Wake Forest University

Skip Prosser, 56, Wake Forest basketball coach, died Thursday in Winston-Salem, N.C., the university said, without releasing details. The Winston-Salem Journal reported on its website that Prosser collapsed at his office on campus and died later at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. Prosser spent six seasons with the Demon Deacons, winning an Atlantic Coast Conference regular-season title in 2003 and reaching the NCAA tournament in his first four seasons.

Skip Prosser, 56, Wake Forest basketball coach, died Thursday in Winston-Salem, N.C., the university said, without releasing details. The Winston-Salem Journal reported on its website that Prosser collapsed at his office on campus and died later at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. Prosser spent six seasons with the Demon Deacons, winning an Atlantic Coast Conference regular-season title in 2003 and reaching the NCAA tournament in his first four seasons.

Wake Forest University, steeped in Baptist tradition, is opening a nondenominational divinity school whose first class of 24 includes a Catholic, a Lutheran, Presbyterians, Episcopalians and Moravians. The students, who will embark on a three-year quest for a master of divinity degree Aug. 25, range in age from 21 to 74. Within three years, officials at the North Carolina school expect the program to enroll about 110 students, with a full-time faculty of eight.

WERE Michael Longley from any other country but Ireland, he'd be long considered a great poet. He's fully formed and has a rich body of work, but almost no one has heard of him in America. With contemporaries like Heaney, and predecessors like Yeats and Synge, Irish who are merely major figures have trouble breaking into the international mind. Longley has much to say about being Irish, especially about the Troubles, but he sees war as the common enemy to both sides.

It isn't every day in college recruiting that a coach lands a future NBA lottery pick because a hurricane blew through the U.S. Virgin Islands. What's more, had this hurricane tormented some other helpless atoll, that coach's ticket to the Final Four might have been leading the break on the university swim team instead of finishing it with two-handed jams against Duke.

Wake Forest won bragging rights in its rivalry with North Carolina State and earned a spot in the final of the National Invitation Tournament. Darius Songaila scored 18 points, including six in overtime, as Wake Forest earned a 62-59 victory over the Atlantic Coast Conference rival Wolfpack (20-13) in the semifinals of the NIT on Tuesday night at New York. Wake Forest (21-14) will play Notre Dame (22-14) in Thursday night's final.

Wake Forest Coach Bill Dooley, 58, announced that he will retire at the end of the season. With a record of 154-122-5 in 25 years, he is seven victories short of becoming the all-time winner in Atlantic Coast Conference history. He also coached 11 years at North Carolina in the ACC. The last three Wake Forest teams have each lost eight games, but Dooley said, "I want it understood that I'm not being forced out. No one has asked me to step down."

Santa Margarita goalkeeper Erin Regan has orally committed to Wake Forest, according to her mother, Darlyn. Regan, 17, saw limited playing time last season, playing behind all-county goalkeeper Riki-Ann Serrins, now at Maryland. Regan is a member of the Southern California Blues club team, which won the club league title, the league cup and the prestigious Surf Cup. She also isplaying in the regional Olympic Development program.

CIARAN CARSON is one of the most accomplished among the astonishing number of formidable poets who have issued from Ulster over the last three generations. In his elegy on the death of Yeats, Auden mused that "mad Ireland stung him into poetry." Northern Ireland, where that madness has lingered longest, more recently has prodded artists like Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian, Frank Ormsby and Carson into stunning poems and wonderfully readable translations.

Wake up, Wake Forest! Five games into the college football season, you're not supposed to be the last remaining unbeaten team in the Atlantic Coast Conference. That's never happened before, at any point in any season. You've taken advantage of a cupcake schedule, sure, but you're one victory away from only the second 6-0 start in school history and the first since 1944, when a team coached by D.C. "Peahead" Walker won its first seven games.

Wake Forest won bragging rights in its rivalry with North Carolina State and earned a spot in the final of the National Invitation Tournament. Darius Songaila scored 18 points, including six in overtime, as Wake Forest earned a 62-59 victory over the Atlantic Coast Conference rival Wolfpack (20-13) in the semifinals of the NIT on Tuesday night at New York. Wake Forest (21-14) will play Notre Dame (22-14) in Thursday night's final.

Wake Forest University, steeped in Baptist tradition, is opening a nondenominational divinity school whose first class of 24 includes a Catholic, a Lutheran, Presbyterians, Episcopalians and Moravians. The students, who will embark on a three-year quest for a master of divinity degree Aug. 25, range in age from 21 to 74. Within three years, officials at the North Carolina school expect the program to enroll about 110 students, with a full-time faculty of eight.

Santa Margarita goalkeeper Erin Regan has orally committed to Wake Forest, according to her mother, Darlyn. Regan, 17, saw limited playing time last season, playing behind all-county goalkeeper Riki-Ann Serrins, now at Maryland. Regan is a member of the Southern California Blues club team, which won the club league title, the league cup and the prestigious Surf Cup. She also isplaying in the regional Olympic Development program.

Wake Forest center Tim Duncan won the 21st annual John R. Wooden Award on Friday in ceremonies at the Los Angeles Athletic Club that pleased no one more than John R. Wooden. The former legendary UCLA coach, for whom the college basketball player of the year award is named, beamed at Duncan's selection. "I've always wanted it to go to a graduating senior," Wooden, 86, said.

Wake Forest has been told by the NCAA to forfeit this week's 69-65 victory over Rhode Island for using a player 4 1/2 hours before he was eligible, officials said. The forfeit, because of an NCAA executive regulation, will not affect Wake Forest's 3-0 record or any statistics from Tuesday night's game, said Gary Johnson, an NCAA spokesman. Demon Deacon guard Charlie Harrison, who started against Rhode Island on Tuesday at 7:30 p.m.

Jim Caldwell, an assistant to Penn State football Coach Joe Paterno, Sunday was hired to coach Wake Forest. He becomes the first black head football coach in the 40-year history of the Atlantic Coast Conference. Caldwell, 37, will replace Bill Dooley, who announced in August that he would retire after this season. Dooley will conclude a six-year tenure with the Demon Deacons on Thursday when they play Oregon in the Independence Bowl.

It isn't every day in college recruiting that a coach lands a future NBA lottery pick because a hurricane blew through the U.S. Virgin Islands. What's more, had this hurricane tormented some other helpless atoll, that coach's ticket to the Final Four might have been leading the break on the university swim team instead of finishing it with two-handed jams against Duke.

In 1794, the English poets Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge planned to (but did not) come to America, meaning to set up a Pantisocracy, an equal rule for all, on the banks of the Susquehanna River. Paul Muldoon, an Irish poet who teaches at Princeton, nearly 200 years afterward, imagined what it would have been like if they had come West, and wrote a funny, tragic history of Western philosophy he called "Madoc, A Mystery" (1991).