Biography|Elliott Hill — The Kinesiology Degree That Almost Did Not Happen Here

People meet Elliott Hill as the Nike lifer who came back as chief executive. The paper trail starts on this Fort Worth campus, years before a swoosh badge existed for him.

He grew up in Austin, raised by a single mother who taught school. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram records that he was born and raised in Austin and that he finished Texas Christian University in 1986 with a bachelor's degree in kinesiology.

TCU itself later said the decision to enroll was financially tight. He chose the school anyway for its size, its place in Dallas-Fort Worth, and its athletics.

He had thought about medicine. What held him was sport and the way teams work, so the degree he took was kinesiology, not a pre-med ticket out of Texas.

Graduation came in May 1986. The next day, by his own later account as reported in Complex and by TCU, he was already working as a graduate assistant athletic trainer with the Dallas Cowboys.

That job did not become the career. It pointed him toward a master's in sports administration at Ohio University, and from there toward Nike.

The campus a visitor walks now is not a frozen 1986 set. Reed Hall still stands as the oldest building on the present site. Sadler Hall and the later academic core fill the same ridge TCU has occupied since it moved back to Fort Worth in 1910-1911.

Hill never really left the place. TCU lists him as class of 1986. University pages record that he joined the Board of Trustees in 2013 and has stayed on it while running Nike.

The first public credential in a thirty-two-year Nike climb was a kinesiology diploma from this hill, taken by a student who almost could not afford to be here.

Photo: Michael Barera, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons