'A special man': Lincoln Land Community College remembers athletics pioneer, Dick Dhabalt
Dick Dhabalt pioneered Lincoln Land Community College athletics and ushered the Loggers from their modest beginnings to the present day.
The heralded and indefatigable administrator, instructor and coach passed away on Sunday. He was 85.
“None of us here in the department would be where we are today if it wasn't for him,” LLCC athletic director and baseball coach Ron Riggle said. “He started it all and coached everything the first year here and just built the program and continued to have it grow.
“That's why fortunately a number of years ago, we started our Dick Dhabalt Athlete of the Year award that we present to our male and female athletes of the year at the end of each school year in his honor for what he meant to this department.”
First of everything
Dhabalt basically assumed every role possible in LLCC's inaugural year in 1967.
He coached a vast array of sports on top of being the Springfield junior college’s first athletic director. That most notably included basketball and baseball but also extended to cross country, golf and tennis.
He ultimately served as the athletic director and basketball coach for 20 years as well as a physical education and mathematics instructor for 25 years.
He was inducted into the NJCAA Region 24 Hall of Fame in 1991 and Springfield Sports Hall of Fame in 2015.
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“I just can't imagine everything that he did,” said Claude Kracik, who succeeded Dhabalt as the baseball coach after the first season. “He was such a leader in our school, and he was an intelligent individual who really was a great math teacher. That was one of his fields as well. I don't know whether very many people knew that.
“But his ability to communicate with the student-athletes was really good and even though we were outmanned many times on the basketball court, we came back with victories. We came back with victories against a lot of teams that had us outgunned, and we were never outhustled or out-prepared.”
Humble beginnings at LLCC
The 1954 Moline High School graduate belonged to the celebrated Bradley University men’s basketball team that won the National Invitation Tournament at Madison Square Garden in 1957.
He additionally garnered Bradley’s prestigious Charles Orsborn Award for athletic and academic success as well as community service the following year and later taught in the Chicago suburbs for nearly a decade before taking over the inchoate Loggers.
He arrived at a temporary campus located off South Sixth Street where this plot of Quonset huts was jokingly referred to as Plywood U.
The Loggers scheduled their home games virtually anywhere they could before moving to their permanent site in 1974.
“They used to call it LLCC, Losers Last Chance College,” said Kracik, who retired in 2002. “I'll tell you what, the people that called it that had no idea of how great that place was and how great it could be because junior colleges weren't as accepted back then as they are now.”
‘A special man’
Dhabalt reeled in “some pretty doggone good players” despite LLCC prioritizing local athletes, and every now and then he found the proverbial diamond in the rough, Kracik said.
A couple of notable players included Rick Montooth and Brian Pesko.
Montooth coached 16 seasons at Southeast from 1992-2008 while Pesko won the NCAA Division II title at Central Missouri State in 1984 as a point guard after leading the Loggers to a 22-10 season in 1982.
“He came at you the right way,” Pesko said. “He approached you and coached you. He wasn't the Bobby Knight guy, you know what I'm saying? But we still respected him. That was his personality. He wasn't going to try to fool anybody. That was him. Everyone respected him, everyone loved him.”
His compassion extended beyond the court.
“There's not a finer person and I've told a lot of people,” Pesko said. “He was always — as much as basketball — trying to guide us in the direction as far as life. Nobody there was going to be in the NBA, so he always wanted to make sure that we got our degree and always wanted to make sure that we went where we belonged.”
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Kracik, 79, assisted Dhabalt in basketball for a couple of seasons.
“We were chauffeurs, we were mentors, we were counselors, we were coaches,” Kracik said. “We were just about everything for those kids. Dick was very proud and had the right to be of all of the athletes and students that he had sent on to be very, very good people out in the world and contributors to our society.”
Kracik complimented Dhabalt as “a man for all of the seasons” and noted that his colleague even took several tennis players to the national tournament.
“He put so much of his effort and time into that school, to the athletic program — it's just unbelievable,” Kracik said. “The dedication that he put in was unmatched.”
Dhabalt remained actively involved with LLCC after retiring all together in 1993. That included a heartfelt letter to the winners of the MVP awards that now bear his name.
“He was a great man,” Riggle said. “He was very approachable, always wanted what was best for the students. I talked to numerous people that played here even before me that I didn't know and ... never ran across anybody that ever had anything bad to say about Dick Dhabalt.
“I mean just such a great person and so helpful — just a special man.”
Contact Bill Welt: (217) 788-1545, bill.welt@sj-r.com, Twitter.com/BillWelt
This article originally appeared on State Journal-Register: Lincoln Land Community College remembers Dick Dhabalt, who died at 85
