a saddening death
I don’t usually have a strong reaction to deaths of people I don’t know, but Thursday’s unexpected death of Wake Forest‘s Coach Skip Prosser did get to me. College basketball has become too much about money, but as far as I could ever tell he was one of the really good guys in the sport. I’m a North Carolina fan, but I’ve got a soft spot for WFU, and I was happy they had a coach to be proud of.
He was a student of history (though his degrees were in nautical science and secondary education), and he managed to use his position as a basketball coach to enrich his players’ outlooks in a way not many coaches would. Here’s an excerpt from Dan Wetzel’s remembrance of Coach Prosser:
Prosser loved to take his teams on those summer exhibition tours. For so many schools now, for so many coaches, these are nothing but extra practice time. Too many teams skip touring the capitals of Europe and head to Canada or the Bahamas – less travel, more mindless fun. What’s the Sistine Chapel when jet skiing is an option?
Not Prosser. Every trip was about taking in the history, soaking up the culture. In the spring semester before the trip, he’d get a professor on campus to conduct a one-credit class on the country the team would be visiting, mandatory for every last player and student manager.
Then, as a bonus, Prosser would attend the class, too, writing the term paper even, banging out four to six pages on the role of Patrick Pearse in the Irish uprising of 1916 like he hadn’t long ago mastered the subject matter.
I expect he truly enjoyed those classes. IMO, summer exhibition tours are part of what’s wrong with college basketball, but I admire a man who turned them into opportunities to learn and to teach. Wake’s lost much more than a winning basketball coach.