The night he celebrated his decision to play basketball for Hillsdale College, high school senior Nathan Neveau opened a fortune cookie at dinner and read the words:

“Life is full of choices; today yours was a good one.”

The choice to attend Hillsdale would change the trajectory of his life as an athlete and a man, leading him to his current position as athletic director at Hillsdale Academy.

A high school football and basketball player from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, Neveau was recruited for basketball by both Michigan Tech and Hillsdale College. 

“The first time I watched Hillsdale College play basketball was on a recruiting trip to Michigan Tech,” the ’19 Hillsdale graduate said. 

Hillsdale lost the game by about 20 points, Neveau said, and head coach John Tharp was furious with his players the whole time. 

Neveau said that his mother told him after the game, “I would never let you play for a coach like the Hillsdale coach. He was crazy.”

Despite his mother’s first impression, Neveau went through recruitment with Hillsdale.

“At the end of the day, it was the conversations I had with Coach Tharp,” Neveau said, recalling a phone call with the coach the summer before his senior year of high school. “I got off the phone with him, and I thought, ‘I really like this man. I want to play for him.’ So I called my parents and told them I was going to Hillsdale.”

Redshirted with an injury his freshman year, Neveau played five years for Hillsdale. He started at point guard for his last three years and fell just short of 1000 points for his career after a shoulder injury caused him to miss half of his final season.

His perception of Tharp was not the only thing that changed for Neveau during his time on the team. Neveau rediscovered his faith as a student, which he credits in part to the culture of the basketball team.

“I had a teammate who became a Christian his third or fourth year here,” Neveau said. “When you’re living, seeing every day, showering with people who all of a sudden have been profoundly changed and care to tell you about that because they believe it and think it’s important, in some ways it’s unavoidable. The questions become unavoidable.”

Neveau also met his wife at Hillsdale, Ashlyn Landherr, who was a senior on the women’s team when he was a sophomore.

Neveau graduated in May of 2019, and the couple married in June.

After a year of ministry with Athletes InterVarsity and two years in the masters program at the Van Andel Graduate School of Statesmanship, Neveau took his current position as the athletic director for Hillsdale Academy last June.

As athletic director, Neveau coordinates programming with other schools, teaches classical literature in the classroom, and serves as the assistant basketball coach. Neveau said he sees his position at Hillsdale Academy as a culmination of his athletic background and his education at Hillsdale.

“Hillsdale Academy’s stated motto is ‘virtue and wisdom,’” Neveau said. “It’s my job as the athletic director to make sure that’s occurring in the athletic teams as well. We want our coaches to be instilling lessons of character in the kids. We want to use athletics to drive or further what we’re attempting to do as a school.”

Neveau said that he wants to stay in Hillsdale as athletic director long term as he and his wife start a family with their first daughter, Nora, who just turned one.

“When I took this job, I think that was for us a way of saying that we’re really committed here,” Neveau said. “All of my friends who I went to college with are calling me a lifer.”

As an 18-year-old, Neveau chose to attend Hillsdale to play basketball and become a better athlete. At 27, he stays because the life and community he found at Hillsdale have made him a better man.

“I didn’t come wanting to be formed as a man and become a person that would lead a good life after college,” Neveau said. “I wanted to play sports, and I wanted to compete at a high level. But Hillsdale has an effect on people, if they allow it to have this effect on them, to shape them. And I think by the time I left here as a student I had become a slightly better man, and was becoming a better man, and had the tools to become a better man. I don’t know that that would have happened somewhere else. But it did happen here.”