CINCINNATI — Mike Roberts’ yell is unmistakable, whether in a quiet practice gym or a packed Fifth Third Arena. It’s the resounding voice that trails just behind head coach Wes Miller’s call, like an echo that somehow grows louder.

Roberts often plays the hype man, parroting Miller’s instructions with a thunderous howl. Sometimes, Roberts fills in the cracks or adds context. Other times, he absorbs Miller’s ire so the head coach doesn’t have to direct it elsewhere, a 6-foot-9 stress ball responding with a quick, loud, “I got you, Coach,” or, “That’s my fault.” Occasionally, Roberts even talks over Miller, which tends to outwardly annoy his head coach, but in a way that Miller secretly enjoys, the type of relationship that only can be earned through decades of tight-knit friendship.

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“I mean, Mike and I have worked together 10 or 11 years now,” Miller said. “We’re like a married couple, for gosh sakes.”

It can look that way at times, a level of bickering or commiserating that exists only between people who are comfortable with each other. It’s also why Roberts is such a vital member of the staff as Miller enters his second season at Cincinnati, with Roberts returning alongside Andre Morgan and associate head coach Chad Dollar as Miller’s three bench assistants. Roberts previously spent eight seasons on Miller’s staff at UNC Greensboro, but the duo’s friendship actually started years earlier at New Hampton School in New Hampshire. Roberts was a college-prep student and Miller a newly arrived undergrad, two teammates whose intensity for basketball quickly formed the basis of a lasting bond.

“We’re both really intense competitors,” Miller said. “We gravitated to each other because we’re both psychotic about being great players and competing.”

That endeared Roberts to Bob Knight, as well. Roberts grew up in Terre Haute, Indiana, an old grace-before-supper manufacturing town about an hour west of Bloomington. Roberts found his way to New Hampton because it was a popular prep school for future Hoosiers players and a good opportunity for a strong student like Roberts to build some muscle on top of his passion.

“Mike was just so tough. Ever since I’ve known him, he did everything that one way,” said Mike Davis, the head coach at Detroit Mercy who coached Roberts at Indiana. “Coach Knight liked him because he wanted guys who would set screens. Mike was all about effort, all the time. I don’t think I ever witnessed a practice where he didn’t go hard. You can’t say that about 99 percent of players.”

Roberts never played a game under Knight. The legendary and contentious coach was dismissed in September 2000, Roberts’ freshman year. Davis, an assistant on Knight’s staff, took over just weeks before the season began. But after spending five years with the Hoosiers under Davis, Roberts got his first taste of coaching as a graduate assistant for Knight at Texas Tech during the 2005-06 season. Roberts wasn’t sure he wanted to go into coaching — he originally planned to go to law school — yet he couldn’t pass on the opportunity to work for the coach he idolized growing up.

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Roberts quickly took to the profession, soaking up the intricacies and teaching aspects of the college game from one of its most successful minds.

“I learned so much from coach Knight. Obviously, he has an intense way about him, and in the modern world, it’s controversial,” Roberts said. “As a coach, I want to have really close, interpersonal relationships with our players. That’s really important. But in certain situations, you also want to be their coach. One of the best things coach Knight was able to do was bring up the level of intensity in his players just by being there. Which I think is good, as long as it’s done the right way.”

It fostered a kinship between Roberts and Knight, and it takes only a few minutes of observing Roberts at work to witness Knight’s influence on Roberts’ coaching style. Not that he was ever lacking any intensity. Roberts grew up playing hoops at the Terre Haute Boys & Girls Club. It’s how he met Steve Fleschner, a prominent attorney whose son, Paul, was about the same age as Roberts. Fleschner volunteered at the Boys & Girls Club and later coached a local AAU basketball team. He still recalls one tournament in Orlando, Florida, when the kids were in middle school and leading big in the fourth quarter of a game. Roberts went to the free-throw line and air-balled both foul shots.

“Then you see Mike running back, and he wasn’t hurting himself, but he keeps kind of hitting himself on the head, angry at himself, all the way down the court,” Fleschner said. “And everyone in the stands, the coaches on the other team, are almost rolling on the floor laughing. This kid is going bananas because he missed two free throws when we were ahead by 30 or 40 points.

“He was intense. Really intense. He was the type of kid, if he thought running through a brick wall would win the game, he would have tried to run through it.”

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The same goes for a locker. After his lone season with Knight at Texas Tech, Roberts was hired as a video coordinator at Cal under Ben Braun in 2006. John Pasternack, an assistant on Braun’s staff, was a fellow Knight devotee who had worked as a student manager at Indiana and helped get Roberts the job in Berkeley. By his second season at Cal, Roberts had moved up to a bench role, during which Braun remembers a road trip to Washington where Roberts demonstrated in the locker room at halftime how the players needed to go after loose balls.

“He went flying, diving on the floor and ramming his head into a locker. I’m thinking, ‘Damn, I don’t know if we have anyone that intense,’” Braun said. “I used to say that Mike was a little touched, but in a good way. You want a guy who has a pulse, and Mike does. When he’s there, he’s all the way there, not half-stepping anything. That’s probably why Knight liked him so much.”

Miller, too. When Miller was elevated from interim to full-time head coach at UNC Greensboro before the 2012-13 season at age 29, he promptly hired his old prep-school buddy to his first staff. Their bond has deepened during the decade since, reuniting in Cincinnati in the spring of 2021 with a well-established understanding of each other’s expectations, each other’s limits and how to keep pushing both.

“My job is to take things off Wes’ plate and help him be the best version of himself. I think I know what his strengths are and maybe what some of his weaknesses are, and vice versa with me,” Roberts said. “I know I’m an assistant and have to pick my spots, but we’ve known each other so long and respect each other enough that we’re not afraid of the slightly contentious moment that might occur in the heat of battle. From the outside, some people might look at it and think I’m overstepping or he’s coming at me too hard, but for us, that’s nothing. We know where we’re coming from.”

Roberts moved from Terre Haute to Eugene, Oregon, the summer before his eighth-grade year. His father was a construction manager who was hired and relocated to build a new Sony Corporation factory in the neighboring town of Springfield.

Eugene was a culture shock for the teenage Roberts. He flew out to meet his dad a few weeks before the rest of his family so he could attend a summer basketball camp, and he and his dad drove through a Grateful Dead concert after leaving the airport. It was the last summer Jerry Garcia toured with the band before his death.

“I’m as Terre Haute as it gets, so let me tell you, that was an eye-opening experience,” Roberts said. “I looked at my dad and was like, ‘Where the hell are you taking me?’”

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Roberts wasn’t a fan of Eugene at first. He missed the Boys & Girls Club and the friends he played basketball with back home and didn’t initially fit in with the West Coast folks who called him “logo man” because of all the IU gear and other sports apparel he wore. But South Eugene High School was an academic powerhouse that had a great basketball coach in Dean Stepp, and Roberts grew to appreciate it.

“It ended up being the best of both worlds: It was elite academically and I had an elite high school coach,” he said. “It changed my life because it opened my horizons.”

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None of them, however, were enticing enough to keep him away from Bloomington. As Roberts developed on the court as a high schooler, he was recruited heavily by a number of Pac-10 and West Coast programs. But he still visited Terre Haute every summer, often staying with the Fleschners, and dreamed of playing for Indiana. Roberts remembers watching Keith Smart and the Hoosiers win the 1987 NCAA championship as a 7-year-old.

“I grew up on that: Channel 4, watching Indiana basketball,” Roberts said. “When IU offered me a scholarship, it was over.”

He casts no illusions about his college playing days. In five seasons at Indiana (2000-05), the forward averaged 1.4 points and 1 rebound in 6.5 minutes per game. He was on the 2001-02 squad with Jared Jeffries, Dane Fife and Tom Coverdale that lost to Maryland in the NCAA Championship Game, knocking off a stacked Duke team in the Sweet 16, but Roberts sat out the whole season with an ankle injury.

“I’m not one of these guys who 20 years later talks about what a great player I was. I was definitely a role player, but I knew what I was good at, and I was reliable. When we needed physicality, defense, reliability, I could bring that,” Roberts said. “My playing career, for the most part, was a disappointment, but I prided myself on being ready, and I enjoyed my time there.”

Roberts was a three-time academic All-Big Ten honoree and a captain on the 2004-05 team as a senior when he also won the Big Ten’s sportsmanship award. He saw his most playing time the year prior, starting three games and averaging 8.7 minutes, coming off the bench to spark a few late-season victories in league play and the Big Ten tournament.

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“He was the ultimate team guy,” Davis said. “He didn’t care how much he played, if he started. He celebrated his teammates’ success more than his own, and he truly understood what it took to be successful. I don’t remember a day when he wasn’t working hard.”

That combination of hard work and maturity was something Fleschner recognized in Roberts at a young age back in Terre Haute. He had a strong family foundation. Roberts’ father was an independent construction manager, his mother a medical technologist, and Roberts is the oldest of three boys. His middle brother, John Henry, has mild cerebral palsy and competed in track at the 2016 Paralympic Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro. A big reason the Roberts family remained in the Pacific Northwest was because of the superior level of facilities and programs available to John Henry. Fleschner ventures that Mike watching all his little brother had to overcome was probably a chastening, motivating factor for Mike.

“He was driven,” Fleschner said. “There’s just something about Mike, even when he was a kid, he’s always going to make the right decision. He would have fun, but he was pretty mature, pretty wise.”

It has served Roberts well in his coaching career. His intensity is intrinsic and undeniable, the trait that leaves a first impression — the big man with the booming voice. But as Roberts has grown in age and experience, he’s continuously evolved in other areas of the job. He also has become more cognizant of that initial perception, not wanting to be assumed or misconstrued as something he’s not.

“I love people like Mike who are tough, but they know how to separate on the court and off the court. Mike could turn it on and off,” said Braun, who also had Roberts as an assistant for four seasons at Rice after leaving Cal. “You gotta support your players and they have to know that. That’s another thing I love about Mike: He could really get into the players on the court, but I never had to worry about a player misreading Mike. He’d be the first guy to spend time with a player when he was in trouble or needed something, needed help academically, when he was sick. If he needed extra time in the gym, Mike was the first guy there.”

Roberts always had the work ethic and basketball mind to be a coach, two things he sharpened further during his season working with Knight. But the connections he developed with his coaches and players, and the loyalty that comes with them, has helped distinguish him. Roberts began to understand the weight of his role and the impact he could have on the people he worked with, on and off the court.

“He’s the highest-character guy I’ve met in this business,” said Pasternack, who is now the head coach at UC Santa Barbara. “He’s great at developing players, and he also cares about the kids. When I think of Mike Roberts, he’s a rock. Such a solid human being.”

Roberts has lived and worked all over the country — West Coast, East Coast, big metropolitan cities, small college towns — but as far as he’s concerned, none of it compares to Terre Haute.

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“We joke with him that there is something about Mike when he crosses the state line into Indiana,” Miller said. “The guy just starts getting a beat to a different drum. That’s home. He loves Terre Haute, and you can’t tell him any different.”

Loyalty is a defining theme for Roberts. To his hometown. To his alma mater. To his teammates and players. To Knight, Braun, Miller and the other coaches he has worked alongside. To people like Fleschner and Stepp who helped mold him. That’s why it was so significant when Roberts left Wes Miller and UNC Greensboro for an assistant position at Indiana under Archie Miller in 2019.

“He turned down some opportunities to stay loyal to both Wes and me,” Braun said. “I appreciate that. He’s not just gonna leave to leave.”

Indiana, obviously, was a special circumstance, one of the few programs that could drag him away from what he helped Wes Miller build for eight years at UNC Greensboro. But homecomings do not always go as planned. The Hoosiers went 20-12 during Roberts’ first season in Bloomington, only to have the postseason cut short by the pandemic. The next year, the team finished 12-15 and Archie Miller was let go.

Roberts doesn’t dwell much on those two seasons at IU, aside from being grateful (and loyal) to Archie Miller for giving him the opportunity.

“What happened is what happened,” Roberts said. “Other than that, I don’t really have much to say. We’re going to the Big 12, they’re in the Big Ten, we’re going to compete for recruits, we’re going to play them — let’s see, let’s go. Whatever.”

Roberts had the opportunity to stay with the Hoosiers in a non-bench role under new head coach Mike Woodson, but Wes Miller landing the Cincinnati job altered that path. Coaching at Indiana was clearly not the experience Roberts had hoped for, and there was likely some pain with the way it ended. Yet it all worked out in the end.

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“He was probably disappointed in the way things went at IU, but he’s really happy now,” said Fleschner, who still lives in Terre Haute and keeps in touch with Roberts. “He really likes Wes, obviously, and the University of Cincinnati and the whole community. It may have been the best thing for him.”

Roberts and Miller still joke about a friendship that has brought them both to Cincinnati, whether it was Miller crashing with Roberts in Bloomington during an AAU tournament or the time they faced off against one another in college when Miller and the North Carolina Tar Heels traveled to Indiana for the 2004 ACC/Big Ten Challenge.

“Well, Wes and I watched from the bench, let’s be clear about that,” Roberts said.

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Whether they were working together at UNC Greensboro or coaching elsewhere, the two were on the phone most nights watching film and talking hoops and would meet up each year at the Final Four or other coaching conventions. Roberts knew Miller was in the running at Cincinnati last offseason and was one of the first people Miller told when he accepted the job. Roberts knew Miller had an assistant spot, too, but that was briefly put on hold while Roberts pursued Miller’s vacated position at UNC Greensboro.

“It was really simple. I called and told him I got the (Cincinnati) job, and that if he doesn’t get the head job at UNCG, I want him on my staff here,” Miller said. “He said, ‘Coach, if you’re telling me you need an answer now, I’m coming, but I’d like to pursue the UNCG job first.’”

Greensboro hired Mike Jones instead, and Roberts hopped in the car and headed to Clifton. It has been a perfect fit professionally and personally for Roberts, who’s still able to live just across that Indiana border to stay closer to his two sons. At the same time, it may not be a long-term setup. Roberts, like most assistants, has aspirations to be a Division I head coach. He doesn’t hide that goal, even as he remains devoted to his current position, and those close to him expect he’ll achieve it soon enough.

“Selfishly for Cincinnati, I hope it’s a couple more years,” Miller said, “but Mike’s ready to be a head coach today.”

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Roberts is at peace with whether that opportunity arises or not, although he admits that wasn’t always the case.

“I’ve interviewed for multiple head coaching positions, and there have been a couple times when I’ve gone to bed thinking I was going to get one and I didn’t,” Roberts said. “The truth is, there have been points in my career when I was really ate up about it, but at this point, I don’t spend my days thinking about it. I spend my days trying to help Cincinnati win. And I mean that. I know if I keep doing my job, I’ll get that opportunity”

Working for Miller helps, laying the groundwork for what both hope and believe can be a revival of the Bearcats. It means a lot to coach for your alma mater, the school you grew up rooting for. It means even more to coach for someone you have a 23-year friendship with.

“This is an ultracompetitive profession, and if you’re doing that with someone who is also a true friend, you don’t want to let them down,” Roberts said. “Wes understands what this institution is. We understand we’re on the shoulders of the people before us, and we owe it to those coaches, players and fans to put a product on the floor they can be proud of. Wes gets that and how much it means to the university and community, and he works every day to uphold that standard.”

Roberts does, too. An unmistakable voice right there behind Miller, for as long as the head coach can keep him around.

(Top photo courtesy of Cincinnati Bearcats Athletics)