News > October 18, 2007

By By Blake Holt | Contributing writer

After a tragic summer for Demon Deacons everywhere, routines resume and priority takes precedent. But as memorial toilet paper and flowers disappear, a team returns to no such normalcy. With the official NCAA practices already begun, the Wake Forest basketball team remembers Skip Prosser everyday. And now, they play for him.

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Skip Prosser with then-freshamn Ishmael Smith last season at the Joel Coliseum. (Old Gold & Black file photo)

“It’s like it was yesterday,” junior David Weaver said. “I would always bump into Coach when he was joggin’ out on the track on my way to and from tutoring in the Miller Center.”

The events of July 26 are cemented into the memory of each of the Demon Deacon players. They remember how strangely the day unfolded, and how the aftermath still clings to them. As the season approaches, a season without the coach who brought them here, three players sit in the quiet of the Z. Smith Reynolds Library, to discuss what they remember and how they are coping.

“As usual I caught him on the way in, but that day I didn’t head straight out when I was done,” Weaver said, the day replaying in his mind. “Instead, I went down to the locker room for a minute with L.D. (Williams). We’re sitting on the couches just watching game tapes and all of the sudden Coach Muse just busts through the door. Usually there’s a little code, you know, that you got to punch to get in there. But I swear I never heard him punch in no code.”

“Muse jumps in and he’s just like, ‘Guys, go to the coaches’ office,’” sophomore L.D. Williams said. “At that point he let us know Coach Prosser had just had a heart attack.” But they didn’t know much more.

Shortly after 1 p.m. July 26, the players were located one by one and told to head off campus to the team’s academic advisers’ home. They waited there for about four hours before they knew of their coach’s death.

The media presence had grown large on campus and the players were instructed to turn off their phones. While off campus, they resisted listening to any news reports, since they didn’t want to hear false information.

Instead, the players waited and just watched some DVDs, oblivious to the reality of what others far beyond the campus seemed to already know.

“As time went by, though, we started to really wonder,” Weaver said. “A couple guys started gettin’ texts from friends telling us what they heard on the news, but at the same time we’re being told it’s all cool by our coaches. We knew what we wanted to believe, but after a while we started thinking, ‘Maybe this isn’t as good as we think.’”

At about 6 p.m., Athletic Director Ron Wellman came to the house where the team waited. There, he let them know their coach had passed.

“I just remember sitting at the top of the stairs and staring straight ahead,” Weaver said. “I was thinking there was no way this could’ve happened. I had just seen him on the track cracking jokes.”

Williams called it the saddest moment of his life, and junior Harvey Hale said he really believed it was a dream.

But it wasn’t a dream. For the first time, Skip Prosser was no longer with them.

What followed the initial shock was an unexpected series of events.

The players unanimously call it a period of “rejoice”.

Former All-American Wake point guard, Chris Paul, invited the team to his home in Winston-Salem.

A special aired on ESPN that night, a re-run of a Wake Forest-Duke basketball game.

“We just got some pizza, watched the game and reminisced about some of the funny things about Coach,” Williams said. “We stayed up all night.”

The following day, the celebration of Prosser’s life continued.

“We just felt like playing basketball,” Williams said. “We had rolled the Quad and all of the sudden we just started up in the Miller Center. We didn’t know how to react or what to do, but the one thing we knew was that we had to play.”

So that’s what they did.

What amassed was a storybook reunion of Skip Prosser’s players. “Everybody came back,” Williams said. “Guys from Xavier, Europe and even the NBA started showing up. It was crazy.”

The all-star pick-up game included Eric Williams, ’06, Justin Gray, ’06, Darius Songaila, ’02, James Posey (Xavier alum) and Chris Paul to name a few.

“We were just up in that gym for days,” Williams said. “We just kind of forgot about everything and played.”

But they couldn’t forget for long. “It hadn’t really sunk in,” Weaver said. “The first time it did was the funeral.”

And as the days went on, visitors left Winston-Salem.

“That was the worst part of it all,” Williams said. “We realized Coach wasn’t going to be here for us now.”

Since then, the Demon Deacon basketball team, everyone recruited by the late Skip Prosser, has faced the difficulty of moving on with a program despite losing the man behind it all.

Weaver said he had an especially hard time in the period that followed Prosser’s death.

As a junior, he had known his coach for close to six years. He described being confused for a while.

“I couldn’t understand the way they chose to break the news to us,” he said, “so for a while, I felt a little anger.”

“At the beginning I was just real frustrated,” Williams said. “I just didn’t want to talk to anyone. It’s better now, but it’s just tough.”

After coming back for the fall semester, they are often left in disbelief of it all.

Weaver explained that the practices are the easy part, but that it’s when they are sitting in their rooms that they start to feel what he calls the void in the team.

“You’ll start to feel like you don’t have the motivation,” he said.

But, he continued, “That’s when you remember ‘Coach P would be all over me if I was saying this.’ That’s when you get your focus back.”

The season, simply, is for Skip Prosser, Williams said. They talk about him everyday. “If you see our practices we’re always saying, ‘It’s more than us’ over and over. That stuff’s all about him.”

Prosser’s favorite phrase over the summer was, “One team, one fight.” And as Hale said, the team has adopted this as its motto and marketing slogan. And now the fight is for Prosser.

Already a week into practices and with the traditional Old Gold and Black scrimmage set for Oct. 27, the team is fully immersed in preparation for the season.

The tragedy is always in the back of one’s mind, according to Hale, “But we came here to play basketball, so that’s what we’re doing.”

“It’s all for Prosser. I mean, he’s still our coach,” Williams said. “He’s just living through us.”