March marked the 40th anniversary of the Hillsdale College men's basketball team's historic run to the NAIA Final Four, the best finish by a Charger basketball team in a national tournament in program history.
This past weekend, just a few months after that anniversary, one of the most important contributors to that run returned to the Hillsdale College campus to talk to attendees of the Chargers' annual Elite Camp.
Hillsdale hosted more than 150 players from over a dozen states, including attendees from states as far-flung as Arizona, Texas and Idaho, as well as bringing back Dale Allen ('81), who has a case as one of the greatest athletes Hillsdale has ever produced.
Allen spoke to camp attendees about "maximizing their moment", a fitting topic for a person who's spent his life doing just that. Perhaps the most impressive thing about Allen is that his four-year run of excellence at Hillsdale was just the beginning of an extremely interesting and accomplished life.
From an overseas career that included championships in Venezuela, to years spent working with a athlete ministry program bringing the gospel to communities around the world, to his nearly three-decade career at Nike, working with some of the world's most elite and well-known athletes, Allen has made his mark in his post-Hillsdale life.
A Historic Run
It's not an outcome Allen could have imagined as a 16-year-old from DeVilbiss High School in Toledo, Ohio who arrived on the Hillsdale College campus as a freshman in 1977.
A high school All-American, Allen had scholarship offers from many of the top NCAA Division I programs in the Midwest and beyond, but he chose to sign with first-year head coach Bill Morse and the Chargers instead, despite Hillsdale coming off a 3-28 season the previous year.
"My focus was on going to a place where academics was taken seriously, and where I would be able to get the degree I wanted to pursue," Allen said. "More than any other place I visited, Hillsdale prioritized academics and made that an important part of their pitch to me."
Inserted into the starting lineup from the first game as a freshman, Allen became the core of one of the most impressive turnarounds in college basketball history. In 1977-78, with Allen averaging 13 points and seven rebounds, Hillsdale won 21 more games than it had the previous year, and kicked off a run of four straight seasons of 24 or more wins, a feat that has never been matched by Charger teams before or since.
"When I arrived at Hillsdale, we had all of these different players – holdovers from the previous team, junior college transfers, and freshmen," Allen said. "Coach Morse did a great job of getting all three groups to buy in and embrace hard work.
"Individually, we all were talented offensive players, but (Coach Morse) instilled in us a commitment to defense that helped take us to the next level as a team."
Allen and the Chargers improved with each successive year, culminating in a 1980-81 campaign that to this day remains the best in program history. Hillsdale set a school record for wins with 28 that still stands, and avenged three years of disappointment in the NAIA District 23 tournament with dominant wins over Northwood (82-65) and Siena Heights (82-50) to secure their first NAIA national tournament appearance in nearly a decade.
In Kansas City, Missouri for the 1981 NAIA tournament, the unheralded Chargers stunned top-seeded Briar Cliff 53-46 on the way to the Final Four. Hillsdale might have claimed the national title had Allen not suffered a head injury early in a 65-60 semifinal loss to Alabama Huntsville that knocked him out of the game.
To this day, it remains the Hillsdale men's basketball team's only Final Four appearance in a national tournament in program history.
For his career, Allen earned four All-GLIAC honors and three NAIA All-American honors, including leading the country in field goal percentage as a senior. He's fifth all-time in program history in career points (1,699), seventh in rebounds (904), is the school record holder in made free throws (446), and has made the Hillsdale College Athletic Hall of Fame both as an individual and as a member of the 1980-81 team.
"I think when everything was over, there was a little bit of disappointment, because we felt like we did have a good enough team to win it all," Allen said. "But I think we were also satisfied that we had done everything in our power to win the title, and maximized the potential we had as a team."
The Next Chapter
Allen graduated in the spring of 1981 with a B.A. in Business Administration and Accounting, and continued to play basketball after Hillsdale. In the summer of 1981, he was one of the final roster cuts of the defending NBA Champion Boston Celtics, and he played professionally for three years overseas before joining Athletes in Action and touring the world as part of a Gospel Outreach Ministry Program for several more years after that.
"If I said I had known when I left Hillsdale that I would end up where I am today, I'd be a liar," Allen said. "But I did feel a lot of confidence, because I had the degree, and I knew that gave me options.
"I felt like the lessons I learned at Hillsdale and the things I accomplished on and off the court during my time there gave me the tools to succeed at whatever came next."
Those lessons proved critical as Allen tried to figure out what came next when his playing days came to an end in the early 90s. Living in Atlanta, Allen searched for a career that could combine his sports background with his business degree, and while volunteering at the 1996 Olympic Games and other local events, he came into contact with representatives from Nike, and those meetings led to a job offer as a sales representative with the international footwear and apparel company.
From that initial opportunity, Allen worked his way up the ladder with the nationally-recognized brand. His experience as a sales rep allowed him to transition to the international wing of Nike's sports marketing department right as a wave of talented foreign-born players hit the NBA.
And his work with international superstars like Dirk Nowitzki, Pau Gasol, Tony Parker and Manu Ginobli in that role caught the eyes of Nike's biggest client, and the greatest basketball player ever, Michael Jordan.
Jordan brought Allen on as the Global Sports Marketing Director of the Jordan Brand in 2007, and over the next 14 years he helped sustain the Jordan Brand's relevance to a new generation of athletes, working with superstars like Derek Jeter, Russell Westbrook, Chris Paul and Maya Moore, among others.
Allen credits his rapid rise at Nike to the habits instilled in him from an early age and during his time at Hillsdale.
"It's been the work of 25 years (to get where I am today at Nike), and I feel like every day still I learn something new, or encounter something I've never seen before that changes my perspective," Allen said. "Hillsdale helped me develop the confidence to know who I am as a person at my core, and the humility to know that I don't have all the answers, and to continue to seek to improve myself and to learn from the world around me."
That's a message that Allen hopes will resonate with young people, today and in the future.
"I see too many people who fall into the trap of putting all their eggs in one basket, and not having something to fall back on if that doesn't work out," Allen said. "As a high school or collegiate athlete, if you really embrace all the options in front of you, academically, athletically, and socially, you increase the number of chances you have to find that opportunity that changes your life.
"If I hadn't given myself those options and put myself in that position, I wouldn't be where I am today."