Adolph Rupp

Adolph Frederick Rupp (September 2, 1901 – December 10, 1977) was an American college basketball coach.

He is ranked seventh in total victories by a men's NCAA Division I college coach, winning 876 games in 41 years of coaching at the University of Kentucky.

Rupp is also second among all men's college coaches in all-time winning percentage (.822), trailing only Mark Few.

Rupp was born September 2, 1901, in Halstead, Kansas, to Heinrich Rupp, a German immigrant, and Anna Lichi, a Palatinate (Quirnheim, Germany) immigrant.

The fourth of six children, Rupp grew up on a 163-acre farm that his parents had homesteaded.

He began playing basketball as a young child, with the help of his mother, who made a ball for him by stuffing rags into a gunnysack.

After high school, Rupp attended the University of Kansas from 1919 to 1923.

He worked part-time at the student Jayhawk Cafe to help pay his college expenses.

He was a reserve on the basketball team under Hall of Fame coach Phog Allen from 1919 to 1923.

Assisting Allen during that time was his former coach and inventor of the game of basketball, James Naismith, whom Rupp also got to know well during his time in Lawrence.

In Rupp's junior and senior college seasons (1921–22 and 1922–23), Kansas (KU) had outstanding basketball squads.

Later, both of these standout Kansas teams would be awarded the Helms National Championship, recognizing the Jayhawks as the top team in the nation during those seasons.

He received an MA from Teachers College, Columbia University.

Rupp began his career in coaching by accepting a teaching job at Burr Oak High School, Kansas.

After a one-year stay, Rupp moved on to Marshalltown, Iowa, where he coached wrestling, a sport he knew nothing about at the time and learned from a book.

In 1922, Adolph pledged and was initiated into the Iota chapter of International Fraternity of Delta Sigma Pi.

He led the Marshalltown team to a state wrestling title in 1926.

In 1926–30, Rupp accepted the basketball head coaching position at Freeport High School, (Freeport, Illinois) where he also taught history and economics.

During his four years at Freeport, Rupp compiled a record of 66–21 and guided his team to a third-place finish in the 1929 state tournament.

While at Freeport High School Rupp started William "Mose" Mosely, the first African-American to play basketball at Freeport and the second to graduate from the school.

University of Illinois head basketball coach Craig Ruby was invited to speak at the team banquet following the 1929–30 season.

Ruby informed Rupp of the Kentucky head coaching job and followed up by recommending him for the job.

During his time in Freeport, Rupp met his future wife, Esther Schmidt.

Rupp coached the University of Kentucky men's basketball team from 1930 to 1972.

There, he gained the nicknames, "Baron of the Bluegrass", and "The Man in the Brown Suit".

Rupp's 1933 and 1954 Kentucky squads were also retroactively named national champions by the Helms Athletic Foundation; his 1934, 1947, and 1948 teams were retroactively named the national champion by the Premo-Porretta Power Poll.

In his 41 seasons as UK coach, Rupp coached 32 All-Americans, chosen 50 times, 52 All-SEC players, chosen 91 times, 44 NBA Draft Picks, 2 National Players-of-the-Year, 7 Olympic Gold Medalists, and 4 Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame members.

He was a 5-time National Coach-of-the-Year award winner, and a 7-time Conference Coach-of-the-Year award winner.

Rupp was inducted into Omicron Delta Kappa at Kentucky in 1937.

Rupp's Wildcat teams won four NCAA championships (1948, 1949, 1951, 1958), one National Invitation Tournament title in 1946, appeared in 20 NCAA tournaments, had six NCAA Final Four appearances, captured 27 Southeastern Conference regular season titles, and won 13 Southeastern Conference tournaments.

Rupp's Kentucky teams also finished ranked #1 on six occasions in the final Associated Press college basketball poll and four times in the United Press International (Coaches) poll.

Later in 1966, he was named Deltasig of the Year by the fraternity.

In addition, Rupp's 1966 Kentucky squad—nicknamed "Rupp's Runts"— finished runner-up in the NCAA tournament and Rupp's 1947 Wildcats finished runner-up in the National Invitation Tournament.

Rupp was enshrined in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame on April 13, 1969.

Rupp played college basketball at Kansas under Phog Allen.

"Mother sewed it up and somehow made it round," he recalled in 1977.

"You couldn't dribble it. You couldn't bounce it either."

Rupp was a star for the Halstead High School basketball team, one of the first in the area to play with a real basketball.

He averaged 19 points a game.

Former teammates described Rupp as the team's unofficial coach.