Bill Bowerman: Father of Nike co.

By Matthew Rinaldi, 2028

Published 12/6/2025

Although his company, Nike, is definitely not hidden from society, Bill Bowerman’s journey to founding one of the world’s most famous athletic and running companies is one mostly untold to the masses. Bill Bowerman, co-founder of Nike with Phil Knight in 1964, has many astounding contributions to the innovation of running shoes in making them more practical for different distances of running. 

As a child, Bill Bowerman was very athletically inclined which set him up for his later athletic career in college. He was born in 1911 in Portland, Oregon. He attended Medford High School and later enrolled in the University of Oregon in 1929. There, he started out as a dual-athlete in Basketball and Football, and later added a third in track and field during his junior year at the university. His ability to balance three sports as a collegiate athlete was astounding in itself, and set the stage for a lifelong involvement in sports. Upon graduation from the University of Oregon, Bill Bowerman continued his athletic involvement by coaching high school athletics at Portland and Medford in Oregon, one of which being the schools that he attended, and the other being located in his hometown. 

After a short career in coaching, Bowerman was enlisted in the United States Army during World War II abruptly, and didn’t return to coaching until 1949. This time, however, he replaced his former coach at the University of Oregon, and continued his career coaching at the collegiate level. He continued to coach at the University of Oregon until 1972, and during that time helped create four national collegiate championship teams, as well as many other teams following a similar success. Similarly, Bill Bowerman helped produce several individual famous athletes during his coaching career, including Otis Davis, Jim Grelle, and many others. Many athletes that he worked with received gold medals in the Olympics and broke several American records. 

Upon retiring, Bill Bowerman shifted his time towards the engineering of running shoes, which would eventually evolve into the Nike Company. He successfully invented the first ‘waffle sole’, designed to improve traction while running, among many other inventions to help runners, and even helped produce many athletic records. The Nike Company was founded in 1968, originally titled Blue Ribbon Sports, and was successful due to Bill Bowerman’s keen insight in the proper design of running shoes. The company was originally founded in order to create more advanced, high-quality, and affordable shoes for athletes that had been undiscovered at the time. This mission could be considered a success, as the company created the widely successful and acclaimed Waffle trainers and Cortez shoes, which served as a gamechanger and catalyst for the further development of the running shoe industry. 

Bill Bowerman worked with his company, Nike, until passing away in 1999. Although he may have passed away, his mission and running shoe insight continued to live on, and allowed the company to evolve into the diverse athletic company that we know today, now including clothing and other athletic equipment beyond just shoes. Bill Bowerman’s astounding success in athletics and coaching throughout the earlier years of his life was fame-worthy in itself, yet the true impetus for his success was his founding of Nike and ability to pioneer shoes to improve the running community up to the olympic level.