Kansas basketball and Guilford alum Dale Greenlee's hoops camp folds after 38 years
Matt Trowbridge
While the Flodin Boys Club found a way to keep its basketball league going during COVID-19 times by moving outdoors to a golf course parking lot, the pandemic brought an end to one of Rockford's longest-lasting and most prestigious annual basketball camps.
Dale Greenlee, who graduated from Guilford in 1971, started on Kansas' Final Four team in 1974 and was the Kansas captain as a senior in 1975, held his Rockford All-Star Basketball Camp for 38 years. The camp, which started out at Eisenhower Middle School, then moved to Jefferson for almost three decades before finishing up at Belvidere North, was called off last year because of COVID-19 and this year Greenlee decided to discontinue the camp for good.
"It gives me a little more vacation time, but it seems strange," Greenlee said. "That camp has been such a big part of my life."
Bill Wilhelmi was a coach with Greenlee at the camp for all 38 years.
"My favorite part about the camp," Wilhelmi said, "was using the same philosophy year after year: 'You're only as good as you want to be. If you want to work hard, you will do really well at this camp.'
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"It gave them a chance to work hard and not feel intimidated by anybody better than them. We had kids who never wanted to leave us. They came back year after year after year."
So did many of the coaches. Wilhelmi, Carl Armato, Dan Green, Cindy Hamilton, Doug Weyburg, Tom Honeycut, Jack McCarthy, Bobby Hearns, Nate Newsome and Nicole Gallas stayed with Greenlee for decades.
"It's been a labor of love for all of the coaches, and a wonderful experience for myself," Greenlee said. "We love getting together and working with the kids. The thing we were proud of is our camp was there to build individual skills. I've been at some of these big camps where they put you on a team and you play games. That's what the kids like, but it doesn't always build skills.
"We do station drills. We work on ball handling and passing, shooting, rebounding and defense at 40-minute stations. Every player gets every coach during camp because you rotate. Some of the other camps, they put you on a team and you have that coach all week.
"Plus when they put you on teams, the stronger players dominate. If you are an inexperienced player, you don't get many touches. Everyone gets the same amount of touches on station drills. We also play 2-on-2 and 3-on-3. You don't get lost in the shuffle in small-sided games."
Greenlee said when he started his camp the only other one in the area was Steve Goers' Fightin' Titan camp at Boylan. Now he says every high school has its own camp or clinic.
Bill Hanzlik, a former Beloit Memorial and Notre Dame star who played 10 years in the NBA as a defensive specialist, was one of Greenlee's first coaches at the camp and stayed at Greenlee's house during the five days of camp.
Greenlee had realized the importance of basketball camps ever since he attended Ray Meyer's DePaul camp as a 15-year-old Guilford freshman.
"My parents put me on the train up to northern Wisconsin; that makes it sound like it was 100 years ago," Greenlee said.
Over the years former Rockford Lighting owner Wayne Timpe and his family would donate to Greenlee's camp to help keep costs down. Those low costs couple with high quality made Greenlee's week-long camp so popular it wound up serving almost 10,000 kids over the years.
"We are very proud of that," Greenlee said. "Lots of young men and women have come through our camp. And a lot of coach's sons and daughters would work our camp. It became a very large extended family."
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Matt Trowbridge: mtrowbridge@rrstar.com; @matttrowbridge