Today ... July 26th ... is my birthday. That fact is one of the reasons I will always remember Wake Forest head coach Skip Prosser, who passed away one year ago today.I have such respect for Skip ... so much so that it pained me to see his program struggle mightily in his final few seasons at the helm. He was on the hottest of seats in the ACC as he pulled in one of the best classes any program would love to have (Ty Walker, Tony Woods and Al-Farouq Aminu).
That class will be enrolling at Wake this fall.
One of the things that makes me proud to be a fan of the ACC is how everyone reacted to Skip's death. The coaches and players who are rivals, but friends, did everything they could to comfort the Prosser family and the Deacons program. When those mega recruits were told they could look elsewhere to go to school ... the ACC coaches banded together to not recruit away any of those young men. Skip's recruits should be going to Wake Forest and no other ACC school. To their credit, they stayed.
"It's a tribute to the kids that we recruited that they stayed with us," [new coach Dino] Gaudio said. "After they signed, somebody asked what it was like, and Aminu said, 'Hey, we were already part of the family. We were in the family. When somebody in your family dies, you don't leave the family.' The kids' sticking with us just said volumes about who they were as people, said volumes about their character."Gaudio was placed in a very tough spot: Suddenly taking over for a popular coach at a program that was struggling, yet a year away from having a dynamic recruiting class. All Gaudio did was taken a young team and guide them to the middle of the ACC pack -- not a small feat considering the talent in the league and clouds hovering over Wake.
All but one main player returns this fall, with those three recruits filling in the blanks.
Truth is, many people saw Gaudio as a one-year man. A guy that was given the reigns because he was Skip's assistant and it would have been tough to find an ACC-caliber coach to replace him mid-summer. Maybe Gaudio heads up the program for the year and then Wake goes out and finds a permanent replacement next spring. I mean, there is no way that Gaudio could out-recruit Mike Krzyzewski and Roy Williams, right?
Scrap that. He showed that he is indeed an ACC-caliber coach who is bringing the Deacs back into the conference's elite. Doing that goes a long way towards recruiting.
Just as Skip had planned.
