Landry, Nicholls experience, allowed Hill to prosper as athletic, academic pioneer

Cleveland Hill was among those who took part in a recent tribute to former Nicholls basketball coach and athletic director Don Landry.

Some 45 years since he last coached the Colonels, Landry was being honored by the school he helped put on the map with the dedication of the “Don Landry Legacy Center” at Stopher Gymnasium.

“Same exact person that he is today almost 60 years later,” Hill, now 76, said of his first recollection of Landry. “I remember somebody telling him one time, ‘why don’t you wipe that smile off your face because you get that smile on your face all the time?’

“Pleasant, very even keeled. Not demanding, not confrontational,” said Hill of the now 85-year-old Landry, who became a mentor and close friend. “Not the Bobby Knight type or anything like that. He’s basically the same. He hasn’t changed a bit. That was who he was, and that is who he is.”

The person Hill is forms the story of a man who used his athletic ability and intelligence, with the influence of people like Landry and his experiences at Nicholls, to become a pioneer many times over at the Thibodaux school.

It was 1968 during turbulent times in the nation – only a few months after civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. had been slain – and a teenager from Moss Point, Mississippi, had a decision to make.

At 6-foot-8, 210 pounds, Hill, whose full name is Obie Cleveland Hill, had the opportunity to attend college and become the first member of his family to earn an upper education degree.

His choice of schools would revolve around a few colleges and a huge decision.

College basketball recruiting in the 1960s was a far cry from what it would become in the 21st Century. There were no Name, Image, Likeness deals or transfer portals. If even there were, it would hardly have affected Hill. The few schools interested in him were of small-school variety, not the blue bloods of the sport.

“I got into the recruiting game late,” Hill recalled. “I had a relative that lived in West Virginia, and he was trying to get me a scholarship to the University of West Virginia.

“They weren’t interested at first, but then West Virginia State College, they offered me a scholarship and once West Virginia University heard about it, then they got into the recruiting game, too. I never took either one of them seriously because I wasn’t going to go to West Virginia. Perkinson Junior College (now called Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College), they really went after me hard.”

Jackson State was another school from his native Mississippi that showed interest in the basketball star who had been a 6-foot-8 specimen since the eighth grade.

One day, a college assistant coach by the name of Lloyd “Tiger” LeBlanc from a small school in Louisiana Hill had never heard of entered the picture.

“He was over in Gulfport recruiting and somebody told them that Magnolia High School – and our high school was all black – had three guys that could play college basketball,” Hill remembered.

The first encounter came when Hill and two other basketball players were called to the principal’s office.

“Anytime the principal called you to the office, it’s like, ‘oh, Lord, what did I do?’” Hill said. “We go in, and this guy starts telling us about Francis T. Nicholls State College. He was in one of the university automobiles. I had never heard of this place before. So, I kind of dismissed it.”

One person who didn’t dismiss it was a LeBlanc.

“I lived about a block from the school, and so I never ate in the cafeteria,” Hill recounted. “I always walked home for lunch. I’m walking home and he drives up beside me, and he said, ‘can I talk to you a little bit more?’

“We drove up and sat in my yard. I never did get a chance to eat lunch that day.”

What the two talked about had ramifications beyond playing basketball.

“He told me, ‘look, this is what we’re trying to do,” Hill said. “We’re trying to integrate athletics at Nicholls State College. I’ve looked at your grades. I’ve heard good accolades from other coaches in the area. I just ask you to come down and take a look at the place.

“I said, ‘OK, coach, I’ll think about it.’”

So, Hill traveled to Thibodaux.

“From that point on, it got serious. I did come down and visit Nicholls and I’ll be honest with you, I wasn’t overly impressed, but Coach LeBlanc persisted,” said Hill.

Hill then discussed the matter with his high school coach, Ira Polk.

“He told me, ‘Cleve, this is something that needs to be done, and you are the person that can get it done.’ I said, “OK, Coach, I’ll think about it,” Hill recalled.

Hill made another trip to Thibodaux.

“On my second visit to Nicholls, there was another kid from Jackson, Mississippi, that had come down – a black kid,” said Hill. “His coach had brought him down. We were in the old part of Stopher Gym, where we had an old training room and everything,”

“That coach and Dr. Galliano were talking,” continued Hill, referring to then Nicholls university president Vernon Galliano. “I didn’t even know what a college president was at the time. I could hear their conversation. That guy asked Dr. Galliano, ‘why are you doing this now?’

“Dr. Galliano said, ‘this is something that needs to be done and we need to do it now.’”

“I remembered what Coach Polk had said, and it was pretty much the same thing. I said, ‘maybe it is time to get this done.’ That was the deciding point for me,” Hill said of his fateful decision.

Polk’s son, Richard, would later become a teammate of Hill at Nicholls, and a standout player in his own right.

It didn’t dawn on Hill about his ability to succeed as being the first black athlete at Nicholls or what it might mean if he was unsuccessful.

“I was not the greatest student in high school when it comes to study habits and things like that, but I never felt like I could not make it academically,” Hill said. “I always felt like I could do that. Back in those days, if you made a ‘C’ you were happy. I knew I could make ‘C’s.’

“That didn’t bother me too much. Maybe I was just too naive to worry about some things like that. I just felt like if Nicholls was willing to give it a shot, I was willing to give it a shot.”

Because of the types of patterns Nicholls ran in basketball under Landry, Hill said he felt a bit confined his first two seasons as a Colonel.

“The patterns basically kept me in the post area – and I had skills,” Hill explained. “I could handle the basketball out on the court and things like that. I could shoot from the outside, but within a team concept, I know what (Landry) was trying to do.

“It didn’t bother me too much. I never complained about it, but every now and then, I would tell him, ‘Coach, I can do a little bit of this and a little bit of that.’ That really didn’t concern me too much because I had been in a system in high school. I knew what pattern basketball was all about. It was just a transition from one phase to another.”

His sophomore year, Hill became a team captain. He was later named a permanent team captain by his senior season.

“When you’re sophomore, you don’t realize the significance of being chosen captain by your teammates. I do now, but I didn’t then,” he noted.

Hill’s time at Nicholls proved to be more of a trek than a journey, especially in his first couple of seasons as a Colonel.

“My first two years, even some into my junior year, there were a lot of things said, slight remarks, little things that we call microaggressions today,” said Hill. “It’s not enough that you can pin on like a fistfight or anything like that, but they are enough to really irritate you.

“If you ingrain enough of that stuff inside of you, it can have long-range consequences – and it did. A lot of those things affected me after I left Nicholls for two years.”

One of the experiences was being called the N-word by one of his Nicholls teammates.

As angry as Hill was by the slur, he knew he couldn’t fight back, physically, or verbally.

“I was smart enough to realize at the time that if I had retaliated, yeah, I would have lost my scholarship because (then Nicholls athletic director Ray Didier) wouldn’t have tolerated it. I would have lost my scholarship, but I was smart enough to realize, I think that’s what (the Colonel teammate) trying to do, get me to quit the team,” said Hill.

“That was the major consideration, but there was another consideration. He probably would have beat the snot out of me. He was a lot stronger than I was. I’m 6-8, 210. He’s 6-4 and about 250. No confrontation there, believe me,” continued Hill, laughing while recalling the incident.

Although Nicholls failed to produce a winning season in each of Hill’s first three years, the Colonels seemed on the cusp by reaching double-digit wins each season. Nicholls went 10-14, 11-15, and 10-15 in those years.

“Our senior year started off just like the rest of them for one half of the game,” Hill recalled. “I remember we prepared well that year. We ran. We didn’t have a lot of talent. Let’s face it, we didn’t. Some of the guys I played with, they will admit that. We weren’t as talented as some of the other teams in the conference or the other teams we played.”

Hill recalled a specific road game.

“We went to play North Texas,” he said. “We were down 18 at halftime. I remember Coach Landry mumbling something like, ‘it’s going to be just like it was in the past.’

“But we rallied. We came back and we won that game 72-70. The next thing I know, we are 11-1 and we’re getting our first national ranking.”

Everything, Hill said, came together that year.

“I always attribute it to the hard work that we put in. The maturity of the players, and just the fact that you get tired of losing. I think that all came together. But I think that one game in North Texas was kind of like a catalyst to make us believe that we could compete with anybody that we played. So we took off from there,” said Hill.

The Colonels would go on to reach the NAIA playoffs, finishing with a record of 16-9. Hill left the school at its all-time leader in scoring and rebounds.

By Hill’s senior season, two other Black players had joined the team, Earthie McMillian and Johnny Williams.

“Earthie McMilliam was 6-feet-3 and not very strong,” Hill remembered. “He had played forward all of his high school career. He was not strong enough to really play forward in in the conference and he didn’t have the ball-handling skills to play guard. So he played minimally, but he accepted that. Johnny Williams was just a hard-working kid. Johnny had offers to play college football. He was a quarterback at Gueydan, but he chose basketball. He was just a hard worker. Johnny was one of those guys that you needed in practice every day to make everybody else work hard.

“I can’t pinpoint any one thing that happened, but all of that seemed to coalesce and we became a team. We’re not a bunch of individuals. We really became a team that senior year. I point to North Texas, but evidently something was going on beforehand that brought us together, make us believe we could win.”

Then came the draft – not the military as was going on at the time because of the Vietnam War – but the basketball draft. Now a two-round affair, the drafts were quite different in the early 1970s.

Hill was selected by the NBA’s Seattle Supersonics with their last pick in the draft, in Round 14 as the No. 185 overall pick. The Kentucky Colonels of the rival ABA selected him in the sixth round as the No. 66 overall pick.

Hill opted to go to camp with Kentucky, The Colonels were loaded with the likes of big men Dan Issel and Artis Gilmore, along with guards Louie Dampier and Rick Mount.

“I made up my mind before I went to that camp, if I make it fine, if I don’t, I’ll move on,” Hill said.

There were more than just basketball skills that caught Hill’s attention at the camp.

“The one thing I found out when I did go to the camp those guys who came in to try out, weren’t even close to a college degree,” said Hill. “A few of them had been journeymen, going from camp-to-camp year after year after year. One guy was 31 years old, and he had played at Florida State. He loved basketball and he never wanted to give it up

“It was an eye-opening experience for me in the sense that I’m three hours short from a bachelor’s degree. Some of these guys that played four years of college and they are not even halfway there. I knew at the time that if I made it great, if I didn’t, I would go into something else.”

Despite hearing a few positive words, Hill didn’t make the team.

“I was the only big man that really knew how to play defense. I remember Coach Joe Mullaney. He had coached at Providence. He was the head coach. I remember hearing him telling one of the assistants that he said, ‘that guy can play defense, but they cut me anyway,” Hill laughed.

Hill returned to Thibodaux to finish his degree.

“I came back to Nicholls because I needed three hours of graduate. I actually took six hours that summer and graduated,” Hill said. “My degree was in liberal arts. In 1972, there were not a lot of people hiring liberal arts majors.

“I went back to Moss Point. I talked to the principal of the high school, and he said, ‘man, I really want to hire you, but I got to get permission from the board. I went back two or three times. He kept saying, ‘don’t do anything drastic. I gotta get permission from the board to hire you.’”

Hill went the drastic route.

I went over one morning, I said to myself before I got there, if he doesn’t offer me a job today, I’m going to go join the Army – middle of the Vietnam War, I’m going to join the Army,” said Hill years later, shaking his head. “I went over, and he said the same thing. I left the school went straight up downtown Moss Point to the recruiting office and joined the Army. The next day, he called my house and said, ‘board approved,’ he told my mom that. I said, ‘oh, well, I’m on my way to New Orleans now on my way to Fort Polk from there.’”

In some ways, the Army felt very familiar to Hill. In other ways, it was an adjustment.

“It wasn’t hard for me in the sense that the training, we had did that in college. The running, we did that in college. The discipline, we had done that in college,” Hill said. “The toughest part for me was this:  when we got to Fort Polk about 2:00 in the morning, a guy walks in. I didn’t know who he was. He just said, ‘I’m here to you all.’

“‘Does anybody here have a college degree?’ I raised my hand and another guy who was older than me raised his hand. He said which one of you all want to be platoon leaders?’

“I told him, ‘you’re the oldest, you should do it.’ He said, ‘nah, you go ahead and do it.’ So they made me platoon leader and I didn’t know what platoon leader meant, but it was like a captain on the basketball team.”

He quickly found out soldiers were not quite like college teammates.

“Except for one other guy from Sunset, Louisiana, everybody in that platoon was from the South Side of Chicago,” recalled Hill. “Totally undisciplined and did not like taking direction from anybody.

“We had a little time off in the evening on Sundays. They wanted to go get some beer and go ‘gangbanging,’ that’s what they called it. ‘Let’s go gangbanging.’ I had to be the person that was in charge of those guys. That was the toughest part for me.”

“They actually threatened me a couple of times and in that platoon, we had a couple of thieves,” he continued. “Being in the Army, when one person does something wrong, everybody gets punished. I had to be in charge of guys who were getting punished for what two other guys were doing.”

As the platoon leader, however, Hill was apart from the others.

“The crazy thing about it is I’m the platoon leader,” said Hill. “The drill sergeant said, ‘stand over here. You’re not gonna crawl in the grass in the mud and stuff like that. Let them guys do it.’ Of course, they took it out on me; ‘Oh, you’re the drill sergeant’s favorite now’ and stuff like that. I know now what he was trying to do, but at the time, I’ve got to live with these guys at night. I’ve got to stay in the barracks with them at night. You go home to your family, but all the things he made them do, they blamed me for it. That was tough.”

Being in the Army didn’t mean the end of Hill’s basketball days. He was part of the All-Army squad that competed against other teams from NATO countries.

He recalled one incident when the team faced a squad from Italy in 1974.

“The Italian national team had a guy named Pierre Maserati. He was from the Maserati family,” Hill explained. “He was good. He was really good, and he was killing us.”

“This guy came over to our coach,” continued Hill. “He said, Coach, let me tell y’all how to defend this guy,’ because he could see exactly what they were doing, and he told us how to defend this guy. We looked at him like, ‘who are you? You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

“Of course, we didn’t listen to him. Anyway, that guy was Mike Krzyzewski.”

While Hill continued his life’s journey, Krzyzewski would go on to become the winningest coach in the history of men’s college basketball.

On another occasion, the Army team went on a goodwill tour to Amman, Jordan, to teach the young people there how to play basketball.

“If you know anything about the Muslim religion, anything with the left hand is frowned upon,” Hill explained. “It’s more extensive than you think. It’s not only just the use of the left hand. They like to do everything to the right. Even the pages, we read this way (motioning left to right) they read this (the opposite) way, so they don’t have to get their left hand involved.

“When you’re on the basketball court, you want to keep the court balanced. Everybody ran to the right side. So we’re out there and I’m trying to teach them that you’ve got to keep the balance and all these things like that.”

It was at that time the Army coach posed a question that would forever change Hill’s life.

“Hal Fisher, our coach, he said, ‘Hill, you ever think about being a teacher?’ I said, ‘no, I don’t think I want to do that. I might want to coach one day but I don’t want to teach.’ He said, ‘what the hell do you think coaching is if it’s not good teaching? said Hill.

It was a profound moment.

“That’s when I came back from the service. I made up my mind I was going to get certified to be a teacher. That’s what I did,” said Hill.

Hill started off as a social studies teacher at East Thibodaux Junior High School.

One day he got a call from Jerry Sanders. Sanders had been an assistant coach at Nicholls and was elevated to head coach when Landry decided to devote his time to being athletic director as the school was making the transition from Division II to Division I.

“Jerry Sanders called me about being his assistant coach,” Hill said. “I’m going like, ‘you mean you want me to make the transition from junior high school to college?’ He basically said, ‘yeah, we can make it work.’ So that’s how I got the Nicholls job.

Hill was an assistant for two years when Sanders was replaced as head coach by Gordon Stauffer.

“Coach Stauffer came in; he had the opportunity to hire who else he wanted to. I believe to this day Coach Landry persuaded him to keep me on. He never said it. He never said anything about it, but you just have this feeling that you know he wanted to bring his own person in, and Coach Landry said keep him on,” Hill said.

Four years later, Stauffer was the first of several individuals associated with Nicholls to ask Hill another of those life-changing questions.

“He asked me one day, ‘what are your future plans as far as basketball is concerned?’ I said, ‘well, Coach, if I don’t get a head coaching offer in the next two years, I think I will get out of coaching,’” said Hill.

“I didn’t think much about it and the very next day, Dr. (Phil) Bergeron, who was the Dean of Education, came to me and said, ‘I heard you’re getting out of basketball. I have a position if you want it in P.E,’” Hill continued. “I said, ‘no, Dr. Bergeron, I might get out in two years, but I’m not ready to get out now.’ He said, look, I have a position open now. Two years from now, I may not have a position.’ I said, ‘well, OK, thanks for the offer, but no thanks.’”

Then came another conversation.

“The next day after that, Dr. Norman Marcel, he was the head of the PE department,” said Hill. “He came to me, and he said, ‘look, I’m going to be honest with you. There is a lot of pressure on us to integrate the faculty in the education department at Nicholls.’ He said, ‘I know you. I taught you. I’ve been knowing you since you were a freshman. I would rather hire you because I know you than somebody who I don’t know.’

He said, ‘I know you don’t have a degree in physical education, but you have expertise in physical education and things like that. I can hire you based on that.’ I thought about it, and I told Coach Stauffer, ‘I have an offer on the table’ and I told Coach Landry too that I need to take it. That’s how I got into it.”

After a year or so, there was another conversation in which Marcel suggested Hill take some courses in physical education to get certified.

“I thought, ‘why do I need to do that? Why don’t I just go ahead and work on a doctorate.’ He said, ‘yeah, you can do that, too.’ That’s how I got into the doctoral program at UNO,” said Hill.

While working on his doctorate, Hill became the assistant women’s basketball coach under Ben Abadie.

“Financially, it was tough going to UNO working on a doctorate and living on the salary that I was making at the time,” Hill said. “He (Abadie) came, and he offered me out of the clear blue sky. “I need some help.’ Lynn Oberbillig, she was the head softball coach, but she also assisted him. She couldn’t do both anymore.

“He had an opening and he asked me to do it. That’s how I got involved with the girls. That extra income helped me a lot.”

Having earned his PhD by 1993, Hill became the head of student teaching in 1994. Four years later, a deanship opened up at Southern University in New Orleans.

“I accepted that position on an interim basis. I went to (Nicholls president) Dr. (Donald) Ayo and told him, ‘I am going to accept this position on an interim basis. Number one, it would give me more experience, and if something ever comes open here, I am going to reapply for here,’” Hill said. “He said, ‘sure, go ahead.’”

The pending retirement of Robert Clement opened the door for Hill to return to Nicholls as the Dean of Education.

“Dr. Ayo called me and said, ‘the position is open, are you going to apply for it?’ I said, ‘you bet.’ I applied and I was named dean of education in ’99,” Hill said.

In a position of leadership, it took Hill a while to adjust his approach to dealing with his personnel just as a coach might.

He tried a familiar approach while at SUNO.

“This is not castigating anybody, but when I was at Southern in New Orleans, I had a very good friend on that faculty. She’s passed away now, but I kind of led that faculty like Coach Landry led us – not confrontation, not that demanding, OK, this is what we need to do.’ I tried that with that faculty and did not work at all.

“This lady came to me, and she said, ‘let me tell you something. This is a faculty that is not used to being asked to do things. They are a faculty that you have to demand things from them.’ I changed my whole personality. Instead of, ‘can you get this for me tomorrow?’ (it changed to) I need this tomorrow at 3:00, have it on my desk.’”

The results were noticeable.

“They actually started to work then. We went up for state accreditation and we didn’t get approved, but we got a sanction lifted from the university that had been there for three or four years. But then when the job opened at Nicholls, I decided to come back to Nicholls,” said Hill.

Hill tried that same strategy at Nicholls before hearing from another sage lady.

“This wonderful lady, she was a secretary, Peggie Toups, she’s gone now, too,” Hill recalled. “She called me in and said, ‘you cannot lead this faculty like that. You have to ask them to get things done. You can’t demand things.’ So I had to change my leadership style again, which I prefer it, anyway. That’s when we gradually begin to get things done. “

“Not only being a leader, which is what you learn in sports, not only teamwork, but as a leader, you have to know how to lead,” he continued. “You can’t treat everybody the same way. Sometimes you actually have to go against your own personality to get the results that you want, but it worked.”

The new strategy worked fine as the school went through national accreditation, and later a program redesign.

“You go through it every five to seven years,” Hill said of the reaccreditation process. “The first time we went through it was in that period when I was trying to lead by demanding things from people and we got probation. That’s one of the reasons I had said I got to change the way I led this faculty.

“We went through the second time; we got the highest rating that the college had ever gotten because we came together as a team. I’m very proud of that. At the same time, the Louisiana Board of Regents began to demand that we redesign our program – redesign undergraduate, redesign graduate program.”

“We were able to do that. We actually led the way. We led other people in the state in doing that because we had just gone through national accreditation. We had a heads-up on everybody, and we got great compliments for that,” he added.

Hill decided to retire as the Dean of Education in 2006.

“I burned myself out,” Hill revealed. “One of the toughest jobs in the world for me is, and I’ve only been one for a few years, but that’s being a high school principal because you are juggling so many things. I was juggling a lot of things at that time as a dean.

“I got to a point where I would go in on Sunday nights. I’d go in at 6:00 in the morning. I would go in on Saturday morning. It just kept building and building and building.”

It didn’t take long for the always-active Hill to realize he wasn’t quite done. He was back in action nine months later as the interim dean of Student Life at Nicholls.

“I stayed in that position for eleven months and then that’s when they offered me a job as principal of Max Charter School. I did that for two years. I had to leave the Max Charter School because I had to have a kidney transplant,” said Hill.

Hill’s family suffers from a kidney disease called polycystic kidney disease, or PKD. It’s a genetic disorder affecting 1 in 1,000 people worldwide, according to the Mayo Clinic.

“It runs in families and my sister also has had a liver transplant. There’s no cure for it,” Hill noted. “You get a transplant, and hopefully, the cyst, that’s why they call it polycystic, that grow in your kidneys, you hope it won’t grow on these kidneys. My sister got her transplant in 1991 and she’s been going strong since. Hopefully, I won’t have any other complications.

“The only reason I knew I had the disease, my older brother who’s passed away now, needed a transplant in the late ’80s and I volunteered to donate a kidney to him.”

While undergoing tests, it was discovered that Hill had inherited the disease. His kidney function was down to 40 percent. A doctor told him that when it went down to 20 percent, he would be placed on the transplant list.

“It stayed at 40 percent for about three, four, five years,” said Hill. “Every year I would go in and (his doctor) would say it was still at 40 percent. He said, ‘if it ever gets at 20 percent, we’re going to put you on the transplant list.’ In one year, it just nosedived from 40 percent to 20 percent functioning. He said it was time to go on the list.”

“That’s when my youngest daughter stepped up and said, ‘you’re not going to go into dialysis. I’m going to give you my kidney,’” he continued. “So my youngest daughter donated a kidney to me.

“The funny thing about polycystic kidney disease – and this is just statistic, it’s been proven by statistics – 50 percent of your family would get it and 50 percent of your family won’t.”

Eight of Hill’s siblings grew to adulthood. Four had to get a kidney transplant and four didn’t. His oldest daughter has the disease.

Hill took a year to recover from the transplant. He then started to look for adjunct courses to teach. He couldn’t do so at Nicholls since he was drawing his retirement.

“I had a friend of mine who was the interim president at Our Lady of Holy Cross College in New Orleans,” Hill said. “I wrote him a letter and asked him did he have any adjunct positions. He said, ‘sure, come on over.’ I went over and I took his job, his class, because he had moved up to interim president.

“After a year, he called me in and said, ‘I’m getting ready to retire. I’m not going back to the faculty’ because they had named the new president. ‘I’m not going back to the faculty; I’m going to go ahead and retire. Are you interested in taking that position on a full-time basis?’ I said, ‘sure.’ I’ve been there ever since.”

In 2022, the College of Education and Behavioral Sciences Building was named in his honor, the first such honor bestowed to an African American in Nicholls history.

“When they told me that the College of Education building was going to be named after me, the first thing I said is why? What have I done?’ said Hill. “I named some other people that I thought should be given first consideration. It took me a long time to finally accept the fact. But you know what? I was working with a guy in New Orleans, and he told me something that I will never forget.

“He said, ‘this is for you, but this is not about you.’ He said, ‘it’s for you now, enjoy the recognition, but it’s about the generations that’s going to come after you.’”

How would Hill like to be remembered?

“If what I’ve done in my life at Nicholls, and away from Nicholls, if it can inspire someone else that would be a legacy that I would appreciate.”