Ken Davis

Dean Buchan spent the past six years working side-by-side with Skip Prosser. Home games. Road games. Practices. Press conferences. As an assistant athletic director at Wake Forest, Buchan was the contact person for the men’s basketball program. If you needed to interview Chris Paul, the request went through Buchan. If you wanted to chat with Prosser, Buchan was more than happy to set things up.

It’s been just a couple of weeks since Buchan left Wake Forest and the tight-knit community of Winston-Salem, N.C. Now he works in the athletic department at Georgia Tech, one of Wake’s rivals in the tradition-rich Atlantic Coast Conference.

Prosser didn’t get mad at Buchan for leaving. (Of course, Prosser seemingly never got mad about anything, with the possible exception of a referee’s call that had gone against the Demon Deacons.) Instead, Buchan said, Prosser had been quite helpful with his transition to another ACC school.

Early Thursday morning, Buchan and Prosser exchanged text messages. Buchan had been listening to talk radio and College of Charleston coach Bobby Cremins had been saying nice things about Prosser’s recruiting class.

“So I texted him,” Buchan said. “I thought he would want to hear about that. And he sent me a text back about an hour later, asking me how I was doing in Atlanta.”

A few hours later Buchan got the news that stunned everyone in college basketball world. Prosser had been found unresponsive after jogging, was rushed to Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, and reportedly died of a heart attack.

He was 56. It doesn’t get any sadder than that. Prosser, a happy and kind person who just happened to be a coach, leaves behind his wife, Nancy, and two sons, Scott and Mark.

Mark is an assistant coach at Bucknell. Father and son reportedly had dinner together in Orlando Wednesday night. Skip left early Thursday morning, returning to Wake Forest for a basketball camp. Mark was watching games at the AAU national tournament when he received a phone call at about 2:40 p.m. He reportedly left the gymnasium immediately and headed to Winston-Salem.

ESPN’s Jay Bilas, who recently served as master of ceremonies for the first Coaches vs. Cancer BasketBALL in North Carolina (hosted by Prosser), called the Wake Forest coach “one of the good guys,” during an appreciation on SportsCenter Thursday night. But that went without saying for anyone who ever spent time around Skip Prosser.

Forget about his career record of 291-146. Forget that he led Wake Forest to a school-record 27 victories during the 2004-05 season. Forget that he was the 2003 ACC Coach of the Year and the only coach to lead three different schools to the NCAA Tournament in his first year at those schools.

Those things may define a coach. But they don’t define the man.

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Skip Prosser didn’t smile all the time, but he came pretty close. His quick wit was always welcome — especially in an interview room setting where clichés and negativity often get in the way of the truth. If he liked you, he gave you his Irishman’s wink. And even if he didn’t know you, that wink still might have punctuated his response.

“He treats everybody well,” said Buchan, who simply wasn’t ready to put Prosser in the past tense. “He treated me like I was part of his family. Your trainers, your academic support people, your student managers, anybody like that . . . he not only made them feel like they were part of the team, but that they were part of his family.”

Paul, the magnificent point guard who provided Prosser with some of his happiest moments at Wake Forest, told me more than once how wonderful it was to play for the man. Prosser’s passion for the game spilled over to his players. Paul understood that Prosser trusted him with the ball — and that makes things so much easier on a youngster’s confidence.

In 2004, Wake Forest lost to St. Joseph’s in the NCAA East Regional semifinals. That game had been billed as a showdown between Paul and Jameer Nelson, the national player of the year. Prosser was philosophical before the game.

“As I often say, it begins at the beginning,” he said. “Both guys, often times, initiate their team’s offense and their defense. So their play, not unlike a quarterback in football, determines how the game goes.”

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