Allen Academy Varsity Boys Basketball

Dave Bliss grew up in upstate New York in Binghamton and attended Cornell University, where he received his B.S. in Economics and his MBA in marketing.

Upon graduating from Cornell University in 1967, Bliss joined the U.S. Army and was assigned to the U.S.M.A. at West Point, N.Y. It was during this two year period that Dave coached under Bob Knight and became enamored with the coaching profession. After two years at West Point and another two years back at his alma mater, Bliss went to Indiana University with Coach Knight and helped orchestrate arguably, one of the top basketball programs of all-time, culminating in the National Championship in 1976.

With this success, Bliss was hired at Oklahoma University where he helped the Sooners to their first Big 8 championship in 1978 before losing to Larry Bird’s Indiana State team in the NCAA. Next, it was Southern Methodist University, where he coached the next 8 years. Several NCAA appearances and a Southwest Conference Championship in 1988 enabled Bliss to get his next position at the University of New Mexico. In the next eleven years, Bliss became UNM’s all-time winning coach and led the Lobos to several championships and numerous NCAA tournaments. His desire to finish his coaching career at Christian school, however, led him to leave Albuquerque for the job at Baylor University.

For several years the Bears were making progress towards the upper half of the competitive Big 12 Conference, including Bliss’s 500^th win in 2001, when Bliss admitted to several NCAA violations. His resignation followed and for five years he was involved in private business in Denver, after a short stint in professional basketball in the Continental Basketball League. His desire to start a coaching ministry, however, led him back to Texas in the fall of 2008. In May of 2010 he accepted an offer to become Dean of Students, A.D. and Basketball Coach at Allen Academy in Bryan, TX.

Dave and his wife of thirty-two years, Claudia, have three children. Their son, Robert, a Baylor law grad, is a lawyer in Denver with his wife Laura and their daughter; Caroline. Their daughter Berkeley and her husband James Bohner have one daughter, Brynn, and are expecting in October. Their son Jeff is in his second year at Film School at NYU.