Itch to Compete: Walk-on Dan Cachia Contributes to Chargers Track and Field
Written by Doug Goodnough
Dan Cachia, ’90, doesn’t have all-conference or All-America honors to point to during his career on the Hillsdale College track and field team.
In fact, his brief assessment of his time as a Charger was: “I wasn’t good.”
However, Cachia, who walked on the team as a junior and was part of Hillsdale’s Great Lakes Intercollegiate Athletic Conference championship program, said the experience has served him well since graduation. The longtime vice president of an information technology company and former elementary school athletic director said he learned what being part of a team meant.
“They were just good people. They were hard workers,” Cachia said of his Hillsdale former teammates and coaches. “I did enjoy it.”
A standout high school athlete, Cachia was asked to walk on the football team at Hillsdale but decided to focus on academics. After two years of intramural sports, and participating on the championship chariot race relay team for the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity during Greek Week, he said he “had an itch to compete.”
“I just wanted to try it,” said Cachia, who approached Head Track and Field Coach Bill Lundberg about the possibility. “He let me try everything.”
Cachia wasn’t fast enough to be a sprinter and couldn’t go high enough in the jumps. So he eventually settled on throwing the javelin. Learning from throws coach Bill Tefft and teammate and friend Ryan Pschigoda, ’91, who was a two-time NAIA national champion in the decathlon, he said he felt he contributed to the team’s success in his own way.
“We only had three throwers, so I felt I was doing something,” he said.
After graduating from Hillsdale with a political science degree, he thought about becoming a lawyer or engineer. However, he eventually settled on technical sales, first selling hardware and software. Eventually, he moved into technical recruiting and staffing. He has been doing that for 27 years, the last 23 with NuTechs, a Michigan-based firm.
“We’re big enough to make a difference, but we’re small enough to care,” said Cachia, who is responsible for the strategy and execution of NuTechs’ sales and recruiting teams. “We get to know our employees. We want to make sure our clients are happy.”
He is involved in helping his clients in a variety of areas, including web development, project management, and system administration.
He and his wife of 25 years, Jill, have a grown daughter who is in graduate school at Ohio University and a son who is a junior at Michigan State University. During their grade school years, he helped coach their teams at St. Patrick’s Catholic School in Brighton, Michigan. For five years he served as the school’s athletic director and said he leaned on his college athletic experience–and his faith–at times.
“As a man of God, I wanted to be active and show my kids that you have to get out there and do something,” he said.
The one-time walk-on is now a walker: his main athletic aspiration these days is walking in 5K and 10K races and half marathons.
“I’m just about completion, not competition,” he said.
Although he has not recently returned to the Hillsdale campus, Cachia said he has fond memories of his experience.
“The thing that I learned was to be a free thinker,” said Cachia, who pointed to Drs. Charles Van Eaton and Mickey Craig as formative faculty members. “They challenged me. When they communicated, I felt that they actually listened. It wasn’t that they were listening in order to respond, they were listening to understand.”
Doug Goodnough, ’90, is Hillsdale’s director of Alumni Marketing. He enjoys connecting with fellow alumni in new and wonderful ways.
Published in December 2023