2026 Chesterton Athletic Hall of Fame: Bob Dille, Class of 1935, was an All-American basketball career at Valparaiso U, a pro basketball player and an Indiana state championship coach

2026 Chesterton Athletic Hall of Fame: Bob Dille, Class of 1935, was an All-American basketball career at Valparaiso U, a pro basketball player and an Indiana state championship coach

Tom Keegan
Onwardtrojans.com

Back in 1944, a college All-American basketball team played the College All-Star Classic against the defending professional champions, the Fort Wayne Pistons, in the Boston Garden.
The All-Americans’ roster included some of the biggest names in sports.
As a quarterback, Otto Graham is enshrined in both the College Football (Northwestern) and professional (led Cleveland Browns to 10 NFL championship games, winning seven of them) halls of fame and was an All-American basketball player.
Big man George Mikan of DePaul and then the Minneapolis Lakers holds the unofficial title as pro basketball’s first superstar and first dominant big man.
Arnie Ferrin remains Utah’s lone four-year basketball All-American.
Late Supreme Court Justice Whizzer White, Heisman Trophy runner-up at Colorado, was added to the roster when another player became ill.
Goaltending was added to the basketball rulebook because college and pro Hall of Famer Bob Kurland of Oklahoma A&M’s shot-blocking rendered opponents helpless.
The All-Americans gave the Pistons all they could handle, but lost, 44-38.
It was one of those rare instances where a player from the losing team played such a great game he was named MVP.
His name: Bob Dille of Valparaiso University. Robert Orville Dille was born in Chesterton on
July 2, 1917 and died near his birthplace on Dec. 10, 1998. In between, he experienced plenty of athletic thrills.
He graduated high school in1935, when to save money during the Depression, Chesterton didn’t publish yearbooks, more like scaled down pamphlets, so specifics on his high school career are sketchy, but according to Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame records, Dille earned 11 high school letters and four in basketball, three as the team’s captain. He also lettered four times in baseball and three in cross country.
He didn’t enroll in Valparaiso University until 1942, recruited there as a central target in the school’s drive to assemble a juggernaut basketball team. The big gap between high school and playing college basketball was not terribly unusual in those days.
The late Dille’s son Bob and his second wife of 15 years, Pat, live in Dunnellon, Florida, 25 miles southwest of Ocala. His first wife, Sheila, died one month shy of their 50th wedding anniversary.
“You’re only supposed to be this lucky once, but I’ve been lucky twice,” he said of marrying well during a recent phone interview.
Bob, 87, is having a knee replacement this week that will put his five days of golf per week on hold, and won’t make it back for his father’s posthumous induction. Bob’s son, the inductee’s grandson, Brent, and wife Cheryl, who live near Grand Rapids, Michigan in a town called Rockford plan to attend Saturday’s dinner at Sand Creek Country Club.
“He had a lot of talent and said his high school coach (Walter Jones) really brought him along,” Bob said of his father. “And then when you go play in those steel mills you learn a lot real quick. He played independent ball and places around Indiana would pay him to come in and play.”
A blog called “Peach Basket Society” lists the names of the independent teams for which Dille played: Valpo Kernals (1938-40), Gary Goodfellows (1939-40), Porter Feed (1940-41), Jackson AC (1940-41), Hammond Ciesar All-Americans (1940-41), Northern Indiana Steelers.
“And he was a good baseball player in high school and college and he pitched in the mills,” Bob Jr. said. “He had a tryout with the Chicago White Sox and they told him, ‘Bob, you need to stick with basketball.’”
A 6-foot-3 forward at Valparaiso University, he played for a team that gained national fame for defeating Mikan’s DePaul team and for its nickname: The World’s Tallest Team. Don and Wally Warnke, 6-10 brothers from Michigan City, and center Milt “The Stilt” Schoon, who held Mikan to nine points, were the tallest players.
“All the players except Harry Hines from Dallas were from right around the area, Lake and Porter County,” Bob said. “We lived above the bookstore at the university.”
In addition to being a full-time student, working full-time, helping his wife, the former Melba Olson, raise the family and playing baseball, Dille made several All-American basketball teams in multiple seasons during his four years at Valpo U and then spent the 1946-47 season with the Detroit Falcons of the Basketball Association of America.The BAA merged with the National Basketball League on Aug. 3, 1949 to form the National Basketball Association, but Dille had moved on by then.
“He only played pro basketball for one year,” his son said. “He didn’t like it with all the travel and being gone from us. He wanted to be a coach.”
The father didn’t like it, but the son did.
The Falcons played in the same arena as the Detroit Red Wings of the NHL.
“When Dad signed with Detroit, Gordie Howe was just a teenager,” remembered Bob. “Dad would take me down to the dressing room and I would put on Gordie Howe’s equipment just for fun.”
After retiring from playing, Dille spent 31 years coaching. His first year was an assistant at Valpo University, followed by six years as Valparaiso High School head coach, three years as head coach of Berne, 14 years (the first seven as an assistant) at Fort Wayne Central and seven as head coach at Fort Wayne Northrop.
The highlight came in 1974 when Northrop defeated Jeffersonville 59-56 for the state championship. That summer, Dille was assistant coach of the Indiana All-Stars, which had a tall, skinny player from French Lick by the name of Larry Bird.
The next year Dille was head coach of the Indiana All-Stars.
“The Indianapolis Star came up with the idea to send the All-Stars to Spain, Germany, France, and they played all the high school all-stars in those countries and they ended up in Russia,” Dille’s son recalled. “The first two games in Russia they played the Russian high school teams and just killed them. I mean it was hardly even a contest. And the next night when they took the floor it was a whole different team. It was the Russian national team. And the All-Stars came very close to beating them.”
When Dille retired, his hometown beckoned.
“He came back and spent his retirement years in Chesterton and passed away in Chesterton,” Bob said. “He contracted Parkinson’s and when he was 81 it just got him.”
But not before getting to know his grandchildren a little better.
“I called him Pops,” said Brent, a 1985 graduate of Chesterton. “He’s been gone for quite some time, but I miss him every day.”
He especially misses their days dropping poles in the water.
“We were always fishing. We would go to Lake Wawasee or we’d go out on Lake Michigan,” Brent remembered fondly. “Then we’d fish the rivers in Porter where Dad was born and they all grew up.”
He remembers his grandfather having cleaner language than the most famous basketball coach in Indiana history: “One of his ultimate sayings was, ‘Oh, bunk!’ In fact, that was on his license plate. He was just an all-around good old guy, a really good person.”
Bob played basketball for his father at Berne and was in his history class: “When he taught history he made everything very interesting.”
Like Brent, Bob said much of his father’s retirement was spent dangling bait: “He was an avid fisherman, I mean avid. In fact, when he was in Russia, he bought some lures. He came home and called me to come over. I went down in the basement and he opened up his tackle box and he had six or seven lures from Russia. I said, ‘Dad, I have a question for you: We don’t have any Russian fish over here. What are you going to do with all those Russian lures?’ He said, ‘You can leave now.’ Oh, we had a lot of fun.”