Shooting free throws on his backyard half-court in Dalton, Ga., with his father rebounding, Steve Prohm dreamed one day of coaching at Duke and said so out loud.
Dream big, Prohm likes to say. And he always did, through his 13 years as an assistant coach at such outposts as Centenary, Southeast Louisiana, Tulane and ultimately Murray State.
He couldn’t possibly know as a student at Northwest Whitfield how far he could go without tracing conventional steps. How a town of 18,000 in the southwest corner of Kentucky – about half the size of Dalton – could take him to the upper echelon of college basketball in his first year as a head coach.
Murray State is one of only three remaining undefeated teams, along with No. 1 Syracuse (19-0) and No. 3 Baylor (17-0), pending Monday night games.
The 12th-ranked Racers are 18-0, coming off a win Saturday on ESPNU against Tennessee Tech, the team that upset them in the Ohio Valley Conference tournament last year and kept them from a second straight appearance in the NCAA tournament.
The Racers have their eyes set on an at-large bid this time around. And why not? With all their remaining games against conference opponents, prognosticators give Murray State the best chance of becoming the first team to go undefeated in a regular season since St. Joseph’s in 2003-04.
At a time when college basketball seeks out mid-major darlings in March, the Racers are already en vogue. In the middle of that is 37-year-old Prohm, who hosted ESPN's All-Access last week and had the New York Times coming Monday.
“I’d have never dreamed this scenario,” Prohm said, then corrected himself. “I dreamed it all the time, but you would have never ever believed it could come true.”
He seems almost the perfect guy for such a scenario. His favorite bedtime story growing up was “The Little Engine That Could,” and his father still e-mails him optimistic references from it before games.
In his Murray State office is a framed article about the game-winning half-court shot Prohm hit for Northwest Whitfield his senior year, his first taste of doing the “unbelievable.”
As a college player at Oglethorpe, Prohm’s coach told him he was “too enthusiastic,” as his mother Kathy tells it. “They wanted him just to sit quiet,” she said, with a chuckle.
Prohm found an outlet for his enthusiasm and a better fit by transferring to Alabama to focus on a coaching career. He spent five years as a student assistant/manager, doing laundry, folding mail, and chasing loose balls.
On a recommendation from an Alabama assistant, he got his first coaching job working for Billy Kennedy – the man he’d follow to Murray State -- in a volunteer position at Centenary.
Prohm, a neat freak, lived in the basement of a dorm known as “the dungeon,” in a 10-by-10 room, where the only window was high above his head. He ate at the school cafeteria and lived off money he’d made working a summer job at Blockbuster.
“I went down to see him there, I said, ‘Son are you sure you want to do this?’” said his father Ron Prohm, a retired carpet salesman now living near Wilmington, N.C. “He said absolutely.”
Prohm had never even interviewed for a head coaching job last May when Maryland coach Gary Williams retired and set off dominos in the coaching ranks. Mark Turgeon went to Maryland from Texas A & M, and Kennedy went from Murray State to Texas A & M, and Murray State athletic director Allen Ward’s phone started ringing.
Players, former players, and fans all wanted Prohm.
“It became pretty clear and pretty easy that he was the right guy,” said Ward, who hired him eight days later.
Eighteen wins later, including in double overtime over Southern Miss to take the Great Alaska Shootout and wins over Dayton and Memphis, Ward is already thinking about what he’ll have to do to keep Prohm.
“I hope that Steve can become the next Brad Stevens and stick around here and build something really special,” Ward said of Stevens who has taken Butler to two Final Fours. “That’d be awesome.”
Prohm said he hasn’t had time to think about the prospects of bigger schools coming to call at the end of the season, or whether he’d follow the lead of Butler coach’s lead, buck the trend, and take a long extension.
But he’s not going around talking about Duke anymore either.
“When you’re 17, 18, 19 years old, just like kids in recruiting, all you see is Duke and North Carolina,” Prohm said. “You don’t realize how many other great tradition-rich programs there are. Then you get older and you realize it’s not all about the hype. It’s about being happy and making an impact on people, enjoying what you do, having peace in your life and I think Murray provides that.”
Prohm bumps into fans paying his electric bill or running into Kroger for groceries. Two or three dozen will show up to watch practice. The school is breaking ground on a new practice facility next month. He’s got three years left on his contract and a girlfriend, who’s a middle school teacher in Murray.
Murray State fans, and his parents, are pulling for marriage, on both fronts.
“He loves Murray and he will honor his contract,” Ron Prohm said. “He’s that type of guy. I don’t think that he would move. Not now anyway, maybe someday he would, but not now.”
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