Hobie Billingsley, who helped create one of college sports’ greatest dynasties, dies at 95

Indiana University’s Hobie Billingsley, one of history’s most influential diving coaches and a figure who helped create one of college sports’ greatest dynasties, died Saturday.

He was 95.

Billingsley’s personality, innovation and expertise allowed him to contribute to diving for parts of eight decades.

He was born in Erie, Pa., on Dec. 2, 1926. He coached at Indiana from 1959-89, a period in which the Hoosiers won six NCAA and 23 Big Ten team championships. Billingsley’s divers won 115 national titles and seven Olympic medals.

A lasting legacy:IU diving legend paved way for Olympic success

He coached U.S. Olympic teams in 1968, 1972 and 1976. He returned to the Olympics in 1992 and 1996 as a diving judge, and at Atlanta in 1996 he had the honor of reciting the Olympic Oath.

IU’s Counsilman-Billingsley Aquatics Center is named for the diving coach and swim coach Doc Counsilman. And the pairing almost didn’t happen.

In the late 1950s, Billingsley was a coach at Allen Park (Mich.) High School. In a 2003 WTIU documentary, he explained how difficult it was for Counsilman to bring him to Indiana.

“He said, ‘I looked over everybody, and you’re the guy I want,’“ Billingsley said. “‘But there is no such job here. They don’t have jobs for diving coaches. We’ll have to figure out how to sneak you into the university.’ Which they did.”

Indiana won NCAA swimming and diving team championships consecutively from 1968 through 1973. The 1971 team has been characterized as the greatest college team ever assembled in any sport.

50 years ago...IU swimming assembled the greatest team ever — in any sport

Billingsley’s Olympic medalists include Lesley Bush (1964), Ken Sitzberger (1964), Jim Henry (1968), Win Young (1968), Cynthia Potter (1976) and Mark Lenzi (1992 and 1996).

Bush’s victory on 10-meter platform at Tokyo might have been the biggest upset in the sport’s history.

In a span of six months in 1964, she went from afterthought to gold medalist. Her parents were so incredulous that when an Associated Press reporter’s transoceanic phone call came at 5 a.m. to deliver the news, they did not believe him.

“A miracle,” Billingsley said at the time.

After Bush finished 11^th in the national championships in April, she trained that summer under Billingsley. He told her:

“There’s an outside, outside, outside chance you could make the Olympic team.”

The Olympic Trials were at Astoria, N.Y., about 50 miles from Bush’s home. In her first competition ever on tower, the 16-year-old finished third to make Team USA.

The prohibitive favorite was East Germany’s Ingrid Kramer, 21, who swept the gold medals at Rome in 1960 and won a third gold on 3-meter at Tokyo.

But on Bush’s opening dive in Tokyo, she earned 9s from the judges to seize a lead she never relinquished. The 7s she received on her last dive were enough to beat Kramer by 1.35 points for gold, 99.80 to 99.45.

After high school, Bush enrolled at Indiana — without an athletic scholarship because there were none for women — and went on to win five national AAU titles.

Bush is not the only female diver whose life was influenced by Billingsley.

In 1968, he encouraged Potter to train in Bloomington. By the end of summer, Potter had become national champion and finished fourth at the trials, making her an alternate for the Mexico City Olympics.

Before Title IX... An IU diving coach changed the life of Olympic medalist Cynthia Potter

Potter went on to win 28 U.S titles, most ever in women’s diving. She made three Olympic teams, won a bronze medal on 3-meter in 1976, was a three-time world diver of the year.

“It didn’t just change my life. It re-directed my whole being,” Potter said in a recent IndyStar interview.

When Billingsley was a freshman diver at Ohio State, he won NCAA titles in 1945 on 1- and 3-meter. Thereafter, he joined the Armed Forces and served in Japan during World War II. He returned to Ohio State after the war.

Following retirement from IU, Billingsley remained active in the sport as a teacher, technician and judge. His book, Diving Illustrated, was published in 1990.

Counsilman’s book, The Science of Swimming, has long been the Bible in that sport. And he urged Billingsley to take a similar approach, asking him if he really knew how to coach divers.

“Well, I took it from there and starting looking into it,” Billingsley said in the documentary. “And in 1960, actually, I found out I didn’t know anything about the sport at all. But neither did anybody else. And that’s how we started beating everyone else. We went technical. We went through science.

“Here’s what it is. He coached swimming and I coached diving, right? That isn’t what we were doing. Not many people understand this.

“We weren’t coaching them. We were teaching them how to live, how to be a better person, how to learn to compete, how to win well, how to lose well. If you want it, work for it, pay the price.”

In a 2017 gathering to celebrate Billingsley’s 90^th birthday, about 145 people attended from six countries.

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Sandy Searcy, director of sports for the National Federation of State High School Associations and a former IU swimmer, said many athletes came to regard Billingsley as a father figure.

"I don't have a lot of money," Billingsley said at the reunion. "But I consider myself to be one of the richest men I know because of the friends I have."

Billingsley is a member of the International Swimming and IU Athletics halls of fame. In 1994, he was presented the Sammy Lee Award, the most prestigious award in diving.

In 2018, Billingsley was diagnosed with myasthenia gravis, an autoimmune neuromuscular disease.

Contact IndyStar reporter David Woods at david.woods@indystar.com. Follow him on Twitter: @DavidWoods007.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Legendary Indiana University diving coach Hobie Billingsley dies