Norman Leslie Sloan Jr. (June 25, 1926 – December 9, 2003) was an American

college basketball In United States colleges, top-tier basketball is governed by collegiate athletic bodies including National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA), the United States Collegiate Athleti ...

player and coach. Sloan was a native of

Indiana Indiana () is a U.S. state in the Midwestern United States. It is the 38th-largest by area and the 17th-most populous of the 50 States. Its capital and largest city is Indianapolis. Indiana was admitted to the United States as the 19th ...

and played college basketball and football at

North Carolina State University North Carolina State University (NC State) is a public land-grant research university in Raleigh, North Carolina. Founded in 1887 and part of the University of North Carolina system, it is the largest university in the Carolinas. The univers ...

. 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 Presbyterian College (PC) is a private Presbyterian liberal arts college in Clinton, South Carolina. History Presbyterian College was founded in 1880 by the William Plumer Jacobs. He had served as the pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Cl ...

The Citadel The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina, commonly known simply as The Citadel, is a public senior military college in Charleston, South Carolina. Established in 1842, it is one of six senior military colleges in the United States. ...

, North Carolina State University, and two stints as at the

University of Florida The University of Florida (Florida or UF) is a public land-grant research university in Gainesville, Florida. It is a senior member of the State University System of Florida, traces its origins to 1853, and has operated continuously on its ...

. 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. 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.

Early years

Sloan was born in

Anderson, Indiana Anderson, named after Chief William Anderson, is a city in and the county seat of Madison County, Indiana, United States. It is the principal city of the Anderson, Indiana Metropolitan Statistical Area which encompasses Madison County. Anderson ...

in 1926 to Norman and Mary Sloan.Clark, Dennis S. "Sloan, Norman L." in He attended

Lawrence Central High School Lawrence Central High School (LCHS) is a public high school with more than 2,300 students, in northeast Marion County, Indiana. Overview It was established in 1940 and is one of two high schools in the Metropolitan School District of Lawrence To ...

Indianapolis Indianapolis (), colloquially known as Indy, is the state capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Indiana and the seat of Marion County. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the consolidated population of Indianapolis and Marion ...

, where he lettered in basketball.

College playing career

Sloan received an athletic scholarship to attend

in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he played

guard Guard or guards may refer to: Professional occupations * Bodyguard, who protects an individual from personal assault * Crossing guard, who stops traffic so pedestrians can cross the street * Lifeguard, who rescues people from drowning * Prison gu ...

for coach Everett Case's

NC State Wolfpack The NC State Wolfpack is the nickname of the athletic teams representing North Carolina State University. The Wolfpack competes at the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I ( Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) for college foot ...

from 1946 to 1949. He was one of Case's original six "Hoosier Hotshots," a group of high school stars Case recruited from Indiana. As a member of the Wolfpack, Sloan was a classmate and teammate of Vic Bubas, who later coached the

Duke Blue Devils The Duke Blue Devils are the intercollegiate athletic teams that represent Duke University, located in Durham, North Carolina. Duke's athletics department features 27 varsity teams that all compete at the National Collegiate Athletic Associatio ...

from 1959 to 1969. Sloan was a member of three Wolfpack teams that won

Southern Conference The Southern Conference (SoCon) is a collegiate athletic conference affiliated with the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I. Southern Conference football teams compete in the Football Championship Subdivision (formerly k ...

championships in 1947, 1948 and 1949. During the fall semesters, he played on the

NC State Wolfpack football The NC State Wolfpack football team represents North Carolina State University in the sport of American football. The Wolfpack competes in the NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) ...

team as a reserve

quarterback The quarterback (commonly abbreviated "QB"), colloquially known as the "signal caller", is a position in gridiron football. Quarterbacks are members of the offensive platoon and mostly line up directly behind the offensive line. In modern Am ...

and was a member of the school's

track and field Track and field is a sport that includes athletic contests based on running, jumping, and throwing skills. The name is derived from where the sport takes place, a running track and a grass field for the throwing and some of the jumping eve ...

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 William Beattie "Big Chief" Feathers (August 20, 1909 – March 11, 1979) was an American football player and coach of football and baseball. He played college football and college basketball at the University of Tennessee. Early life and colle ...

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

Coaching career

Presbyterian

Soon after graduating from NC State in 1951, Sloan was hired at

Clinton, South Carolina Clinton is a city in Laurens County, South Carolina, United States. The population was 8,490 as of the 2010 census. It is part of the Greenville– Mauldin– Easley Metropolitan Statistical Area. Clinton is the home of Presbyterian Col ...

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 The Presbyterian Blue Hose men's basketball team is the basketball team that represents Presbyterian College in Clinton, South Carolina, United States. The school's team currently competes in the Big South Conference. Postseason CIT Results T ...

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.

Memphis State (assistant)

Sloan left for Memphis State University in 1955 to serve as an assistant for the

Memphis Tigers The Memphis Tigers are the athletic teams that represent the University of Memphis, located in Memphis, Tennessee. The teams compete at the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I level as a member of the American Athletic C ...

under head coach

Eugene Lambert Eugene Lambert (1928 – 22 February 2010) was an Irish puppeteer and actor from County Sligo. He was owner of the Lambert Puppet Theatre in Monkstown, County Dublin. He was noted for co-starring as O'Brien in the RTÉ television series ''Wan ...

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

The Citadel

In 1956, Sloan was named the head coach at

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 George Lawrence Mikan Jr. (; June 18, 1924 – June 1, 2005), nicknamed "Mr. Basketball", was an American professional basketball player for the Chicago American Gears of the National Basketball League (NBL) and the Minneapolis Lakers of ...

Award for Most Improved Team in the Nation, and Sloan was named the coach of the year by the South Carolina Sportswriters Association. The Citadel posted winning seasons over the next three years and made their first appearance in the

championship game in 1959. Sloan's overall record at the school was 57–38.

Florida

In 1960, Sloan was hired as the first full-time basketball coach at the

, 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. 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 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 Un ...

-coached

Kentucky Wildcats The Kentucky Wildcats are the men's and women's intercollegiate athletic squads of the University of Kentucky (UK), a founding member of the Southeastern Conference. The Kentucky Wildcats is the student body of the University of Kentucky. 30,47 ...

team in 1965. 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 The ''Miami Herald'' is an American daily newspaper owned by the McClatchy Company and headquartered in Doral, Florida, a city in western Miami-Dade County and the Miami metropolitan area, several miles west of Downtown Miami.

North Carolina State

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 The Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) is a collegiate athletic conference located in the eastern United States. Headquartered in Greensboro, North Carolina, the ACC's fifteen member universities compete in the National Collegiate Athletic Assoc ...

(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 The UCLA Bruins are the athletic teams that represent the University of California, Los Angeles. The Bruin men's and women's teams participate in NCAA Division I as part of the Pac-12 Conference and the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation (MPSF) ...

in the NCAA Final Four, ending UCLA coach

John Wooden John Robert Wooden (October 14, 1910 – June 4, 2010) was an American basketball coach and player. Nicknamed the Wizard of Westwood, he won ten National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) national championships in a 12-year period as hea ...

's run of seven straight NCAA championships. 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 Tom Loren Burleson (born February 24, 1952) is an American former professional basketball player. A 7′2″ center, Burleson played for North Carolina State University's 1974 NCAA national championship team. Early life Burleson is a native o ...

, Moe Rivers, Tim Stoddard (who went on to pitch in

Major League Baseball Major League Baseball (MLB) is a professional baseball organization and the oldest major professional sports league in the world. MLB is composed of 30 total teams, divided equally between the National League (NL) and the American League (A ...

), Kenny Carr, and

Monte Towe Monte Corwin Towe (born September 27, 1953) is an American basketball coach and retired basketball player. He was a starting point guard on the 1973–74 North Carolina State Wolfpack men's basketball team which won the NCAA Division I Men's Bask ...

. "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 Charles Grice "Lefty" Driesell (born December 25, 1931) is a retired American college basketball coach. He was the first coach to win more than 100 games at four different NCAA Division I schools, Driesell led the programs of Davidson College, t ...

Maryland Maryland ( ) is a state in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. It shares borders with Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia to its south and west; Pennsylvania to its north; and Delaware and the Atlantic Ocean t ...

and

Dean Smith Dean Edwards Smith (February 28, 1931 – February 7, 2015) was an American men's college basketball head coach. Called a "coaching legend" by the Basketball Hall of Fame, he coached for 36 years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel H ...

North Carolina North Carolina () is a U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern region of the United States. The state is the List of U.S. states and territories by area, 28th largest and List of states and territories of the United ...

. 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.

Great Britain national team

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. Great Britain finished Olympic Qualifying with a 1–3 record and a 5–6 (.455) overall international record for the summer. Sloan was succeeded as the Great Britain National Team head coach by Tom Schneeman.

Return to Florida

A salary dispute with the athletic director at NC State caused Sloan to leave the school, and the construction of the modern O'Connell Center basketball arena at the University of Florida helped convince Sloan to return to Gainesville in 1980. After three losing seasons, he turned the Florida Gators basketball program around for a second time, primarily by convincing several top in-state high school recruits such as Vernon Maxwell and

Dwayne Schintzius Dwayne Kenneth Schintzius (October 14, 1968 – April 15, 2012) was an American National Basketball Association (NBA) basketball player. He was born in Brandon, Florida and attended the University of Florida, where he helped lead the Florida Gato ...

to attend college at Florida. From 1984 through 1989, Sloan's Gators posted winning records in six straight campaigns and made the first six postseason tournament appearances in program history when they were invited to the

NIT Tournament The National Invitational Tournament (NIT) is a men's college basketball tournament operated by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). Played at regional sites and traditionally at Madison Square Garden (Final Four) in New York Cit ...

in 1984, 1985, and 1986 and the NCAA Tournament 1987, 1988, and 1989. Sloan's last three squads each won over 20 games, which had previously been accomplished only once at Florida, and his final team won the school's first

Southeastern Conference The Southeastern Conference (SEC) is an American college athletic conference whose member institutions are located primarily in the South Central and Southeastern United States. Its fourteen members include the flagship public universities o ...

regular season basketball championship. Sloan compiled a 150–131 record over nine seasons in his second stint at Florida, giving him an overall record of 235–194 in 15 years with the Gators.

Resignation

Sloan was forced to retire on October 31, 1989, just days before the start of the 1989–90 season and one year before his previously announced retirement date, in the wake of an NCAA investigation into the Gators program. In September 1990, the NCAA imposed two years' probation on the Gators for violations dating back to 1985 under Sloan. The Gators' 1987 and 1988 NCAA Tournament appearances were erased from the record books due to Maxwell being retroactively declared ineligible; Maxwell had admitted to taking money from agents without Sloan's knowledge. Sloan had also purchased a plane ticket to Boston for Maxwell in the summer of 1987 so that Maxwell could serve as a counselor at a basketball camp. Two years earlier, one of Sloan's assistants had allowed a recruit's mother to use the return leg of the recruit's airline ticket to return home after the recruit enrolled in summer school. In the NCAA's view, this amounted to the university paying for the travel expenses of recruits and players. It also harshly criticized Sloan, finding that he had engaged in unethical conduct by paying Maxwell's airfare. The basketball program lost two scholarships in 1991-92 and one scholarship in 1992-93 because of the infractions. As severe as these penalties were, the NCAA said it would have imposed even harsher penalties, such as a ban from postseason play and live television in 1990–91, had Sloan not been forced out. Sloan was personally penalized with a five-year show-cause penalty, which had the effect of blackballing him from the collegiate coaching ranks until 1995 at the earliest. Later, Sloan stated that the situation was "mishandled". In a 1990 interview, Sloan stated his belief that UF athletic director

Bill Arnsparger William Stephen Arnsparger (December 16, 1926 – July 17, 2015) was an American college and professional football coach. He was born and raised in Paris, Kentucky, served in the United States Marine Corps during World War II, and graduated from Mi ...

and other university officials "panicked" over relatively minor issues in the basketball program due to recent major violations in other sports ( Florida's football team was placed on NCAA probation twice in the 1980s), and that the fear of being levied a "

death penalty Capital punishment, also known as the death penalty, is the state-sanctioned practice of deliberately killing a person as a punishment for an actual or supposed crime, usually following an authorized, rule-governed process to conclude that ...

" caused them to overreact and demand his resignation. He also claimed that the university's athletic compliance office was partially to blame for his "unconscious" violations of NCAA travel rules because his requests "went through the channels of athletic administration at the university unquestioned." Overall, he said, "The findings certainly don`t justify what has happened... My reputation was completely destroyed and the careers of two young, promising assistants (

and Kenny McCraney, who were also forced to resign) were destroyed. That`s tragic, and the university worked hard at getting it done."

Awards and accomplishments

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. His 266 wins at NC State are still second in NC State history, trailing only Case. His 235 wins at Florida (232 if vacated games aren't counted) were the best in Florida history until

Billy Donovan William John Donovan Jr. (born May 30, 1965) is an American professional basketball coach and former player. He has served as head coach of the Chicago Bulls of the National Basketball Association (NBA) since September 2020 after previously coa ...

surpassed him in 2006. Sloan was inducted into the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame in 1984, the

North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame The North Carolina Museum of History is a history museum located in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina. It is an affiliate through the Smithsonian Affiliations program. The museum is a part of the Division of State History Museums, Office of Archives ...

in 1994, the Citadel Athletic Hall of Fame in 2002, and the North Carolina State University Athletic Hall of Fame in 2013.

After coaching

Sloan coached briefly in Greece after leaving Florida, then he retired in Raleigh, North Carolina. He died of complications related to pulmonary fibrosis on December 9, 2003 at

Duke University Medical Center Duke University Hospital is a 957-acute care bed academic tertiary care facility located in Durham, North Carolina. Established in 1930, it is the flagship teaching hospital for the Duke University Health System, a network of physicians and hos ...

in Durham, North Carolina. He was survived by his wife Joan, son Mike, and daughters Leslie and Debbie.

Head coaching record

Basketball

* NCAA appearances in 1987 and 1988 were subsequently vacated due to Vernon Maxwell being declared ineligible. Official record for 1986-87 is 21-10, official record for 1987-88 is 22-11.
& Record at Florida is 232-192 (147-129 for second stint) without vacated games.

References

Bibliography

*Dortch, Chris,
String Music: Inside the Rise of SEC Basketball
', Brassey's, Inc., Dulles, Virginia (2002). . *Koss, Bill, ''Pond Birds: Gator Basketball, The Whole Story From The Inside'', Fast Break Press, Gainesville, Florida (1996). . *Peeler, Tim,
Legends of NC State Basketball
', Sports Publishing L.L.C., Champaign, Illinois (2004). . {{DEFAULTSORT:Sloan, Norm Great Britain men's national basketball team coaches 1926 births 2003 deaths American football quarterbacks American men's basketball players American people of English descent Basketball coaches from Indiana Basketball players from Indianapolis College men's basketball head coaches in the United States Florida Gators men's basketball coaches Guards (basketball) Memphis Tigers men's basketball coaches Memphis Tigers track and field coaches NC State Wolfpack football players NC State Wolfpack men's basketball coaches NC State Wolfpack men's basketball players NC State Wolfpack men's track and field athletes Players of American football from Indianapolis Presbyterian Blue Hose men's basketball coaches Sportspeople from Anderson, Indiana The Citadel Bulldogs basketball coaches Track and field athletes from Indianapolis