Hall Of Fame Spotlight - Dan Hilson
1/21/2011 9:04:00 AM | General, Athletics
by Dan Stroud
UMKC Hall of Fame Inductee Dan Hilson has a hard time separating his high school and college years. To him Kansas City, with his favorite Oklahoma Joe's barbecue, and life on the Plaza is still much the same as his memories of St. Louis, only with different restaurants. But the answer as to why he has such similar feelings about the two places has less to do with what he lived around as to who he lived, played, and studied, at least a goof portion of the time around.
The Kangaroo soccer star played for the Scott Gallagher Soccer club in St. Louis while in high school. During his junior year in high school, his team won the Andy Stone Cup, which was awarded to the National Champions of the under-eighteen player division. Scott Kaiser, Mike Reiter, John Roy, and Scott Twellman were all one year ahead of Hilson and decided to attend UMKC. So, in deciding to reunite with his teammates on the Kangaroo squad, the challenge to achieve even more was the main reason for coming to Kansas City.
But there was a bit more to it than that. It seems that head coach Rick Benben and Associate Head Coach Fred Schlichting had recruited his teammates to play at UMKC the year before. The coaches offered the opportunity for the group to continue growing as a unit and playing the style of soccer they had been accustomed to during high school. Hilson found it to be an easy decision to follow his mates a year later.
The result of all five players moving across the state together bore some rather juicy fruit. In 2001, the squad reached the round of 32 in the NCAA Tournament, beating Wisconsin-Milwaukee in the opening round before falling to St. Louis University 2-1. “That was an exciting time, to play in front of friends and family at the NCAA Tournament, well, it was really great.”
"We had a great group of guys on the team,” said Hilson. “Everyone really got along great!” The group from St. Louis even shared a house together just off the Plaza. “It was kind of like a Fraternity house, but we still studied and worked hard during our practices.”
Now the Director of Truckload Operations at a freight broker for third party logistics in St. Louis, the former soccer star said he has benefitted greatly from his degree in Communications, which was obtained at UMKC. He remembered one person in particular who helped him during his college years. Linda Kurtz served as his advisor and he credits her with helping him decide on Communications. “She got me started and then walked me through to graduation,” Hilson said. “I'll always be grateful.
The Chaminade High School graduate said what made Communications fun at the time was the fact that half of the team had the same major. “We had to give presentations quite a lot,” he said. “It was really a blast to make fun of the guys when they screwed up a speech. It was good, cheap entertainment.”
The building of Stanley H. Durwood Soccer Stadium & Recreational Field, in Hilson's estimation, has the program, “going nowhere but up.” He, like many others who keep track of the sport, thinks that it is among the top five collegiate venues in the country. “It's really a state of the art facility,” he said. “It's so much easier to maintain a steady influx of great players when you have a facility like that one.”
Hilson remembers all too well what it was like when he played. “We used to practice four miles away at a facility with no bathrooms,” he said. “Bringing such a nice facility onto the campus is great for the team, but it's especially great for the students.”
But what is Hilson most grateful for from his four years as a `Roo? “My parents, Ron and Toni, might have missed a handful of games home and away during my playing days,” he said. “I could not have asked for a more loyal or loving father and mother. They really racked up the miles to come see me play. That's what it's all about.”
(This is the seventh of a eight-part series featuring the 2010 UMKC Athletics Hall of Fame class.)
