Former Kansas Jayhawks and Wyandotte High basketball great Ellison dies at 83
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- Nolen Ellison scored 1,045 points for KU and led as team captain in 1963.
- He declined an NBA career for education, earning a Ph.D. and college presidency.
- Ellison supported education through leadership roles, foundations and endowments.
Former University of Kansas men’s basketball player Nolen Ellison, a two-time all-Big Eight first team selection, died on June 12, Kansas Athletics reported Tuesday.
He was 83.
A native of Kansas City, Kansas, Ellison graduated with honors from Wyandotte High School (where he played basketball, football and baseball) in 1959. He played for the Jayhawks from 1961-63 under head coach Dick Harp.
While at KU, Ellison, a point guard, became the seventh Jayhawk to score 1,000 points. He scored 1,045 career points in three seasons. Freshmen were not eligible for varsity competition during his years at KU.
Team captain in 1963, he currently ranks No. 56 on KU’s all-time scoring list. He was first-team all-league in 1962 and 1963.
In 1959, KU offered high school All-American and national honor society member Ellison a full basketball scholarship. He was recruited out of Wyandotte High in KC where he played on three state championship basketball teams.
“I enrolled at KU in 1959 with a long tradition of stellar athletes from Wyandotte High School who continued to excel in basketball at KU,” Ellison told KUathletics.com in 2016. “Players like Monte Johnson, Al Donahue and Harry Gibson had played on basketball teams with me prior to attending the university.”
Ellison’s older brother, Butch, also earned a basketball scholarship to KU. The two roomed together in Joseph R. Pearson Hall on KU’s campus.
“The education I got from KU, well, I am deeply appreciative for it,” Ellison told KUathletics.com in 2016.
One of Ellison’s highlights as a Jayhawk player was KU’s 90-88 four-overtime win against Kansas State in the championship game of the Big Eight Holiday Tournament played at Municipal Auditorium.
He scored a career-high 32 points and scored the Jayhawks’ final points in each of the first three overtimes.
In the first OT, Ellison converted two free throws to send the game into its second overtime. Ellison later cashed a 20-foot shot with two seconds left to force a third overtime. He hit two free throws with three seconds left to force the fourth overtime.
Ellison made the assist on Jay Roberts’ game-winning 12-foot jumper with three seconds remaining in the two-point victory.
Ellison was married to Carole Ellison the following day.
Ellison was selected No. 29 overall in the fourth round of the 1963 NBA Draft by the Chicago Zephyrs, later named the Baltimore Bullets. He was offered a contract but declined the opportunity to play professional basketball. He went overseas to help train the Olympic teams for the 1964 Olympic Games.
“I wanted more. I believed I could be more,” Ellison told KUathletics.com. “I look at the athletes today and I think that many of them are selling themselves short. I try to exemplify the other road that you can take.”
Ellison completed his certification and began “practice or lab teaching” in the Shawnee Heights school district outside of Topeka. He took a job teaching world history and government at Sumner High School in KC, where he also was a coach.
While at Sumner, Ellison was the first African-American elected to the Kansas City Kansas Community College Board of Trustees.
Ellison later worked for the Kellogg Foundation in Battle Creek, Michigan, which led Ellison to Michigan State University, where he earned his Ph.D. in education/leadership in 1971. He served as an assistant to then-Michigan State president Clifton R. Wharton Jr. from 1970-71.
In autumn of 1971, Ellison was hired as an assistant to the chancellor at Metropolitan Community College in Kansas City. In 1972, Ellison, then 31, was hired as the president of Seattle Central Community College. He thus became one of the youngest CEOs of a higher-education institution in the U.S.
In 1974, Ellison became the second president and CEO at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland, a position he held until 1991.
In 1992, Ellison became a professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City in the Henry W. Bloch School of Management. He retired from UMKC in 2001 and returned to Kansas City Kansas Community College in 2007 in a consulting role while serving as a trustee for the college for a second time.
Ellison, and his wife, Carole, were married in 1962 while attending KU. In 1983, Ellison was awarded a distinguished service citation by the University of Kansas Alumni Association.
Inspired by KU’s 150th anniversary celebration in 2016, the Ellisons formed the Ellison Family Foundation. The Ellisons also endowed a scholarship in the School of Education and Human Sciences in honor of Martin Luther King Jr., and made the first endowed gift to the Department of African and African American Studies to create the Ellison Family Research Fund.
“KU was home to the beginning of the vision of where I could go in life,” Ellison said. “Martin Luther King’s speech, ‘I Have a Dream,’ is a dream that we all are challenged to live, and because of basketball at KU I was able to live that dream.”
KUathletics.com contributed to this report.
This story was originally published June 17, 2025 at 1:06 PM.
