News > August 8, 2007

By Ryan Durham | Sports editor

Uncertainty has surrounded the head coaching job of the Wake Forest men’s basketball team since the untimely death of Skip Prosser, but it ended today. Demon Deacon associate head coach Dino Gaudio, a close friend and longtime assistant of Prosser, was named head coach of the Deacs by athletic director Ron Wellman at an Aug. 8 press conference.

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Gaudio on the sidelines with Prosser at the Joel Colisuem. (Photo courtesy Wake Forest Media Relations)

“This is a very bittersweet moment for me," Gaudio said. “I love Wake Forest and I love the Atlantic Coast Conference. But I also love Skip Prosser and to become the head coach under these circumstances is not what I had envisioned.”

Gaudio has signed five-year contract, according to Wellman, who said he expects it will be only the first of several contracts to come.

“Dino has the qualities that we want at Wake Forest,” Wellman said. “First of all, he's a teacher. He enjoys teaching and he considers coaching teaching, just as Skip considered coaching teaching.”

Gaudio becomes the 20th head coach for the university’s men’s basketball team, but this is not his first time at the helm of a Division I basketball team. He led the Black Knights of United States Military Academy at West Point from 1993-1997, more commonly known as Army, and the Greyhounds of Loyola University in Maryland from 1997-2000. After these coaching jobs, Gaudio joined Prosser’s staff at Xavier University and then made the move with him to Winston-Salem in 2001.

However, this was not the first meeting of the two coaches. In fact, they worked together for a total of 17 years. Gaudio started his career in 1981 as assistant coach to Prosser at Central Catholic High School in Wheeling, W.Va. and served alongside Prosser as an assistant coach at Xavier.

Gaudio had been Prosser’s top assistant at Wake Forest and played a central role in recruiting. With three of the top high school players in the 2008 class already committed to the university, Gaudio’s appointment should help keep these players on board and continue a strong recruiting trend. And with the first practice of the season only a few months away, Gaudio’s similar coaching style should make for as smooth a transition as could be expected in such a turbulent time.

Though he said, “I'm going to be my own man,” Gaudio vowed at the press conference that he would carry on the philosophies of the Prosser years. “We'll make certain that what we started, we're going to finish,” he said.

Gaudio also praised the coaching staff he now leads and implied he has no plans to change personnel. “Skip always said we have the best staff in the nation. And we do,” he said.

“One of the big things we have to do is to get better on the defensive end of the court.” he added. “It was Skip's desire and it's my desire and we are going to do that. We have to get better on the defensive end of the floor to go where we want to go.”

Gaudio brings a strong coaching history to the helm of the Deacons squad. At Army, he recorded 19 wins in his first two seasons, the most of any coach in over a decade. He had similar success at Loyola, where he recorded 25 wins in his first two seasons – the best two-year record of any Greyhound coach in 26 seasons.

“Those experiences at Loyola and Army prepared me so well for what I'm doing right here today,” Gaudio said at the press conference. “I was 33 years old when I took the Army job, I'm 50 now. I've learned a lot in those years.”

Gaudio appeared to be confident in taking over as the leader of Wake Forest Basketball.

“I told my guys that from this tragedy is going to be one of the greatest success stories in college basketball,” he said. “From this tragedy we have tremendous cause, we have tremendous motivation. We're going to have a storybook season. I believe that. I told them we've got to make this thing like a Shakespearean play. At the end of the season they're writing books about what happened.”

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Online editor Kevin Koehler contributed to this article.