Star Tribune
Ed Prohofsky, state basketball coach for five decades from high schools to Timberwolves and Lynx, dead at 90
Ed Prohofsky, who coached basketball in the state at the high school, college and professional levels and helped start the adapted sports program in Minnesota high schools, died on Monday at age 90.
“Coach Prohofsky’s legacy and servant leadership in so many areas runs deep and has had a powerful impact on the lives of students,” the Minnesota State High School League’s Tim Leighton said Friday. “Without his advocacy at the grassroots level, adapted athletics would not be flourishing as it is. The League and the Adapted Athletics community are grateful for his vision, support and dedication.”
Prohofsky graduated from St. Paul Humboldt High School before graduating from the University of Minnesota in 1957. He joined the Army, and his coaching career began in 1957 at a base in Killeen, Texas.
That coaching career would span more than 50 years. Prohofsky coached at Minneapolis Marshall University High School, Golden Valley Lutheran College, Hamline and Macalester, the Timberwolves and the Lynx.
In 1974, while teaching physical education at Marshall University in Dinkytown, Prohofsky formed the first adapted floor hockey league, comprised of four teams. Minnesota was the first state to sanction adapted athletics for high school students.
Prohofsky told the Star Tribune in 1996 that one thing he most cherished was getting the MSHSL to sponsor adapted state tournaments, in 1993. While the MSHSL was considering sponsorship of adapted state tournaments, Prohofsky urged the MSHSL to embrace adapted athletics.
Prohofsky coached the Marshall University boys basketball team for six seasons. The Cardinals went 28-0 in the 1975-76 season en route to the Class 1A state championship. They also reached the state tournament in 1977 and ’80, going 140-10 under Prohofsky overall, including a 53-game winning streak that ended in the first round of the 1977 state tournament.
He spent 34 years as a teacher, coach and administrator in Minneapolis, including seven years as the Minneapolis City Conference’s athletic director. Prohofsky also started an All-City Academic team while leading the conference.
He was an assistant to Flip Saunders at Golden Valley Lutheran in 1980-81. From 1981 to ’89, he coached at Hamline. Prohofsky rejoined Saunders as an assistant with the Wolves from 1997 to 2004, then joined the Lynx as an assistant under former Wolves colleague Don Zierden in 2006 before retiring in 2009.
“A life lived in service to others is how I will remember Ed Prohofsky,” broadcaster Lea B. Olsen wrote on Facebook.
Prohofsky and Ronnie Henderson, a guard on the Marshall University championship team in 1976, were named to the Minnesota Basketball Hall of Fame in 2019. Prohofsky is also a member of the MSHSL, Minnesota State High School Coaches Association, Minnesota Basketball Coaches Association and the Minnesota State High School Athletic Directors Halls of Fame.
Prohofsky lived in St. Louis Park. Services have been held.
The University of Minnesota would get $13 million to put toward pollution cleanup at UMore Park under a proposed settlement with E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Co. and the federal government, ending a dispute over contamination left in the south metro by a World War II-era gunpowder plant.
DuPont designed, built and ran the Gopher Ordnance Works smokeless gunpowder facility on the site, which once spanned 13,600 acres in Rosemount and what was then Empire Township. The plant was briefly operational from November 1944 through August 1945. Some of the land was then returned to farmers, but about 8,000 acres was deeded to the U.
The proposed consent decree, which summarizes the settlement, is open to public comment until July 29, and then a public hearing will be held Sept. 4, before a judge decides whether to approve it.
“We’re happy to have reached an agreement with the federal government and hope for the court’s approval,” said Jake Ricker, a University of Minnesota spokesperson.
The $13 million payment to the U would come “in return for a release of claims against the United States and DuPont,” Ricker said in an email.
The U.S. Department of Justice declined to comment on the proposed settlement. Attorneys for the company referred questions to Chemours, a DuPont spinoff, and representatives there declined to comment.
The UMore Park land has had several uses after being deeded to the U in 1947.
The U.S. Army and Navy both leased land from the U for a period after that; hazardous substances were disposed of during those times, the lawsuit alleges. The U used the land mostly for lab waste and agricultural research for half a century.
About 2,800 acres in the area became the Vermillion Highlands, a wildlife and recreation area jointly administered by the U and the Department of Natural Resources.
More recently, the U had planned an ambitious, environmentally friendly development for 20,000 to 30,000 people at UMore, but those plans have stalled. Gravel mining in the area began more than a decade ago.
University officials filed the lawsuit in 2017, seeking to recover costs associated with cleaning up pollution on the property.
Cleanup work ahead
Because Gopher Ordnance Works was “never fully activated … the magnitude of contamination at this site is actually pretty limited,” said Tom Higgins, manager of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency’s Superfund remedial section.
But UMore is on Minnesota’s Superfund list of hazardous waste sites being investigated and cleaned up through state and federal programs. The pollution — mostly arsenic, lead, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) — contaminated the soil in the north-central part of UMore, Higgins said.
The U’s lawsuit says it has performed “an extensive environmental investigation at a cost in excess of several million dollars to determine the source, nature and extent” of contamination on the site. Elsewhere in the lawsuit, the U said it has spent at least $3 million investigating the site.
DuPont and the United States both filed multiple countersuits, saying the site was eligible for assistance through the federal Superfund law. The United States also filed a counterclaim saying the U breached contracts that stated it would hold the federal government harmless for any liability related to pollution.
Higgins said the U has already gathered a trove of data about the site and is still working on a risk assessment and feasibility study of possible cleanup methods.
The easiest way to clean up contaminated soil near the surface is to excavate and remove it, Higgins said. From there, contaminants can be burned off “by applying tremendous heat” or the soil can be taken to a landfill approved to take hazardous waste.
“It’s my hope that we eventually can delist it from the state Superfund [list],” Higgins said, adding that the consent decree is a “net positive for everybody.”
Dakota County Commissioner Bill Droste, who served as Rosemount’s mayor for two decades, called the proposed settlement “a good thing,” noting that next year will mark 80 years since WWII ended. There were once 900 buildings on-site; many still remain on the east side of UMore in the form of concrete structures and foundations, he said.
Rosemount City Administrator Logan Martin said, “We’ve always wanted to see UMore get addressed as needed and I think it’s wonderful to see it happen.”
Martin said he hopes the proposed settlement could make way for more development of the land, if that’s the U’s vision.
The U recently sold off UMore land for two big projects: Amber Fields, a 479-acre housing development that borders Dakota County Technical College and is south of 145th Street E., and the Meta data center, slated for 280 acres in the property’s northeast section.
The union representing more than 300 Minneapolis park workers announced Tuesday they will strike for one week beginning July 4, after seven months of negotiations with the city yielding no new labor contract.
At a news conference Tuesday, AJ Lang, the business manager for LIUNA Local 363, said that for now, the union is keeping striking activity to one week to minimize disruptions for residents, although he acknowledged the July 4 holiday is the busiest time of year for parks in the city.
Workers for the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board have for years called for improved wages, health insurance and safety precautions.
Lang said the union has agreed to eight out of 10 proposals from the board, and the board has not agreed to any of the union’s.
In a statement, the board said it made a final offer Monday night of a 10.25% wage increase over a three-year period.
This story will be updated. Check back later for updates.
One person was killed and two were critically injured in a head-on collision on a western Wisconsin highway, officials said.
The crash occurred shortly after 11:30 a.m. Monday about 9 miles south of Turtle Lake on Hwy. 63, the Polk County Sheriff’s Office said.
An SUV driver heading south crossed over the center line and hit a northbound car, the sheriff’s office said.
The car’s driver was killed, and a passenger in the vehicle suffered life-threatening injuries, according to the sheriff’s office. The SUV driver also was critically injured, the sheriff’s office added.
Officials have yet to release the identities of any of the vehicles’ occupants.
