By GREG MENGELT
He also joins an exclusive list of state championship coaching legends like Bill Green, Jack Keefer, Bill Harrell and J.R. Holmes.
Just in his early 40s, Miller has a long coaching career ahead of him, if that’s the path he continues to choose. Miller will likely have choices to make in the future as a rare basketball coach who holds a doctorate in medicine and a state championship trophy.
Not only did Miller lead the Pioneers to their first semistate and state championships in program history in March, he did it without a superstar. He did it with a team few expected to compete for a regional title, much less a state championship. And he did it by being the underdog three times in the postseason (usually against teams with rich histories of postseason success and/or featured future Division 1 stars).
With last Saturday’s 62-49 win over Central Noble in the Class 2A state title game, Miller, who played collegiately at Southern California and Eastern Kentucky, joins a list of local and state legends and it could be argued that his coaching job was the best of the all the local coaches to win a state championship.
Miller is also winning at life. He’s married to his wife, Danielle, who he’s known since they went to grade school together, and has four children ranging from 13-year-old to a 1 year.
Dr. Miller, who was the Courier-Journal Coach of the Year in 2020 after he led Providence to 18 wins and a sectional championship in his rookie season before the remainder of the postseason was canceled by Covid-19, graciously sat down with Greg Mengelt for a 1-on-1 interview Wednesday.
Here’s what Coach Miller had to say about his career and his team’s championship run:
Q: You have your M.D. So how did you wind up in coaching?
MILLER: “I went to medical school at the University of Louisville for four years. I coached a couple years here at Providence while I was doing my undergrad. I got my M.D. and was going to do sport medicine. I was doing my residency at Frazier Rehab, and for whatever reason, I guess the Good Lord had other plans for me. Growing up, my mom’s a nurse and my dad’s a dentist and they always encouraged me to go that route, but basketball’s always been in our blood as well. I thought I’d either be a doctor or coach basketball … but I never really became a doctor, never practiced. A few years ago, after I had gotten done at Floyd, I reached out to one of my mentors from medical school. I was like, ‘You know, I need to get back on that horse and finish my residency and get back into that.’ It wasn’t a week later, this position opened up and my buddies all called me and wanted to give this a shot and we need you to be the head coach. That was a real crossroads in both my profession and my personal life.”
Q: Of course, you were a star on some really good Providence teams. How did you end up the head coach at your alma mater?
MILLER: “When then job came open — I had been at Floyd Central High School over there with Todd Sturgeon and Greg Walters and Tom Gohmann, a great player here at Providence back in the 90s and a family friend of ours. Once (former head coach Lou Lefevre) went up to Tipton High School, our staff disbanded, went different directions. I ended up landing at Floyd Central for a 5-year stretch there, a really good stretch. I was grateful to have the opportunity to learn from Todd and Walters over there. Of course, I’ve been very fortunate to have learned from Coach Lefevre during his stint here. Once this position opened up, Lance Stemler, Dan Block, Brad Denman and a few others reached out and asked what I thought about doing this together. A group of guys who had a lot of history together. We knew that we’d be a good fit coaching together. We said, ‘Yeah, let’s go for it.’ We already had our core group of staff in place. From there, we’ve been fortunate to build an even more comprehensive staff.”
Q: Coming into the season, did you see your team as a state championship-caliber team? Being honest, I didn’t.
MILLER: You know what, coming into the season, we had to throw some of these boys to the wolves over the summer. They responded. They stepped up. Especially some of our younger guys. … Over the summer, who cares if you win or lose? You’re trying to learn and grow. Kids are trying to learn their new roles after departures of some key seniors, some leadership and a lot of experience, but we still felt like we had some really good kids coming back, so we had a chance to do something here. That belief really started for our coaches over the summer as our guys were battle-tested, playing in the Kentuckiana league that Matt Denison puts on. Matt faced us up with some top-tier 4A schools of Southern Indiana and of Louisville. That really, I think, battle-tested our boys. Then we went over to Louisville Central High School where Doug Bibby runs something and they put us against several top-tier teams, not only in Louisville but in the state of Kentucky. Then we went over to Bellarmine and faced some great teams over there, then went up to Indianapolis and faced more. We took a lot of losses over the summer, but we were doing it most of the summer without Casey Kaelin, Max Beatty and Grant Seebold as they played out their baseball season. Then they came on board with us the very last week of the summer after our other guys had just been facing high-level competition. When we had those boys join us in the last week at Indy, we just played really well when everyone came into together. That’s when, as a coaching staff, we started to realize this group has a chance to do something. We still have some improving to do, no doubt, and we didn’t have the superstar team or have (players who are) 6-8, 6-7, 6-6. We didn’t have any of that. We go 6-3 and below. Most of our guys were 6-foot and below. But they showed a real willingness to battle over the summer. They played so hard, and even though we weren’t winning a lot of those early games, we were competitive with really good teams. It didn’t matter if we won or lost, our guys would show up and play just as hard every game. Then they started sharing the ball on the offensive end and playing very unselfish team basketball. That gave us a real hope and belief that we could be a good team. Did that mean we were going to necessarily win a state championship? Is that something that was on our aspirational list as a coaching staff that we would talk to our players about? No. That was not. What we did talk to them about was becoming a really good team and continue to improve. … Did I ever imagine this? No. But did I think it was possible? Yeah. You just have to live in the moment. As the cliche goes, one game at a time.”
Q: At what point in the season did you see that you had a team that had a chance to be the best in Class 2A?
MILLER: “We didn’t really start to hit our stride until the end … probably into February we started playing really good ball. We were playing well in December and January, but we were far from hitting our stride. We didn’t have everybody playing on all cylinders … “
Q: So what happened? How do you go from losing to Rock Creek and beating Christian Academy by a point to beating three of the best teams in Class 2A in Linton-Stockton, Eastern Hancock and Central Noble and winning a state championship? You also beat Southwestern by a point in the first game of January then beat them by 24 in the sectional championship in March. That’s quite an improvement over a couple months.
MILLER: “We lost some games, more than one — two or three or four even — that we were not real pleased about our performance. And, quite honestly, we needed to get better. We needed to learn … the players needed to learn and grow and the coaching staff needed to learn more about our team and what we needed to do better and improve upon, as a team and as a whole. I think the players and coaches alike took some of those disappointing losses and said, ‘We’re not going to waste these losses. We’re going to get something out of them, we’re going to learn something from them and we’re going to improve. This team was able to develop a mentality that, when we lost, we were not happy. We were pretty fired up about it when we’d lose. But we weren’t going to let it fracture us or pull us apart. We weren’t going to hang our heads about it. We were going to go to work and use it to grow stronger and more united and become a better team. We were able to make our run not because of wins. We were confident because of our losses. We knew we could learn from our mistakes. We identified our weaknesses and the boys were eventually able to understand what their strengths were and started to play to those.”
Q: One of those strengths was obviously balance and teamwork. It was amazing how many different players stepped up and made huge plays during your postseason run. You played Joey Hart in the regional and Connor Essegian in the state championship. No offense to your players, but you don’t have anybody like that. How was your team able to overcome that type of talent?
MILLER: “We were so battle-tested. This area is really tough, small schools and big schools alike. There are a lot of good teams around here and when you’re battle-tested that way and just keep maintaining a tough persistent and positive attitude, then you can find yourself with an opportunity to become a really good team. When you face good teams so consistently, you have to find ways to get better. I would credit the caliber of teams we have to face on a weekly basis around here. The caliber of coaching and players that we have to face, I credit our area and the caliber of play and coaching around here. That’s a big reason for our success. Look at our schedule. We play some really good teams and we beat some real big boy programs. That gave our guys belief. (Class) 2A’s got some really good teams, and we played a lot of them, but we also played really good teams throughout the season. Our guys were prepared for it.”
Q: Sure, if you can beat Jeffersonville and New Albany and take North Harrison to the buzzer, you can probably compete with anybody in Class 2A.
MILLER: “You feel confident against everybody you’re going to play in 2A. You really do. How many 2A teams face teams the caliber of New Albany and Jeff and Floyd Central? These are things our boys know. If they can compete with New Albany and Jeff and Floyd, they can be competitive with anyone in 2A. Even the best of the best and that’s what we had to go through. I think we were underdogs in every step on the way. We believed every step on the way, but the experts had us losing to Southwestern, had us losing to Linton, the Forest Park game was probably a toss up, Eastern Hancock underdogs, Central Noble underdogs. I think a lot of people thought we were going to get whipped. We respected all of those teams immensely, but our boys had a very strong belief in themselves and in each other.”
Q: So let’s talk about Saturday. Clearly your team was intimidated by Central Noble. You were up 16 at the end of the first quarter and 11 at halftime. You had a 20-point lead in the fourth. When did it start to sink in that you were going to be a state championship coach and you had brought the first state championship to your alma mater?
MILLER: “In the fourth quarter, there was a timeout. I looked up and there were three or four minutes remaining, somewhere in there. Each timeout, we were focused on what was going well, what wasn’t going well, and we were focused on that. You’re aware of the time and situation but you’re thinking about what we need to do to win. It wasn’t until after the timeout. During each timeout, you look at time and situation. As the boys were walking out on the floor, it hit me, ‘We’re winning by 21. Geez, we’re going to win this.’ I just said it to myself, like, ‘Huh, we might win.’ Our players and coaches started to exude it more when it went under two minutes. I was like, ‘Oh, no, no, no. We’re just getting started.’ Once that buzzer goes off, then we can celebrate.”
Q: Even you couldn’t have imagined that you could beat that loaded Central Noble team like that.
MILLER: “No. That was a great team. A student said to me this week, ‘I thought (Central Noble) was going to be really good.’ They were really good. You’re 28-2 and top two in the state and got one of the top scorers in the history of the state. In the history of the state. Going to Wisconsin. And another kid who was really good, a 6-3 kid who could shoot it. Long, good athletes. Once you get through it, you’re glad that you had to go through the gauntlet. It’s nice in retrospect that we had to earn it.”
Q: I guess Saturday helped you realize that coaching was the right path for you all along.
MILLER: “Yeah, yeah. There are moments in our lives that bring some clarity or reassurance that you’re on the right path, hopefully. That you’re doing what the Good Lord wants you to be doing. That’s not always evident in our lives. So when you have some moments like this, like I said, it brings some clarity, some affirmation, some reassurance that hopefully we are where we’re supposed to be.”
Q: So I assume you expect to win it every year now, right?
MILLER: “I’m not under the disillusion that state championships are going to come easy. Our goal this year was to keep improving to give your team a shot to win a sectional championship. That was it. And that will be our goal next year, as well. Keep improving and hope you get some big wins along the way. For me, at least, that’s the name of the game every year. Win a sectional, everything else is icing on the cake along the way. Our standard is you maximize your abilities and you keep getting better.”
Q: So now you join local legends like Jim Shannon and Brandon Hoffman and Doc Nash as local coaches who led their teams to a state championship. What does it mean to you to be on that list?
MILLER: “It’s a small list and that’s not lost on me. It’s hard to do. We’ve been fortunate in this school to have so many great athletics programs across the board, boys and girls alike. Obviously we have strong theatre and other extracurriculars. Academics is what we focus on the most, but since we’re talking about athletics here, we’ve had a lot of success. Unless you’re really in the world of Indiana high school basketball, it’s so stinking hard to win a sectional. Then if you can do that, can you win a regional against four sectional champs? Everybody’s trying to do this. Everybody is putting forth such great effort and they’re really good teams. We have really talented teams and coaches in this state. We have communities that really care about the success of their basketball programs. To be able to accomplish something like this for our boys, for our program, for our community, the awesomeness of that is not lost on me. We have so much gratitude for all these experiences and gratitude toward the people who helped make it all possible. I can’t tell you the number of coaches, who people would say are our rivals, who reached out at some point. Dang near all the area coaches reached out at some point. Floyd and Clark and beyond. Whether it was support or advice. There were some real practical applications that helped us win this. I believe that. I think I’ve thanked all of them for it. Every area coach who has reached the semistate or beyond has reached out to me and given me some valuable advice. I don’t know how often that happens around the state, but here, I know it happens, because it just happened. I can’t tell you how thankful I am for that. I also gives me a great source of pride for Southern Indiana high school basketball. We go to battle each other from November through March, but when it’s not directly against each other, we are really pulling for each other. That’s a real thing. I have such respect for the programs and the coaches in our area. That’s a very special thing.”
Q: At Providence, you kind of have to win a state championship just to keep up with the other teams these days, don’t you?
MILLER: “To that point, we had some boys in our program who were on the baseball team who just won the state championship last year. Of course, they did in 2016, as well. They just won it past June. Several of our key contributors — Kaelin, Beatty, Seebold — those are two of our starters and another key guy. With those guys getting that done then we have several guys, as well, from our soccer program. Quentin Hesse is one of our key guys and one of the key guys on the soccer team, along Charlie Scott and Jackson Kaiser off the varsity roster. There are more JV guys who are coming up. Some of those boys and their parents, from both baseball and soccer, said all right, it’s time to do this in basketball. I kind of laughed and said, ‘It’s Indiana.’ It’s tough to win a championship in any sport. It’s obviously a great challenge and a great accomplishment, but you do realize that this is Indiana and every program in the state of Indiana is trying to win a state championship in the sport of basketball. If you go to Florida or Texas or Ohio maybe, everybody is trying to win in football. In Indiana, everybody’s trying to be competitive and win in basketball. So to win in basketball, understand it’s another level of challenge to do it in basketball. I do believe that several of these boys have a belief coming in that a state championship is not something that’s unreasonable to accomplish. I do believe it helped the boys having that experience of success in baseball and soccer, sports that had won a state championship. They believed this was possible, maybe naively so.”
Q: It always takes a good staff to make a long tournament run. Tell me about your coaching staff.
MILLER: “We started here together three years ago, myself, Coach Stemler, Coach Block, Coach Denman. Since then, we’ve had some other great guys join us, like Chris Carruthers, Mike Gosman, Bart Makowsky, who’s a theology teacher here and does a lot of things for our program, in addition to basketball. We’ve really been able to round out a really comprehensive and complete staff. Everyone really kind of has their area that they excel in and they compliment each other. … Very fortunate to have a such a great group of guys and we have a lot of history, too. Block and I, we played together here at Providence. Lance and I coached together here under Coach Lefevre and had some really good teams, went to semistate and ranked top five in the state. (We) had some really good groups.”
Q: Congratulations, Coach! And thanks for your time. Anything else you’d like to say about your season and your accomplishments?
MILLER: “One thing that I think allowed our team to have success this year that you won’t find on paper, and watching us throughout the season it may not have been evident either, but by the end of the year, our guys had developed this belief that was an unwavering belief that they could be competitive and win, even against all odds in some cases. Our boys, they battled through adversity in season and even postseason. We didn’t have easy games. I just want to credit our boys. One of our themes this season was positivity. I think the positivity went hand-in-hand with that belief. They knew they were underdogs many steps of the way, from the outside looking in, but I don’t think they ever felt like underdogs. I think that’s a credit to these boys’ belief in each other. I’m just so proud of them for being unwavering in their belief, even though we didn’t have superstar power across the board. They were willing to embrace other players’ success on this team. Our guys truly root for each other. They never cared who got the credit. We had guys who might be averaging four points a game and they might have 12 points in key games, key moments. That was because they had belief in themselves and their teammates have belief in them. They would tell each other, ‘You’re going to have a big game today.’ I think that’s pretty unique where you have boys pulling for each other the way the coaches are pulling for the kids. They were building each other up the way coaches usually build players up. They did that with and for each other. I think that’s why this team was able to have success against teams that, on paper, were probably the teams that were supposed to have the upper hand. We’re grateful we got to go through such tremendous teams. They earned it. We played teams that were Sagarin ranked No. 4, No. 3 and No. 2, and at the end of it, they’re No. 1.
“One last thing I want to say. I was talking about our community. We had so many former players, like Juston Betz, who’s at Bellarmine, and a multitude of other guys. Former coaches would come back and that was just so awesome for our boys to experience. You could tell it really meant a lot to them and to the former players.”
“Last thing I’ll mention, my dad, Larry Miller, a ’68 grad. He and his buddy, Gary Leonard, who is also a ’68 grad, they’d come to every practice, every game. So many people in our community have said how special this was to them, for people outside of our program. That’s probably what’s most gratifying. To know how special this is to others in our community. We realize there were other Providence teams that were really good and were just as deserving and worthy of this. There were also teams that we were able to beat that were worthy of this as well. Were we picked to do this? No. Not at all. But our guys happened to be playing their best basketball at the end of the season, they believed in each other and we were fortunate enough to have things go our way this time … and we’re grateful.”
