How late father of new coach, Skip Prosser, helps connect Winthrop basketball family
On Thursday, the talk of the college basketball world involved the retirement of Roy Williams — an all-time great coach, a revered college basketball fixture, and the most recent Tar Heel to serve in the vaunted North Carolina Basketball Family.
On Friday, Winthrop made its newest head men’s basketball coaching hire official.
If you squint, adjusting for the different sizes and ages and national statures of these two programs that are rarely ever used in the same sentence, there’s a common thread that connects these moments: On Thursday, UNC said goodbye to its latest, beloved Carolina basketball patriarch. And on Friday, Winthrop looked to establish a basketball family of its own.
Looking at its history as a Division I basketball program, there doesn’t appear to be a notable amount of continuity between Winthrop head coaches and their successors. Gregg Marshall didn’t have strong ties to Winthrop before delivering the Eagles national prominence. Neither, really, did Pat Kelsey.
But the hiring of Mark Prosser appears to change that trend. That is, the program that Kelsey ran and the program Prosser will run are uniquely and notably connected.
It’s a sign of a program growing in sophistication and notoriety; a sign of an evolution instead of a full break.
“I wasn’t sure if I should say this or not, but I’m gonna say this: I think that in this program, on this day, there’s a huge debt of gratitude owed to Skip Prosser,” said Winthrop athletic director Ken Halpin on the podium on Friday. “If you’ve been around Winthrop basketball at all, you’ve heard the name Skip Prosser a hundred, a thousand times. His legacy is infused into our program.
“And you know we had a coach (Kelsey) who used the word ‘mentor’ constantly (to describe Skip). Today, I get to introduce somebody who has a different word for him.”
That word is “Dad.”
Mark Prosser is the son of Skip Prosser, the late coach who helped bring Xavier and Wake Forest national relevance decades ago. Skip left a profound impact on college basketball itself — the motorcycle and tie-dye nation energy he brought to Winston-Salem has yet to be rekindled there and replicated anywhere — but he also left a profound impact on people.
One of those people is Kelsey.
Kelsey grew up in Cincinnati and played basketball under Skip. He only knew Skip as “Coach Prosser,” he told me time and time again in my two years’ worth of conversations with him. Skip took Kelsey as an assistant coach when Kelsey graduated, and Kelsey soaked in everything his mentor said — from his basketball wisdom, to his marketing “genius,” to his one- or two-sentence life lessons that revealed Skip’s clever sense of humor and unique irreverence.
“Coach Prosser used to say,” Kelsey once began, detailing a road trip where his team was late according to its travel itinerary, “that if you don’t miss a flight every once in a while, you’re spending way too much time in airports.”
Kelsey seemed to keep Skip in mind in everything he did. And so when Kelsey brought on Skip’s son, Mark, to be an assistant coach at Winthrop in 2012, it made sense.
And it makes sense now.
When Halpin spoke of Mark’s father at the podium Friday, tears welled in the newly hired coach’s eyes. Prosser’s chin quivered at other moments, too, like when he saw his wife, Emily, across the room tearing up when he said his family left a “part of their heart” in Rock Hill, and that he was so happy he was given the chance to come home.
When I asked about the possible beginning of a Winthrop basketball family after the news conference, Prosser offered a green smile and shrugged: “I hope so.”
He added: “I don’t wanna go anytime soon, so hopefully we’re not really worried about who is coming after me. But yes, we want to keep it sort of in the family, and we’ve done that. I mean, we have an entire staff of (assistants) who were here, and they recognize how special of a place this is. And I don’t know if I’ve seen that before.”
Yes, Winthrop is years and decades, generations and generations — perhaps forever — away from forming what UNC basketball coach Roy Williams sat at the top of for so long. And yes, players and coaches who’ve spent time in Rock Hill seem to share a familial bond, and there’s more than one way to cultivate a basketball family.
But in hiring Prosser, the Eagles are uniquely connecting themselves to the not-too-distant past and those mentors and fixtures and successes.
And they’re hoping it leads to more.
This story was originally published April 3, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
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