Adolph Rupp
Adolph Rupp
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Adolph Rupp

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Adolph Rupp

Adolph Frederick Rupp (September 2, 1901 – December 10, 1977) was an American college basketball coach. Nicknamed the "Baron of the Bluegrass", he coached the University of Kentucky Wildcats to four NCAA championships, one NIT championship, 27 Southeastern Conference championships, and 13 SEC tournament championships. In his 41 years of coaching at Kentucky, he won 876 games, retiring with the most total victories by a men's NCAA Division I college coach at the time; he has since been surpassed by six coaches and ranks seventh. Rupp is second among all men's college coaches in all-time winning percentage (.822) and third in NCAA championships. In 1948, he coached the US Olympic Team to a gold medal in London.

Rupp was enshrined in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame on April 13, 1969. Rupp played college basketball at Kansas under Phog Allen.

Rupp was born September 2, 1901, in Halstead, Kansas, to Heinrich Rupp, a German immigrant, and Anna Lichti, a Palatinate (Quirnheim, Germany) immigrant. The fourth of six children, Rupp grew up on a 163-acre farm that his parents had homesteaded. He began playing basketball as a young child, with the help of his mother, who made a ball for him by stuffing rags into a gunnysack. "Mother sewed it up and somehow made it round," he recalled in 1977. "You couldn't dribble it. You couldn't bounce it either."

Rupp was a star for the Halstead High School basketball team, one of the first in the area to play with a real basketball. He averaged 19 points a game. Former teammates described Rupp as the team's unofficial coach.

After high school, Rupp attended the University of Kansas from 1919 to 1923. He worked part-time at the student Jayhawk Cafe to help pay his college expenses. In 1922, Adolph pledged and was initiated into the Iota chapter of International Fraternity of Delta Sigma Pi. Later in 1966, he was named Deltasig of the Year by the fraternity. He was a reserve on the basketball team under Hall of Fame coach Phog Allen from 1919 to 1923. Assisting Allen during that time was his former coach and inventor of the game of basketball, James Naismith, whom Rupp also got to know well during his time in Lawrence.

In Rupp's junior and senior college seasons (1921–22 and 1922–23), Kansas (KU) had outstanding basketball squads. Later, both of these standout Kansas teams would be awarded the Helms National Championship, recognizing the Jayhawks as the top team in the nation during those seasons.

He received an MA from Teachers College, Columbia University.

Rupp began his career in coaching by accepting a teaching job at Burr Oak High School, Kansas. After a one-year stay, Rupp moved on to Marshalltown, Iowa, where he coached wrestling, a sport he knew nothing about at the time and learned from a book. He led the Marshalltown team to a state wrestling title in 1926.

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