Skip Prosser

American basketball player and coach

George Edward "Skip" Prosser (November 3, 1950 – July 26, 2007) was an American college basketball coach who was head men's basketball coach at Wake Forest University at the time of his death. He was the only coach in NCAA history to take three separate schools to the NCAA tournament in his first year coaching the teams. In 21 years as a collegiate coach, he made 18 postseason appearances. and graduated from Carnegie High School, where he played football and basketball. Prosser coached at Linsly Military Institute in Wheeling, West Virginia, where he achieved a 38–9 record. He then was hired as a history teacher at Wheeling Central Catholic High School, where he coached his teams to a state championship in 1982, five regional championships and three conference titles over a period of six years Prosser earned his master's degree in secondary education from West Virginia University while he taught at Wheeling Central. and he became Gillen's top assistant. In his only season at Loyola, the Greyhounds finished with a 17–13 overall record and won the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference Championship to earn its first ever NCAA Division I tournament berth. He returned to Xavier precisely one year later, on April 1, 1994, to succeed Gillen, who had accepted a similar position at Providence College two days prior. Prosser became the second winningest coach in Xavier history after Gillen. Prosser began his career at Wake Forest in 2001 and led the Demon Deacons to the NCAA tournament in each of his first four years there. Every senior whom Prosser coached earned his degree in four years. He had two sons, Scott and Mark, who are from his first marriage to Ruth Charles. and is now head coach at Winthrop University. An avid sports fan, Prosser was a follower of the Pittsburgh Steelers since childhood and would often find sports bars to watch their games while on the road. Prosser stated, in an interview that aired just after his death, that his favorite quote was from Ralph Waldo Emerson: "He was a transcendentalist in America in the 1830s who said 'Our chief want in life is someone who will make us do what we can.' I thought that was a powerful statement that we need to be around people who challenge us to be as good as we can be." Since 2009, Prosser's legacy has been celebrated in Winston Salem, North Carolina, with the annual READ Challenge as part of the Skip Prosser Literacy Program. The READ Challenge, a collaboration between Wake Forest Athletics and the Wake Forest Department of Education with support from the Winston Salem based literary nonprofit Bookmarks, encourages and supports reading among fourth grade students in Winston Salem/Forsyth County Schools. In the fall of 2019, 1,441 fourth graders from 29 elementary schools participated in the READ Challenge. 903 fourth graders read 1500 or more minutes before winter break, the highest participation total since 2014.

On July 26, 2007, Prosser collapsed in his office around noon at the Kentner Stadium track adjacent to his office in the Manchester Athletic Center on Wake Forest's campus. A staff member found him unresponsive around 12:45 pm; medical personnel performed CPR and used a defibrillator in efforts to revive Prosser. The announcement of Prosser's death was delayed until later in the day because his wife was traveling to Cincinnati and had not yet been reached. Two funeral masses were held for Prosser. The first was on July 31, 2007, at the Holy Family Catholic Church in Clemmons, North Carolina, near the Wake Forest campus (due to seating limitations, this service was televised by closed circuit television to Wait Chapel on campus). The second mass was held on August 4, 2007, at the Cintas Center on the campus of Xavier University in Cincinnati. Prosser was then buried at the Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati.