Stepping Out of Billy Kennedy’s Shadow
Murray State has a history of producing good coaches who move on to bigger schools. The latest was Coach Billy Kennedy who left the Racers for Texas A&M following the 2010-2011 season. Coach Kennedy obviously had some success with the Racers and now has left the program to his long-time assistant Steve Prohm.
Prohm, a native of Vienna, Virginia, attended Alabama where he was a student manager and student assistant coach for five years, graduating in in 1997. After that he was ready to be a real coach.
Coach Prohm began his coaching career as an assistant to Kennedy at Centenary College in 1998. After one season Kennedy went to Southeastern Louisiana and Prohm followed. They stayed there together until 2005. It was then the two split paths. Kennedy went to Miami to be an assistant with the Hurricanes. Prohm went to Tulane, where Kennedy was an assistant 15 years earlier, to be an assistant with the Green Wave. Even in school nickname they could not get too far away from each other. And the split did not last long.
After just one season, Kennedy took over at Murray State. One of the first things he did was to get his old buddy Prohm on board as an assistant coach. Five successful years later and Kennedy once again moved on. This time the split might be for good. Coach Prohm was no longer a coach who needed to follow somebody else. He was ready to step out on his own and lead his own program.
The fact that he has already spent half a decade with Murray State will certainly make that transition easier for Prohm. He has a good Racers squad and should continue right where Kennedy left off. Yet, if Prohm can keep Murray State near the top of the Ohio Valley Conference standings year after year like many Racer coaches have before him, it will not take long before Coach Prohm steps out of Coach Kennedy’s shadow. By then he could follow his mentor once again and take over the head coaching job at a bigger school.
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