photo by: Kansas Athletics

Nolen Ellison, a former all-conference Kansas men's basketball player, died at 83 on Thursday, June 12, 2025.

Nolen Ellison, a former Kansas men’s basketball player who went on to a lengthy career as an education official, died on Thursday. He was 83.

KU Athletics announced the news in a press release on Tuesday, citing information from the Ellison family.

Ellison, a native of Kansas City, Kansas, who attended Wyandotte High School, arrived at KU in 1959 on a basketball scholarship and played alongside and lived with his older brother Butch (who died in 2019). Playing for head coach Dick Harp, Ellison totaled 1,045 points and was at the time just the seventh KU player to clear the 1,000-point mark; in both 1962 and 1963, he was a first-team all-conference selection.

Ellison was drafted by the Chicago Zephyrs of the NBA but elected not to play professional basketball.

“I wanted more,” Ellison told the KU Athletics website in 2016. “I believed I could be more. 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.”

For Ellison, that road meant teaching. He taught in Kansas City and became the first African American member of the board of trustees of what is now Kansas City Kansas Community College, then got a doctorate at Michigan State University.

He served as the president of Seattle Community College and then, for 17 years, Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland.

After concluding his tenure there in 1991, Ellison returned to Kansas City and became a professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City for nine years prior to his retirement in 2001. During that retirement, he later served a second term on the KCKCC board.

Ellison’s sons Marc and Steve, who are also both KU graduates, had shared the news of their father’s passing in a public post on his Facebook page on Sunday afternoon, writing that their first priority was their mother Carole’s well-being, but that they would provide future updates about memorial services.

“It’s with great sadness that we are informing you, via Facebook, that our father, Nolen M. Ellison, passed away suddenly this past Thursday (6/12/25),” they wrote in the post. “As we scrolled through the list of names in his Facebook account, we saw many old friends and colleagues. Please know that our father valued your relationship through the years.”