‘We nearly lost both of them’: Camryn Crocker tells how wife and newborn child fought for life amid Illinois’ Final Four run
By Dana O’Neil, CNN
Indianapolis (CNN) — The homemade picture hangs in Camryn Crocker’s Illinois basketball office. “Dad, you’re a slam dunk,’’ it reads, next to an imprint of Sienna Bobbie Crocker’s tiny little hand.
Nurses in the neonatal intensive care unit at the Carle Foundation Hospital in Champaign, Illinois, made it for Crocker, the Illini’s defensive coordinator, during Sienna’s six-week stay there.
“It’s just this picture, but it’s also the hope and the joy that your child is going to be OK in a very, very difficult and dark time,’’ Crocker says, sharing his personal story for the first time.
Hope and joy, difficulty and dark have battled for Crocker’s heart over these past six weeks, at once giving him more than he could ever imagine and threatening to rob him of everything he would ever want.
Only now as he sits here, in a quiet spot on the second floor of an Indianapolis hotel room, is he able to reflect on the outcome. On Saturday, the Illini will play Connecticut in the Final Four. His wife, Taylor, will be in the stands at Lucas Oil Stadium and, back in Champaign, Sienna will be at home, waiting for her daddy.
“This is what every coach dreams of – to be able to coach your team as long as possible,’’ Crocker says. “And then when it’s over, I’ve got some late-night feedings and some diaper changes headed my way, and I am running towards that.’’
Finally getting a shot at the Big Time
The worst best 24 hours of Camryn Crocker’s life started in Detroit, at the celebration of life for his grandfather. Earl Crocker, “Papa Earl” to his grandkids, earned the Korean Service Medal for his work as a communications officer in combat zones and later became a minister, using his church to serve as a foundation for a community center that offered hot meals, Bible classes and tutoring to area kids.
Married for 55 years, Pap Earl lived a beautiful, full life of 95 years before dying in January. The family intentionally scheduled his services in March, when his grandson would be nearby for a game at Michigan State.
Crocker had not expected to be on a Big Ten staff, at least not this quickly. A former player at Penn with two degrees from the Ivy League school, he pinged around chasing his coaching dream from a high school (Verbum Dei in California ) to a prep school (Northfield Mount Hermon in Massachusetts) to a player development spot at Stanford and finally to Colgate, where he served as an assistant to fellow Penn grad Matt Langel.
Not four years ago, Crocker remembers walking into the Superdome for the 2022 Final Four, in awe of the audacity of the event. During his time at Colgate, the team earned two NCAA tournament trips via back-to-back Patriot League titles, but the Final Four seemed like a pipe dream to someone at a low major.
Instead, the big time came calling this past summer, when Illinois head coach Brad Underwood practically cold-called him. Underwood had divvied up his team between an offensive coordinator (his son, Tyler) and defensive (Zach Hamer) but when Hamer itched to move into more of a player development role, Underwood challenged the duo to find him someone young, smart and willing to tweak, but not reinvent, the defense.
Illinois’ defense wasn’t broken, but it had dipped. The year prior, the Illini dropped to 80th in Ken Pomeroy’s rankings, their lowest in the last six seasons.
Hamer and Tyler Underwood prepped a short list of candidates, and Crocker’s resume intrigued Underwood. Though he’s an information processor who likes to chew on his options, Underwood also has, after 44 years in the coaching profession, learned to trust his gut.
He liked Crocker instantly when the two connected on the phone and was impressed that no matter how much he threw at the 35-year-old – questions about defensive schemes, how he would fit in with the staff – Crocker had an answer.
“The next week I’m talking to a bunch of people on the staff and then before you know it, I’m flying to Champaign for an interview,’’ Crocker said of his whirlwind courtship. “When he offered me the job, I couldn’t get here fast enough.’’
Before he could move though, Crocker had to take a little detour to South Africa.
When Crocker worked at Northfield Mount Hermon, Taylor was a dance instructor at the school. The two commiserated and bonded over their jobs as dorm-heads, he in charge of the dorm for 10th grade through post-grad boys, she overseeing the ninth-grade girls. They became a couple, and when Taylor came along on a Colgate overseas trip to France, Crocker proposed to her on the banks of the Seine.
They married two years ago but had delayed their honeymoon, waiting for what they thought would be some downtime in the basketball calendar, Instead, the pair had no sooner come home from touring Johannesburg and Cape Town than they were moving to Champaign.
In the fall, Taylor learned she was pregnant and due in April.
“Just jumping for joy,’’ Crocker said.
‘We nearly lost both of them’
As Taylor’s pregnancy progressed, doctors said that some complications might make for an earlier delivery, but they were thinking maybe a few weeks at most.
On February 7, Crocker left the services in Detroit for Papa Earl and doubled back to East Lansing, where the Illini played Michigan State. Illinois squandered a nine-point second-half lead and lost in overtime to end a 12-game winning streak. Crocker was left wondering why his defense, which had been so good for so long, had malfunctioned.
The next morning, he was getting ready to head to practice while Taylor was out running errands.
“She called me in a panic,’’ Crocker says. “She’s in the car and she’s bleeding everywhere.’’
His first call was to Underwood.
“It’s a slap in the face, a kick in the ass, whatever you want to call it, about what is truly important in life. And this isn’t it,’’ said Underwood while sitting on a golf cart outside his team’s Final Four locker room at Lucas Oil Stadium. “And I told him that day, ‘I don’t care if you do any of this. I don’t care if you take a leave for the rest of the season. I do not care about any of this. You go take care of your family.’”
Crocker sped to the hospital, but upon arrival in the emergency room learned Taylor had been whisked to labor and delivery. Their daughter, only 29 weeks, was on her way. Because it was an emergency delivery, Crocker couldn’t join her and was left in the waiting room. After what felt like both an instant and forever, doctors came to tell him that Sienna, named for the Seine, had arrived.
At just three pounds and in need of help to breathe, she was in extremely serious condition.
“What about my wife?” Crocker asked.
Soon he would learn that, during the delivery Taylor had lost four units of blood.
“We nearly lost both of them,’’ he says.
Taylor was discharged after four days, weak and exhausted but out of the woods. Sienna couldn’t leave. Together the couple worked out a schedule that worked for them – Crocker would go to the hospital in the morning, Taylor in the afternoon and both would return in the evening, making sure to be there when Sienna had her three-hour feedings.
It helped that they could hold her and that they saw incremental progress, but every night they’d leave empty-handed. After months of joyful planning for a new family member, they kept returning home to the disorienting sensation of still being by themselves.
“It is the hardest thing to leave your baby in the hospital,’’ Crocker says. “It just feels wrong.’’
A rough patch in the season
All the while, the season spun on.
On game days, Crocker would show up for shootaround, head to the hospital and back to the game but he felt like he wasn’t doing either – parenting or coaching – successfully.
“I mean, there were points where I definitely wasn’t well, and I had to understand that and try to steady myself and find some clarity and calm in order to best help the team,’’ he says. “I had a feeling we had a really special group, and I didn’t want to let them down. So, I wanted to model the behaviors that we talked to them about, like hard things are happening but we’ve got to keep going, keep working, go through adversity.
“But I also wanted to show that I value my family, so I need to do that too. And it felt like I couldn’t do both.’’
It didn’t help that Illinois hit the skids at the same time. Beginning with the loss at Michigan State, the Illini lost four out of their next six, the defense giving up 89 points per game and tracking its worst efficiency numbers of the season on KenPom.
In context, it makes sense. The first loss came on the day Crocker said goodbye to Papa Earl and the second, to Wisconsin, two days after Sienna was born and while Taylor was still in the hospital. Eight days later, Illinois went out west, thousands of miles away from the hospital, and lost in OT to UCLA.
“I know what he was going through,’’ Underwood says. “I know he felt like he had to prove himself to me. He’s in that first year. He doesn’t want to let his players down. He doesn’t want to let me down. And I just kept telling him, ‘I don’t care about any of that. I mean it.’ And I just had to hope he believed it.’’
He did. Crocker essentially gave Underwood his schedule on the fly, explaining that he might get in a little later than usual because he wanted to go to the hospital, or that he’d be pinging back and forth between shootaround and game time.
“And he didn’t care,’’ Crocker says. “When I called him in February, when it all happened, he said, ‘Take care of them,’’ That’s all he said. And there was nothing else he ever had to say after that because his actions showed me that he meant it.”
Sienna comes home
On March 23 a picture popped up in the Illinois group text message – Sienna looking up at the camera, snug in her yellow jammies.
Thanks to the care from the hospital staff at Carne Foundation and her own feistiness, Sienna Bobbie Crocker now weighs seven pounds, 12 ½ ounces and last Monday, 43 days after her birthday, the family brought her home.
Underwood, who six weeks earlier had fielded the terrified call from Crocker about Taylor, remembers exactly what he did.
“Tears,’’ he says. “Just tears.’’
After a few days of blissful middle-of-the-night wake-up calls from his hangry daughter, Crocker had to leave for Houston and the Sweet 16. While Sienna cozied up at home, the Illini held Houston to 22 points in the first half and 55 for the game to advance to the Elite Eight.
Two days after that, previously hot-shooting Iowa connected on just 38% of its shots from the floor, and 36% from behind the arc and Illinois returned to the Final Four for the first time in 21 years.
“I remember back when I went to New Orleans thinking how amazing it would be to coach in a Final Four,’’ Crocker says. “And when it happened, all I wanted to do was go back and FaceTime.’’
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