"He used to tell me every day to never get into coaching," Mark says.

Mark's gig at Bucknell is his second stop on the coaching carousel. He wants to be a head coach some day -- high school or college, he's not sure.

"That's what has been hard is that I was used to leaving practice or a game and calling him," Mark says. "We'd talk about how to defend (an opposing player), recruiting, whatever."

Mark's other disappointment is that he couldn't get his father to take a break from basketball. Mark enjoys watching the Pittsburgh Steelers -- his parents grew up in the Pittsburgh area -- and spending time with girlfriend Emily Criscioni, whom he met while at Marist.

But Skip Prosser, Mark said, always had basketball on his mind.

"I'd always try to talk to him about other things," the younger Prosser says. "But it would always come back to basketball."

Mark was with Bucknell head coach Pat Flannery recruiting in Orlando when he got the call from a Wake Forest athletic secretary telling him something was wrong. Flannery missed a game last season after his father died.

Skip Prosser was found slumped on a couch in his office minutes after he finished a workout. He recently had been told by a doctor that he needed to exercise more.

"I didn't know what was going on, I didn't think it was happening," Mark recalls of the grim news. "I kept thinking that I'd call his cell, he'd answer and we'd talk about the rumors that were out there."

It wasn't a rumor. Mark and Dino Gaudio, then an assistant at Wake Forest who was at the same Orlando gym, soon were on a plane to Winston-Salem, N.C.

Mark Prosser said he's had an enormous amount of support from friends, fellow coaches and players past and present since the tragedy. He said his relationship with Criscioni took a big step forward -- in his mind -- when she left friends she was visiting in Manhattan on July 26 and nearly beat him to the Wake Forest campus to be his support system.

Criscioni had just recently relocated from Manhattan to Lewisburg to advance her relationship with Mark.

"I believed, somehow, some way, there was a reason why she was here," Mark says. "I don't know what I would have done without her then."

Mark Prosser leaves with his Bucknell family early this afternoon for Sunday's game with Wake Forest. He knows it will be different when he looks down at the opposing bench and sees Gaudio in his father's place, standing and barking at the Demon Deacons players.

It will remind Mark of what it was like last year when Wake Forest came to Bucknell.