Aside from being a nonpareil coach, Prof Blood was an incredible athlete in his own right. Young Ernest was a YMCA prodigy, and excelled in gymnastics, fencing, and wrestling, where at the age of 15, he won the New England wrestling championship for his weight class. His constant physical activity, along with weightlifting, would come to develop in him strength that would be beyond most men. He could toss up a 16-pound shot put into the air and then proceed to catch it on the back of his neck. While he took to the game of basketball like a duck takes to water, Prof also played football and baseball and was good at both. His athletic prowess enabled him to coach many other sports including baseball, where he once even gave batting tips to Babe Ruth, when he was a Red Sox. When Babe was traded to the Yankees, Prof used to visit him at Yankee Stadium.
Branch Rickey, most famous for being the sports executive who broke Major League Baseball's color barrier by signing Jackie Robinson, is also notable for creating the sports farm system. He arranged for the St. Louis Cardinals to purchase a series of minor league teams to provide experience and training for young players in the team system. This enabled the Cardinals to always have good players, which made them a dynasty throughout the 20's, 30's and 40's. In similar fashion, Prof would always plan ahead. He would scout and work with younger up-and-coming players as early as their elementary and middle school years. In effect, he developed his own system of "feeder schools" which helped him to win wherever he coached. Given Prof did this well before Rickey did, Prof could be given credit for putting into practice what Rickey would later create.
Prof coached many great players. Like quick, strong and tough DeWitt Keasler, "Dead Shot" Mike Hamas, Fritz Knothe, who literally kept the great streak going by playing with one hand despite a dislocated shoulder, and Bobby Thompson, who would go on to score 1,000 points in a single season and was featured in "Ripley's Believe It Or Not." But his greatest player was Johnny Roosma, who was then recruited by General Douglas MacArthur to play at West Point, where he would lead the Black Knights to a 73-13 record and become the first college player to score more than 1,000 points in his career. West Point's MVP award is still named after him. Roosma was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1961.
Nat Holman was among the most influential figures in basketball, first as a player, and later as a coach. Known as "Mr. Basketball," he was a talented guard with the Original Celtics. A gifted passer and dribbler, Holman turned pro in 1916, was the biggest star in the game by 1920, and played until 1930. While still playing he began coaching at the City College of New York, where he would spend 37 seasons, compiling a record of 421-190. In 1949, he became the only coach to lead his team to the NCAA and NIT championships in the same season. He was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1964. In 1969, he spoke at a well publicized banquet to honor the 50th anniversary of the start of Passaic's record 159 consecutive win streak and called Ernest "Prof" Blood the greatest coach of his time.
Prof may have been the very first coach to emphasize the "pass before dribble" approach to the game. And while Frank Keaney (Rhode Island State College) is given the historical credit for it, as Prof was the first to employ the strategy of passing the ball down the court as fast as possible to score, it can be argued that Prof is really the father of the "fast break." As the man who taught many the game during Dudley Allen Sargent's Harvard Summer School of Physical Education, it is likely that Prof was the first to conduct what is popularly known as the "basketball clinic." Prof once noted that the number of players on a team was reduced from seven to five because YMCA administrators deliberately wanted to reduce his playing time so his teams wouldn't always win. Hence, Prof could be the very reason why basketball is played with five players on a team.