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 University of Kentucky. Rupp is also second among all men's college coaches in all-time winning percentage (.822), trailing only Mark Few. Rupp was enshrined in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame on April 13, 1969. Rupp played college basketball at Kansas under Phog Allen. Early life Rupp was born September 2, 1901, in Halstead, Kansas, to Heinrich Rupp, a German immigrant, and Anna Lichi, 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.