston, Texas area with over 300 employees. I was asked to continue to build that business out and grow it from a fiber growth perspective,” Collins said.
Collins chose to play basketball at Penn State because of its great education, community, and basketball program.
“The cherry on the top was Joe Paterno came to my house and convinced me that Penn State was a great home for me,” Collins said.
When he arrived at Penn State during his freshman year, he was shooting pretty poorly from the free-throw line. His brother, Chris Collins, pulled him to the side and told Craig he was wasting too much time at the free-throw line and should just take a couple of dribbles and shoot.
“In my junior year, I used that theory. And then my senior year, I actually used free-throw shooting to prepare myself for the rest of the game as well as shooting anywhere on the court and it just became second nature,” Collins said.
Collins never thought about going for the NCAA free throw single-season record. It wasn’t until late in his senior year that a publication asked if he knew he beat the record.
“It was in the Guinness Book of Records for some period of time. So it was something that I can always look back on and just think about very positively,” Collins said.
For Collins, Swarthmore was a community of fairness and education that always felt welcoming, which played a part in his life and career. It taught him to take time to treat everyone as an individual and learn about them before jumping to conclusions.
“Ultimately, the engine and backbone, from a business perspective, is always the employees. You want to make sure that you recognize and understand what people are going through in order to get the most rewards out of everyone and for the shareholders,” Collins said.*
