By Sam McWhorter
Cameron Hill is a husband, a father to two sons, 11 and 10, and a sneakily good pool player. Oh, and he’s also among the best active coaches in NCAA Division III women’s basketball.
He’s certainly in the conversation as far as regular season feats are concerned, with the best win rate (.812) per season in D3WBB history during his seven seasons with Trinity. Bring it up to him, and he finds a characteristically logical way to deflect: “Wins can be scheduled, if I’m being honest with you.”
If that convinces the general public as little as it convinces him, there’s also this: he was at the helm of a team that nearly won its division title four years in a row, which hadn’t been done in decades in Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference. Conference winning percentage? Higher than 85 percent.
And the thing he attributes all that success to is, unsurprisingly, failure. Which isn’t to say he enjoys failure, no, far from it. He does, however, embrace it. “It’s the only way you learn, really,” he says.
One way for him to learn from failure is watching back and studying hours of game film. “You might call it an addiction,” he says, laughing. Yet, he struggled to find an answer for how many hours he spends every day watching films. “I don’t know, a lot,” he says. He watches films at work. Then he goes home, spends a while with his children, puts them to bed, and watches some more film.
If he wasn’t so passionately in love with the game, it might be a cause for concern--an unhealthy obsession. And yet, there are few times he seems happier than when he is around the game of basketball. More specifically, doing something to be better at basketball.
Fellow SCAC head coach Michelle Filander of Austin College has seen that sort of passion from across the halfway line. “He is an intense competitor and it’s made me more competitive, which I didn’t know was even possible!”
Clearly, this passion resonates with those around him, who often refer to him as a great teacher. “There are a lot of smart coaches out there,” says Assistant Coach Joe Shotland. “There are far less that know how to make the material and concepts accessible to people coming at the material from different backgrounds.”
Hill’s positive impact on the team as a whole goes beyond winning games. “I mean if I win a championship, great. I’d love that,” saysstudent assistant JP Urrutia, who calls Hill “my man Cam.” “But I just want to be a part of developing strong individuals.”
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