CHICAGO — As Dillon Thieneman’s high school coach tells it, Thieneman’s father, Ken, had a saying while Dillon was growing up.
“His dad says all the time: You’ve got to skate to where the puck’s going, not to where the puck is,” said Jake Gilbert, Thieneman’s coach at Westfield (Ind.) High School and now head coach at Division III Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Ind.
Ken didn’t invent that saying, as any hockey fan or student of Wayne Gretzky would tell you. Dillon himself admitted he’s a little foggy about that memory.
“My idea of it is it’s probably more of a feel for the game,” Thieneman said Friday while holding court during his first news conference at Halas Hall. “How’s the pocket moving? What are they trying to attack? And just be aggressive to the point of attack.”
Thieneman applied that philosophy — skate to where the puck is going — while making the most critical decision of his career: relinquishing a family legacy at Purdue, rolling the dice on one visit to Oregon and embracing some uncomfortable truths about himself.
But that foresight — seeing where he needed to be, not where he was — set him on a path to being drafted in the first round by the Chicago Bears.
Oregon defensive coordinator and safeties coach Chris Hampton remembers when Thieneman was in the market for a new college program. Bringing up all the tackles he missed during his sophomore season at Purdue would seem to be the worst recruiting pitch — but not for someone with Thieneman’s makeup.
“He had a bunch of visits lined up. We were the first one,” Hampton said. “We talked about the plan. It wasn’t like an entertainment, like when we take him out and party. It was strictly football and the plan for his development and how we can get him to be a first-round draft pick, and he was all in.
“He wanted to know his weaknesses. It wasn’t just about his strengths. It was what does he need to improve on in order to get called by (an NFL team like) the Bears.”
The Ducks staff made cut-ups, “we watched film of it and he saw it, he knew it,” Hampton said. “And we talked about how we want to improve it and what was the plan in place.”
He was sold. Even with his NFL future on the line, Thieneman “canceled all the other trips,” Hampton said.
Thieneman said Friday that, from past experience, recruiters typically are “just sugarcoating or trying to talk you up.” But Hampton and head coach Dan Lanning “didn’t sugarcoat anything.”
“They told me exactly,” he said, “like: ‘We think you’re a good player. This is what you need to work on. This is how we get you better. This is how we develop guys fast.’ And to see those examples and see how they had it planned for me made it very easy.”
Said Hampton: “Not only did he listen to what I said, he did stuff on his own and he really attacked it.”
Thieneman drilled and drilled some more during his time in Eugene. Even during noncontact drills and walk-throughs, he would get in position — moving exactly where he was supposed to be on the field — and imitate making the tackle.
“It was unbelievable how addicted to the process he was,” Hampton said.
Thieneman has two older brothers, Brennan and Jacob, who played safety at Purdue as walk-ons. They, along with his parents, helped instill a love for the game.
“It starts with that little kid, the 4-year-old me looking at that TV being like, ‘Hey, it’s going to be me out there,’” Thieneman said. “Then it goes on to see my family and my brothers do it. Seeing my parents, how they work in their businesses, and really watching my brothers out there on the field wanting to be out there with them.”
His family at one point lived in northwest Indiana, in the footprint of Bears fandom.
“I was really young when we were a family of Bears fans, but I’m excited to learn more about the history,” he said. “When we moved down to Indianapolis, we were Colts (fans) but still had the Bears in there somewhere.”