Coach Prosser Dies at Age 56

By JIM ELLIOTT
Wheeling’s Joe Blaha was a freshman on the 1980 Wheeling Central boys’ basketball team coached by Skip Prosser, who died Thursday at the age of 56.

New to the job, Prosser had joined Wheeling Central earlier that year after a stint at The Linsly School. What he inherited was a young team that was about to take its lumps.

None of that mattered to Prosser.

Blaha remembers riding on a team bus on the way back through Charleston after they played a few practice games in the area.

“Our bus stopped at the Charleston Civic Center,” Blaha recalled. “Coach had organized for the place to be open for us. It was completely empty. We walked in, he sat us down and gave a speech and said, ‘This is where we’ll be in two years.’

“He was right.”

In 1982, Prosser’s third Wheeling Central team, which included current Tulsa University coach Doug Wojcik, won the school’s first West Virginia Secondary Schools Activities Commission boys’ basketball state title.

Blaha, with a heavy heart, relayed that story only a few hours after he’d received news that Prosser, the head men’s basketball coach at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., had died Thursday at the age of 56.

“A friend of mine called about 2 o’clock,” Blaha said. “I looked on the Internet, and boom, it was there. Complete shock.”

Blaha’s words were echoed throughout the Ohio Valley by those who remained close to Prosser.

“Skip was always first-class,” said former Wheeling Park boys’ basketball coach Sam Andy.

Andy’s teams didn’t take it real easy on those young Central teams — a favor Prosser later returned when his sophomores became seniors — but the two were always close.

“We’d talk on the phone for hours,” Andy recalled. “When my wife was ill, he called and sent flowers.”

Blaha said Prosser remained the most influential coach he ever had.

“It was more than that,” he said. “Not just basketball but teaching — everything. All I could see is I didn’t want to disappoint him. He was one of those guys who would get the best out of you. You didn’t want to disappoint him in any way, shape or form.”

No details of Prosser’s death were immediately released, and Wake Forest athletic director Ron Wellman declined to comment. The school scheduled a news conference for Thursday night.

Jon Terry, a Bucknell team spokesman, said Mark Prosser had been on the road recruiting but was heading to North Carolina on Thursday afternoon.

“Everybody here has gotten to know Skip real well,” Terry said. “Obviously it’s tragic news for all of us up here, as well.”

Nick Bedway, retired executive sports editor for The Intelligencer and Wheeling News-Register, worked alongside Prosser for many years and always admired his approach.

“Skip’s mission in life was to become a great teacher, and he certainly reached that goal,” Bedway said. “He was a teacher of the game of basketball, and he did it as well as anybody in the coaching profession. As a high school coach, everything was about the kids. His philosophy was to make them better people first and basketball players second.”

Bedway’s longtime newspaper co-worker and friend Doug Huff, a retired sports editor of The Intelligencer, said Prosser was one-of-a-kind.

“Skip was a real personable guy, really well liked,” Huff said. “He had a pretty good rapport with his players, the media, he had time for everybody. Even after he left and became a Division I head coach at Xavier and Wake Forest, he came back here to Wheeling (Jesuit University) and helped with camps and was a guest speaker.”

One of the men responsible for bringing Prosser back to those camps was Wheeling Recreation Department Director Tom “Bear” Bechtel, a friend of Prosser’s for more than 30 years.

Bechtel recalled a time a few years ago when he and three others traveled to the Winston-Salem area to check out a softball facility. Bechtel had called Prosser and set up a meeting with him inside Lawrence Joel Coliseum just a few hours before the Demon Deacons were to play Wisconsin

On the trip with Bechtel was Roy Arman, Jim Stein and Don “Wally” Wallace.

Among those in the group who’d never met Prosser was Wallace, but Bechtel had already informed him who was coming. “We walked into the gym, Skip’s coming around the locker room,” Bechtel explained. “A security guard comes out and says, ‘Coach isn’t giving autographs.’ I said, ‘I already have it, I got it 30 years ago.’ Skip walked out, put his hand out and said, ‘How you doing Wally?’ That just floored Wally.”

“That’s just the kind of guy he was. He treated everybody so fair,” Bechtel added. “Just a great individual.”

Before arriving at Wake Forest, Prosser was head coach at Xavier for seven seasons and at Loyola of Maryland for one year. Prosser had a career record of 291-146 as a head coach, including 126-68 with Wake Forest.

“He paid his dues,” Andy said. “You see the glory of Wake Forest. What you don’t see is all that time he put in as an assistant recruiting. Everybody sees the end product, but he certainly paid his dues to get where he was.”

Prosser was born Nov. 3, 1950, in Pittsburgh. A 1972 graduate of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, Prosser earned his master’s degree in secondary education from West Virginia University in 1980 while he was working at Wheeling Central. He joined the Xavier staff as an assistant before the 1985-86 season, spending eight years on the bench there.

Prosser spent six seasons with the Demon Deacons, winning an Atlantic Coast Conference regular-season title in 2003 and reaching the NCAA tournament in his first four seasons. Wake Forest went to No. 1 for the first time in the 2004-05 season.

Prosser averaged nearly 24 wins in his first four seasons at Wake Forest — including a school-record 27 in 2005 — with his up-tempo offense. But after Paul left for the NBA after his sophomore year, Prosser’s last two teams struggled to a combined 32-33 record, including 8-24 in the ACC, with youth-laden teams.

He is survived by his wife, Nancy, and sons, Scott and Mark. Mark Prosser is an assistant coach at Bucknell.