Xavier Nation Magazine Feature: Like Father...
Mark Prosser, son of a certain former Xavier coach, brings his Western Carolina team to Cintas Center. How could it not spark memories?
Rory Glynn, Xavier Nation Magazine
12/18/2019
Mark Prosser is apologizing. Western Carolina University officials said he would call between 11 a.m. and noon, and a meeting with his athletic director ran a little long, he explains. It’s only 11:04 a.m. If you can’t be on time, be early.
That was just one of the many sayings of Mark’s father, Skip, the beloved former coach at Xavier and Wake Forest. And Mark Prosser, beginning his second season as head basketball coach at Western Carolina, proves the proverbial apple doesn’t fall far from the proverb-loving tree. Mark, 41, will bring his Catamounts to the Cintas Center on December 18 to play the program his late father helped build into a perennial power. It’s the second of back-to-back Skip-themed games, following XU’s December 14 visit to Wake Forest in the resumption of the series XU and Wake created in his honor.
It’s Mark’s second season in charge of the program in Cullowhee, North Carolina. “It’s going to be a lot of fun,” he says. “As a family, we still feel a very, very tight bond to Xavier. I’m sure there will be a lot of emotions, but once the ball gets tipped, it’s a game. Hopefully Travis [Steele] will take it easy on us.”
Mark is kidding, of course, and knows better. He grew up in a household where maximum effort was assumed and better was expected.
Another of Skip’s favorite sayings was borrowed from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Our chief want in life is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.”
That philosophy was among the underpinnings of a career that included 291 victories and nine NCAA tournament appearances as a head coach.
Skip was the first coach to lead three different schools to the NCAA tournament in his first season at each.
When Mark told Skip he wanted to pursue coaching as a career, he said his father’s reaction “was what a lot of coaches’ sons hear: ‘What else do you want to do?’ But I knew pretty early on,” Mark says. “To see the relationships he built with players, the opportunity to be part of kids’ lives and help mold them into young men...this is what I wanted to do.”
Mark grew up around Xavier, where Skip spent eight seasons as an assistant coach and seven as head coach, but played his college basketball at Marist. He visited Xavier on a recruiting trip—Pat Kelsey hosted him—but says seeing players like Torraye Braggs, Lenny Brown, Gary Lumpkin, and Darnell Williams persuaded him that Marist was “a good level for me.”
“Hindsight’s 20/20,” Mark says. “If I had known [Skip would pass away in 2007], I might have done things differently.”
When a knee injury ended his playing career early, Mark served as a student coach at Marist and made stops as an assistant at Wofford (twice) and Bucknell, where the Bison famously upset Kansas in the 2004 NCAA tournament.
He spent a year as head coach at Brevard College before leaving for Winthrop to work under Kelsey, who had been an assistant to Skip at Wake Forest. In six seasons at Winthrop, Mark was part of four straight Big South tournament finals and one NCAA bid.
“I took the job with Pat because I didn’t get to work with my father as a coach,” Mark says. “Pat would always say, ‘Here’s how your dad would approach this.’ It was great to see how they went about their business.”
When Wake Forest and Xavier announced this season’s return of the Skip Prosser Classic after a two-year hiatus, Wake coach Danny Manning said the Deacons “continue to feel his presence every day within our program.” Twelve years after his father’s death, Mark has a theory as to why he remains such a presence in his sport.
“What endeared him to a lot of people was his honesty,” he says. “Like recruiting. You have people telling you what you want to hear sometimes instead of people telling the truth. People were sometimes taken aback by my dad’s brutal honesty. But the way he could be so open, so honest, and yet so compassionate is a big part of why he’s such a popular figure in college basketball.”
