Not every great coach was a great player.

In fact, Tom Billeter, head men’s basketball coach at Emporia State University, didn’t even finish his high school career with both knees intact. Two major surgeries sidelined much of his time on the court, but those same injuries opened a door to something larger.

“I realized I could still be around the game even if I wasn’t playing it,” Tom says. “That changed everything.”

Raised in Byron, Illinois, Tom moved to town in first grade—Halloween Day, 1967—and felt welcomed from the jump. His teacher, new to the class the same day he arrived, became a small but lasting symbol: “We were both the new kids,” he laughs. “It made the whole experience feel a little less lonely.”

That sense of inclusion followed him through school, thanks to teachers like Mrs. Strube, a no-nonsense presence, and Principal Richard Hendy, whose stern expectations created a kind of healthy reverence. “You didn’t want to be sent to his office,” Tom says. “That was motivation enough to stay on the straight and narrow.”

In the days before club sports, Byron kids organized their own games. Tom remembers sandlot football in backyards, pick-up baseball, and self-run basketball shootouts. “No one organized anything for us,” he says. “We figured it out. It taught us a lot.”

Tom eventually found his way to the University of Illinois, where he didn’t play basketball, but where he started hanging around the right circles—thanks to his brother, Jeff Billeter, a graduate student involved in sports radio. That led to early exposure to the coaching world and a small opportunity at University High School in Urbana, coaching a JV team of brilliant, undersized kids.

His first game? A blowout loss. The final score was 83 to 13.

“And the parents came up after the game to thank me,” he says, still amused. “They said, ‘Coach, we’ve never had double figures against those guys before.’”

But Tom loved it. He was hooked.

That love took him to Hinsdale Central, where he coached basketball and, inexplicably, boys’ gymnastics, despite having never taken a class. He read books, faked his way through interviews, and got better by being bad at first—a pattern that would carry him far.

He earned a master’s degree in exercise physiology at the University of Arizona, supporting his young family with multiple side jobs—cleaning pools, mowing grass, taking on any gig that would cover expenses. One summer, desperate for extra income, he volunteered at a Lute Olson basketball camp.

“I was assigned shell drill defense—for six-year-olds. No AC. Tucson in June. I just gave it everything I had.”

Coach Olson noticed. A week later, he asked Tom to join the staff. Just like that, Tom was on a college bench—with Steve Kerr, Sean Elliott, and Kenny Lofton as players.

From there, the journey stretched across Rice University, where he helped rebuild a program and ran summer camps with over 1,200 kids (without air conditioning), to a head coaching stint at North Dakota State, assistant coach positions at St. Johns (NY) and Texas A&M, and to a long tenure at Augustana University in South Dakota, where he led the program to a Division II national championship in 2016, finishing that season 35–2.

Now at Emporia State University in Kansas, Tom continues building. His first year there, he inherited just two players. He recruited thirteen. They won eleven games. Since that time, he has continued to build the program and has reached his 500th career victory in college coaching.

“I’ve never been the guy who had the perfect pedigree,” he says. “But I showed up. I worked. And that’s always been enough.”

Tom credits everything—his values, his work ethic, his grit—to Byron. “Every ounce of how I approach coaching came from that town,” he says. “It came from the way we were raised, the teachers and coaches we had, the friendships we formed.”

These days, he’s not chasing the spotlight. He’s showing young players what it looks like to stay the course, invest in people, and outlast the trends.

Not bad for a guy who started in the shell drill station at a kids’ camp.