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WINSTON-SALEM — Skip Prosser loved a good crowd, but on one condition. And it wasn't met Tuesday night.

Hundreds packed Holy Family Catholic Church in Clemmons and nearly all the 2,000 seats were filled at Wait Chapel on the Wake Forest University campus as a community convened to remember Prosser, a basketball coach who was known as so much more when he died of a massive heart attack Thursday at the age of 56.

"If Coach were here, he would've been really upset with all this," said Dino Gaudio, one of the top assistants to the late Demon Deacons coach. "It was never about Skip."

But this time, it was.

All 11 ACC head coaches bypassed the summer's final day of permissible off-campus recruiting of prospective players to mourn the gregarious Prosser, and they had company from former Deacons players, current coaches and administrators, and even a former NFL head coach, Bill Cowher of Prosser's beloved Pittsburgh Steelers.

Five speakers during the two-hour, 10-minute service recalled a humble man who offered guidance and refused to believe his very public and high-paying job separated him from the common man.

"Skip took everyone seriously," said Nathan O. Hatch, Wake's president.

Hatch read one of 700 message-board remembrances posted on the university's official Web site since news of the coach's death leaked out Thursday. In it, a young alumnus spoke of a campus visit he took while in high school. He was with his dad, who proudly wore a Steelers T-shirt. Out of nowhere walked Prosser, who had recently come to Wake from Xavier University in Cincinnati.

The coach sat with the two visitors and chatted up the dad for an hour about the Steelers, for whom he once camped out overnight in subzero wind chills to buy tickets. When they finished talking football, Prosser addressed his love of his new school for another 30 minutes.

The prospective student, who didn't play basketball, pronounced himself a Deacon for life on the drive back home.

"To Skip," athletics director Ron Wellman said, "there's something more important than just championships. And that is relationships and friendships.

"On campus, Skip seemed to be absolutely everywhere. Most of the time when he said, 'Hi!' to you, that would make your day."

Among the most solid relationships Prosser had was with Ed DeChellis, now the coach at Penn State. The two never worked together or played on the same team, but a meeting at a recruiting event in 1989 invigorated both coaches, who rose from underpaid assistants to prominent lead men in their business.

"I spoke to Skip every day or every other day for years," DeChellis said. "Since last Thursday, I've been lost. The man I counted on for direction in life is gone. My compass in life has gone to another place."

And that, friends speculated, bodes well for a team somewhere.

"God called coach early," said Chris Paul, who played at Wake from 2003-05 and is now an NBA star. "Heaven must have a really bad basketball team. God needed a coach right away."

Contact Rob Daniels at 373-7028 or rdaniels@news-record.com

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