Wake Forest’s Skip Prosser, the first coach to take three schools to the NCAA tournament in his first season, died suddenly yesterday. He was 56.
Prosser had been jogging on a track adjacent to his office at noon, the Winston-Salem, N.C., school said. A member of his staff then found him unresponsive at about 12:45 p.m. Prosser was transported to the school’s Baptist Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead at 1:41 p.m.
Prosser compiled a career record of 291-146 as a head coach, and led Loyola (Md.), Xavier, and Wake to the NCAA tournament. He was 126-68 with the Demon Deacons and guided them to their first No. 1 ranking in 2004-05.
Prosser, a Pittsburgh native who played at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy and graduated in 1972, was a high school coach when then-Xavier coach Pete Gillen gave him his big break. Prosser became an assistant with the Musketeers in 1984-85, before Loyola gave him its top job in 1993-94.
“It was the best move I ever made,” an emotional Gillen said yesterday. “He was what we call an A-to-Z coach. He did it all. He could scout, he could recruit, he ran practices. He was the whole package.”
A year after leading Loyola to the NCAA tournament, Prosser returned to Xavier, this time as head coach.
“He worked his way up through the ranks himself, so he always had an encouraging word for others who were trying to do the same,” said Manhattan College coach Barry Rohrssen, who worked with Prosser and Gillen at the legendary 5-Star Camp. “In all of college basketball, you couldn’t meet a finer gentleman than Skip.”
Prosser, born Nov. 3, 1950, led the Musketeers for seven seasons before taking the job at Wake in 2001-02.
“He was a better person than he was a coach, and he was a tremendous coach,” said Seton Hall’s Bobby Gonzalez, who replaced Prosser as Gillen’s assistant at Xavier. “As coaches, you’re running all over the country, and then you hear something like this and it just stops you. He was just a true class guy.”
And a modest one at that.
“The thing about Skip, was that the success never got to him. He never let it change him,” Gillen said. “He went to the ACC, he was a star, he had the No. 1 team in the country, he was beating Duke and North Carolina. But he never lost that common touch. He was always just a hard-working, blue-collar guy from Pittsburgh.”
Prosser is survived by his wife, Nancy, and sons, Scott and Mark. Mark is an assistant at Bucknell.