Mike Dillett was a successful business man and family man for many years, but he was a soccer man nearly his entire life.
And he was darn good at that as well.
Love for sport began at Pius
Dillett's soccer career started in the fall of 1966, when he was a junior at Pius XI High School playing for the St. Matthias Catholic Youth Organization Cadet team. He later played for the Bavarian junior team and the Serbian Soccer Club team before joining the newly formed Milwaukee Kickers in the spring of 1969.
Thirty-five years later, Dillett, a Kickers Hall of Fame member, hung up his cleats after his final season in the Kickers' over-30 league.
"He was always a step ahead of me," said Gary Troy, New Berlin Eisenhower boys coach and Dillett's lifelong friend. "He was fast, smart. Whatever the team needed him to do, he'd do. He was always a player that wanted to win but didn't need to be the one things revolved around. He was competitive, but always played fair and hard all the time."
As much as he loved to play, Dillett equally loved to coach. He ran countless soccer camps and coached several age groups for the Kickers, the Brookfield Soccer Club and the New Berlin Soccer Club. He began coaching at New Berlin West during the 2000-01 school year. His style of coaching drew players closer to the sport.
"He's always very composed, very calm with his players and very passionate about the game," said Jordan Ward, New Berlin West's junior varsity coach, who was coached by Dillett from 1993-2001. "He wanted kids to know about sportsmanship and love of the game more than anything else."
Disease moved swiftly
Dillett, 59, passed away Dec. 21, presumably from the effects of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a brain disease he was diagnosed with just weeks before his death. According to his obituary in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Dillett began to feel different in September. Numbness in his face traveled to his arms and led to some tremoring on his side. Ward said he and others new something was wrong, but said Dillett never talked about it with his players or coaches.
"At the time of the soccer banquet in early November, we still did not know," Ward said. "We could tell something was up; there were pauses in his speech, his hands were shaking and he struggled with his balance. But the doctors didn't know what it was."
Troy was among those who could not tell Dillett was ill.
"We had the all-conference meeting in mid-October right after the season was over," Troy said. "I was sitting next to Mike, we walked out to the parking lot together and we were shooting the breeze and he never said a word about any problem, and I couldn't tell. That's Mike, very much a strong person - until I know what's going on, I'm not going to admit something's wrong."
Dillett owned and operated his own heating, ventilation and air conditioning business since 1996, and he and his wife, Linda, raised 12 children and had 10 grandchildren. Soccer was just one part of his well-rounded and all-too-short life.
"He was a relationship-builder," Ward said. "He was the type of guy that could make lifelong relationships with people. Some people have a few close friends or family members in their lives; Mike treated everyone as if they could be that type of person. Despite being busy with his family, or busy with his business, or busy with soccer, he could always make time for you."
Added Troy: "He really dedicated a lot of his life to his sport and his teams. He's a really, really good person. If you need something, he would bend over backwards to help you. You could count on him. I'm going to miss him a lot."
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