Norm Sloan - Coaching Career

Coaching Career

Sloan was the head basketball coach and assistant football coach at Presbyterian College in Clinton, South Carolina from 1951 to 1955, where his Presbyterian Blue Hose basketball teams compiled a 69–36 record in four seasons. He coached for a single season at Memphis State University in Memphis, Tennessee during 1955–1956, working as an assistant basketball coach for the Memphis State Tigers.

Sloan left Memphis in 1956 to become head coach at The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, where he built the Citadel Bulldogs program from a conference also-ran to a respectable 15–5 in 1959. His first Bulldogs team in 1957 won the George Mikan Award for Most Improved Team in the Nation and he was named the coach of the year by the South Carolina Sportswriters Association that year. His Citadel teams compiled a 57–38 record in four years. In 1960, Sloan became the first full-time basketball coach of the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. 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 at his alma mater, North Carolina State, in 1966, and his NC State Wolfpack teams won three 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 UCLA in the NCAA Final Four, ending UCLA and coach John Wooden's run of seven straight NCAA championships. Sloan's Wolfpack beat Marquette, 76–64, in the 1974 championship game.

Sloan's overall win-loss record at NC State was 266–127 in fourteen 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), 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. 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.

Sloan returned to Florida in 1980, turning the Florida Gators basketball program around for a second time. Sloan's Gators won over twenty games and made the NCAA Tournament in each of his last three seasons and won the university's first Southeastern Conference regular season basketball championship in 1988–1989. His teams compiled a 150–131 record in those nine seasons, giving him an overall record of 235-194 in fifteen years with the Gators. His reputation as "Stormin' Norman" continued as he feuded throughout his tenure in Gainesville with LSU Tigers coach Dale Brown. Sloan was forced to resign prior to the 1989–1990 season in the wake of an NCAA investigation into the Gators program.

He was inducted into the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame in 1984, and the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame in 1994.

Sloan's career win-loss record was 627–395, and his victory total ranks him twenty-sixth on the career list of Division I coaches. He is still the second-winningest coach in NC State history, trailing only Case. His 235 wins at Florida were the best in Gators history until Billy Donovan passed him in 2006.

Sloan lived in Raleigh, North Carolina following his retirement from coaching. He died of complications related to pulmonary fibrosis on December 9, 2003 at the Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina.