Carl Tacy, former Wake Forest basketball coach who’s in school’s hall of fame, has died

Carl Tacy, who was maybe one of the most underrated basketball coaches in Wake Forest basketball history, has died at age 86.

Tacy, who lived in Winston-Salem along with his wife, Donnie, for the last 15 years or so, coached Wake from the 1972-73 season through 1984-85. Wake Forest played in regional championship games in 1977, losing 82-68 to eventual national champion Marquette, and in 1984, losing 68-63 to Houston.

Tacy’s Wake Forest teams went 222-149, playing in four NCAA Tournaments and two NITs. The Deacons reached the NIT semifinals in 1983.

Ernie Nestor, an assistant coach on the current Wake Forest basketball team, worked for a short time under Tacy. Nestor said that in recent days Tacy had been moved to Hospice after suffering some health issues.

“Carl made his mark at Wake,” said Nestor, who was an assistant for Tacy from 1979 through 1985. “His kids played hard and they loved playing for him. He was certainly somebody that shaped my coaching career.”

The era that Tacy coached in saw some of the greatest players in school history that included Rod Griffin, Skip Brown, Frank Johnson, Jerry Schellenberg, Kenny Green, Delaney Rudd, Anthony Teachey and Tyrone “Mugsy” Bogues. Brown, Griffin and Bogues all have their jersey’s retired at Joel Coliseum.

One of Tacy’s thrills as the coach at Wake Forest was winning The Big Four Tournament, which was a yearly battle between the four ACC schools in North Carolina. Tacy won those mini-tournaments on a regular basis.

“I think he won at least four of those,” Nestor said. “He just thought it was always important in the recruiting battles to try and win the Big Four so he pushed his teams hard.”

Tacy won four overall Big Four titles including three straight 1975-77. The Big Four tournaments were played in Greensboro.

Maybe his best team was 1977 when the Deacons made it to the Midwest Region finals. The Deacons, which were led by Brown, Griffin, Schellenberg and Johnson, went 22-8 that season but lost in the Elite Eight to Marquette, the eventually national champions.

In 1984 the Deacons beat DePaul in the NCAA Tournament in overtime in Coach Ray Meyer’s final game of his coaching career. The Deacons lost to Houston, the eventual national champions, in their next NCAA Tournament game.

After the next season, however, Tacy abruptly resigned and never coached again. Nestor said that Tacy went into the yogurt business in Virginia after he resigned but eventually moved back to Advance and then back to Winston-Salem the last two years or so.

“It was certainly a shock,” said John Justus, who was the Wake Forest sports information director at the time of Tacy’s resignation. “It was in the middle of the summer.”

Justus arrived at Wake Forest during the last year and half of Tacy’s coaching career.

“His era was very good and you look at his record and you see he was very consistent,” Justus said.

Skip Brown, said that Tacy and his wife, Donnie, moved back to the area about 15 years ago. Brown said he and Larry Williams, a former assistant coach at Wake Forest, would get together frequently for lunch. Brown said he stayed in contract with Tacy through the years.

“He was a very matter-of-fact coach, but probably the thing that I think makes him the greatest coach in Wake Forest history was how simple he made things,” Brown said. “He would simplify things to a degree to where it was fun. He just had a way of making it easy to play for him.”

Brown said one reason why Tacy wasn’t as popular was Tacy’s low-key approach.

“He wasn’t flamboyant or exuberant maybe as other coaches,” Brown said. “He was a great teacher and a student of the game. I always kidded him that way before Nike had that ‘Just Do It’ slogan Coach Tacy was telling us that in the 1970s. He should have trademarked that slogan because he had it long before Nike had it.”

Brown, who has been a successful bank owner in Winston-Salem after his graduation from Wake Forest, said Tacy supported him long after Brown’s basketball career was over at Wake Forest.

“He was just an incredible man of character and we are all better off to have known him,” Brown said.

Tacy, who along with Bones McKinney, Dave Odom and Murray Greason are all in the Wake Forest sports hall of fame.

Tacy was a native of Huttonsville, W. Va. and he graduated from Davis & Elkins before coaching 10 years in high school and then for three seasons at Ferrum Junior College in Virginia.

After one season as an assistant at Marshall he was hired at Wake Forest in 1972 to replace Jack McCloskey by Dr. Gene Hooks, who was the Wake Forest athletics director who hired Tacy.

“Carl was a great coach and an even better person,” Hooks said in a statement released by Wake Forest. “I trusted him completely as he always valued the integrity of Wake Forest and his student-athletes over everything else.”

This story was originally published April 2, 2020 at 11:46 AM with the headline "Carl Tacy, former Wake Forest basketball coach who’s in school’s hall of fame, has died."