Norm Ellenberger

Personal

Vocation

American football, basketball, and baseball player and coach. He was head coach of the University of New Mexico Lobo basketball team from 1972 to 1979, winning Western Athletic Conference championships in 1974 and 1978 and compiling an overall record of 134–62 (.684). His former players included future National Basketball Association (NBA) defensive stand-out Michael Cooper, who helped lead the 1977–1978 team that was ranked as high as No. 5 nationally. Ellenberger was dismissed as Lobo head coach due to a recruiting scandal known as "Lobogate". Ellenberger was fired on 17 December 1979. An investigation led to a federal indictment of Ellenberger on seven counts of fraud and forgery of academic transcripts, but he was acquitted of those charges at trial. In July 1981, however, he was convicted by a state District Court on 21 of 22 counts of fraud and submitting false public vouchers. The judge deferred sentence, placing Ellenberger on unsupervised probation for a year, and all counts were formally dismissed in 1983. Ellenberger later became lead assistant coach under Don Haskins at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) from 1986 to 1990 and under Bobby Knight at Indiana University from 1990 to 2000. He served as an assistant for the Chicago Bulls of the NBA from 2000 to 2003 and then coached boys' and girls' high school basketball in Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. He was an assistant for the New York Liberty of the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) during the 2012-2013 season before returning to high school coaching in Michigan. Despite the scandal, Ellenberger remained popular with many Lobo fans. He continued to live in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he owned a restaurant and appeared in TV commercials. Norm Ellenberger died in his sleep at his cabin in Watersmeet, Michigan on 15 November 2015 at the age of 83. Link to Wikipedia biography