Norm Sloan

Norman Leslie Sloan Jr. (June 25, 1926 – December 9, 2003) was an American college basketball player and coach.

Sloan was a native of Indiana and played college basketball and football at North Carolina State University.

Sloan was born in Anderson, Indiana, in 1926 to Norman and Mary Sloan.

He attended Lawrence Central High School in Indianapolis, where he lettered in basketball.

Sloan received an athletic scholarship to attend North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he played guard for coach Everett Case's NC State Wolfpack from 1946 to 1949.

He was one of Case's original six "Hoosier Hotshots," a group of high school stars Case recruited from Indiana.

Sloan was a member of three Wolfpack teams that won Southern Conference championships in 1947, 1948 and 1949.

During the fall semesters, he played on the NC State Wolfpack football team as a reserve quarterback and was a member of the school's track and field team.

Sloan quit the basketball team before his senior year (1950–51) due to an ongoing dispute with Case over playing time.

On the football field, he became the backup to starting quarterback Ed Mooney and appeared in most games under coach Beattie Feathers.

He began a long career as a basketball coach months after graduating from college in 1951, and he was the men's basketball head coach at Presbyterian College, The Citadel, North Carolina State University, and two stints at the University of Florida.

Sloan graduated from NC State with a bachelor's degree in education in 1951.

Soon after graduating from NC State in 1951, Sloan was hired at Presbyterian College in Clinton, South Carolina, to be the school's head basketball coach and an assistant football coach starting with the 1951 fall semester.

He led the basketball team from 1951 to 1955, and his Presbyterian Blue Hose men's basketball teams compiled a 69–36 record in four seasons, including conference championships and berths in the NAIA Men's Basketball Championship Tournament in his first and last seasons at the school.

Sloan left for Memphis State University in 1955 to serve as an assistant for the Memphis Tigers under head coach Eugene Lambert.

The Tigers went 20–7 during Sloan's single season at the school and earned the program's first berth in the NCAA tournament.

In 1956, Sloan was named the head coach at The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina to take over a basketball program which had won a total of two games over the previous two seasons.

His first Bulldogs team in 1957 went 11–14 and won the George Mikan Award for Most Improved Team in the Nation, and Sloan was named the coach of the year by the South Carolina Sportswriters Association.

As a member of the Wolfpack, Sloan was a classmate and teammate of Vic Bubas, who later coached the Duke Blue Devils from 1959 to 1969.

The Citadel posted winning seasons over the next three years and made their first appearance in the Southern Conference championship game in 1959.

Sloan's overall record at the school was 57–38.

In 1960, Sloan was hired as the first full-time basketball coach at the University of Florida, where an assistant football coach had usually been assigned to coach basketball due to the school's lack of emphasis on the sport up to that time.

He was unable to get the Gators into postseason play during this time; during the 1960s, only one team per conference was guaranteed an NCAA bid.

Nonetheless, he built a foundation for a basketball program that had been, according to Florida historian Norm Carlson, "essentially an intramural program playing at the intercollegiate level."

The Miami Herald dubbed Sloan the "father of UF hoops" for his achievements in the 1960s.

His Florida Gators men's basketball teams tallied an 85–63 record in six seasons, including the school's first victory over an Adolph Rupp-coached Kentucky Wildcats team in 1965.

Sloan was named head coach at his alma mater, North Carolina State, in 1966, and his NC State Wolfpack basketball teams won three Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) Championships in 1970, 1973 and 1974.

His 1973 Wolfpack team was undefeated (27–0) but missed that year's NCAA tournament due to questions about the recruiting of high school phenomenon David Thompson.

A year later, he led the Wolfpack to a 30–1 record and the school's first NCAA national championship.

En route, the Wolfpack defeated the UCLA Bruins in the NCAA Final Four, ending UCLA coach John Wooden's run of seven straight NCAA championships.

He was selected the National Coach of the Year in 1973 by Basketball Weekly, and again in 1974 by the USBWA and the Associated Press.

Over a career that spanned 38 seasons, Sloan was named conference coach of the year five times and won the 1974 national championship at North Carolina State, his alma mater.

Sloan's Wolfpack beat Marquette, 76–64, in the 1974 NCAA championship game.

Sloan's overall win–loss record at NC State was 266–127 in 14 seasons.

His greatest teams included legendary players such as Thompson, Tommy Burleson, Moe Rivers, Tim Stoddard (who went on to pitch in Major League Baseball), Kenny Carr, and Monte Towe.

"Stormin' Norman" was as well known for his garish red-and-white plaid sports coat as he was for his ACC battles with Lefty Driesell at Maryland and Dean Smith at North Carolina.

Sloan was named head coach of the Great Britain men's national basketball team ahead of the 1980 Olympic qualifying campaign.

Sloan, who had just been rehired by the University of Florida, hosted a month-long training camp for the Great Britain national team on Florida's campus in Gainesville.

He then took the team to England for a series of preparation games against Finland and Belgium before competing in the Vienna Tournament in Austria and the European Olympic Qualifying Tournament in Switzerland.

He was nicknamed "Stormin' Norman" due to his combative nature with the media, his players, and school administrators, and his collegiate coaching career ended in controversy when Florida's basketball program was under investigation in 1989, though Sloan claimed that he was treated unfairly.