John Miller very nearly didn't make the Wingate basketball team. But once on the roster, he quickly showed the tenacity and determination that would ultimately make him a top high-school coach and father of two extremely successful Division I coaches. 

John Miller ’63’s legendary basketball career nearly imploded before it ever began.

Miller, a standout point guard in high school, was originally recruited to play at Morehead State, at the time a strong Division I team in the Ohio Valley Conference. But when that deal fell through in the summer of 1961, Miller had to scramble to find a college where he could play basketball.

In stepped Wingate Junior College – sort of. Miller heard of Wingate through an alumnus friend and enrolled. Before he left his home in suburban Pittsburgh, his high-school coach offered to write Wingate’s head coach, Bill Connell, a letter on Miller’s behalf.

“Don’t worry about that,” a confident Miller told him. “I’ll make it down there on my own.”

As it turned out, despite being a good athlete and a workaholic, the 5-foot-8 Miller didn’t stand out during tryouts in Sanders-Sikes Gymnasium. He at one point hit 28 consecutive free throws, but Connell was unmoved (or possibly didn’t even see them). And Miller got no chance to demonstrate how he’d run the show as a point guard.

“I got in there and ran up and down one or two times, but I couldn’t really show him the team element and passing the ball,” Miller says.

Back home for Thanksgiving break, he ran into his high-school coach and broke the news. “I got cut,” Miller told him. “There’s no way,” the disbelieving coach responded.

This time, Miller let his old coach write that letter, and once Miller returned to campus Connell approached him about joining the team. A few weeks later, Miller was the starting point guard.

It was a wise move by Connell, who helped spark a coaching career that notched more than 650 victories and four state championships at the high-school level, and sent countless players on to college playing careers.

The most successful Miller basketball progeny are his literal offspring: His two sons now helm major-college programs. The oldest, Sean, has made the University of Arizona a perennial college-basketball power, while the youngest, Archie, is trying to resurrect the fortunes of the once-dominant Indiana University program. Both learned The Miller Way firsthand, living and breathing basketball in Western Pennsylvania’s “first family” of hoops (Miller’s youngest daughter, Lisa, played basketball at Elon).

Wingate was an important step in Miller’s development into a nationally recognized coach.

“I look back at Wingate and just say, ‘Hey, if it wasn’t for those years, who knows?’” Miller says. “I could be working in a steel mill up here some place. It afforded me a steppingstone to sort of get my life right, in order, and move myself on.”

Move on he did, and even in his 70s he’s not slowing down.

Battling polio

Of all the roadblocks Miller had to get past to become a college player and successful coach, perhaps the most daunting occurred when he was just 6 years old. After watching their young son battle a fever for several days, Miller’s parents took him to the family doctor, who recommended they see a specialist in a nearby town.

After a battery of tests, it was determined that Miller had polio. The dreaded disease, which could leave sufferers paralyzed because of nerve damage, shocked Miller’s parents. But they were determined to make sure their son didn’t suffer any long-term effects. Miller’s father, Joe, worked nights at the railroad and took care of his son during the day, rubbing his affected muscles down in a homemade whirlpool bath three times a day.

The treatments worked, albeit slowly. Two long years later, Miller started walking again. Eventually, he was back running around with the rest of the neighborhood kids.

A few effects of polio have begun to show as Miller, 76, has aged, but it has never slowed him down. In fact, it has probably contributed to his legendary work ethic, which he passed on to his four children and countless former players.

I just had that knack of being able to take a guy and get that player to love the game

The unrelenting capacity to outwork his opponents turned Miller from a benchwarmer as a sophomore to the MVP of his high-school league as a senior. It was also the reason he thought making the Wingate team would be a piece of cake, especially because, by the time tryouts rolled around, he had played pickup games against many of the guys who were already assured spots on the team. He knew he could outplay most of them. Getting cut puzzled him.

“That was a devastating blow to my ego,” he says, laughing. “I was playing basketball two or three hours every day in the summer. I was ready to go.”

Once on the team, Miller staked his claim to the starting point guard spot pretty quickly. He ran the fast break efficiently, played lock-down defense and scored when he needed to, often with an overhead precursor to the jump shot.

“What I remember about Johnny Miller the most is he had a two-handed jumpshot, over his head. Two-handed. He shot it that way,” says Wingate teammate Morris “Mo” McHone, mimicking a throw-in in soccer. “Oh yeah, it would go in.”

But Miller was mostly known as a hard-nosed competitor who would simply outwork everyone.

“Johnny was a battler,” says Mike Martin, a freshman during Miller’s sophomore season who would go on to become a junior-college All-American in baseball.

Martin, a 6-foot-1 forward (back in the days when a 6-1 guy could play forward in college), would often take on the smaller Miller one-on-one. “Those were some drag-out games,” Miller says. “He really got after it. He was a fierce competitor.”

That makes two of them. “I’m going to say I got the best of him,” Miller says, adding, by way of explanation, “I was a year ahead of him.”

Family dynasty

Miller never lost that fire. He went on to play basketball and baseball for two years at Pfeiffer College (he had also played shortstop at Wingate), leading the Falcon hoopsters to a 21-7 record his senior year.

After graduating he immediately took a coaching position at a junior high school back in Western Pennsylvania, turning around a program that had won just twice the previous season. Miller took his job seriously, organizing summer practices nearly every day.

That holistic approach to basketball became a hallmark of Miller’s coaching career. Basketball consumed him, and perhaps his greatest skill was infecting young players with that same love of the game.

What Miller really wanted was to be a high-school coach, and in a couple of years he finally got that opportunity, turning Riverside High, a small, rural school in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, into a Goliath killer.

But it was at Blackhawk High School, a few years later, where Miller found his most success. Soon after starting at the school, Miller began holding Saturday-morning training sessions and games for elementary-school kids in the area, and that pipeline of well-trained players helped feed his high-school program for years to come.

At Blackhawk, Miller won 583 games in 29 seasons, claiming four state titles. He coached a dozen or so Division I players and countless others who went on to play small-college ball.

Among those D-I players were his two sons, Sean (University of Pittsburgh) and Archie (N.C. State), who have won a combined 70 percent of their games as major-college head coaches.

Sean learned basketball at his father’s knee. He spent hours dribbling in the family basement or shooting at a makeshift hoop attached to the bleachers as his dad conducted practice. A ball-handling prodigy, Sean and his dad would attend basketball camps around the country, giving one-hour clinics, starting when Sean was in elementary school. Sean would put on dribbling exhibitions that left the audience stunned. “It’s hard to even explain to you the things he could do,” Miller says. “He’s spinning two of them. He’s flipping ‘em behind his back, off his head. We would have them mesmerized.”

Sean got to meet Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, travel with Isaiah Thomas, and appear on The Tonight Show and That’s Incredible. Miller even called the NCAA to see whether the father-son duo could claim appearance fees.

“They didn’t know what to tell me,” Miller says. “They always said, ‘No, you might jeopardize his amateur status.’ The guy’s in third grade!”

The hours of dedicated work it took for Sean Miller to learn to dribble four basketballs at one time paid off as he became a starter for the Pitt Panthers as a freshman and later became a focused head coach, like his father before him and like his brother a few years later.

“He was like a coach by the time he came out of high school,” Miller says of his eldest son. “He was a real floor general. I trained him to have the skills of a Pete Maravich, but not to conduct himself and act the way Pete Maravich does. Sean would never come out there and start jacking around, go behind your back, show you this, show you that. He was just sort of like a quiet assassin.”

Archie Miller, who played at N.C. State, wasn’t quite as certain about going the coaching route. A few weeks after he graduated from college, however, he informed his dad that he would stay in the family business. “It’s all we know,” he said. “I think I’m best fitted for basketball.” Before Indiana came calling in 2017, Archie won at least 20 games five times with the University of Dayton, including one run to the Elite Eight. His older brother has been to the Elite Eight four times.

Tactician and motivator

For both younger Millers, especially Sean, basketball is all-consuming, as it was – well, still is – for their dad. John Miller contrasts his eldest son’s coaching style with that of another successful coach he knows well: his cousin, University of Kentucky head coach John Calipari.

“If I called Calipari and said, ‘Look, you can get on this TV show out in California,’ he’s going to get on a plane and go out there,” Miller says. “You couldn’t get Sean Miller to get on that plane for nothing. He just wants to be in his gym, coach his guys, and do what he’s got to do.”

He gets it from his father. When John Miller began his high-school coaching career, Western Pennsylvania was a football stronghold. The Steelers weren’t the Steel Curtain yet, but Johnny Unitas, George Blanda, Joe Namath and Babe Parilli all came from the area, which would ultimately also spawn Joe Montana, Dan Marino and scores of other star players. Football players were encouraged to lift weights year-round and practice in the spring and summer. And high-school coaches would often have a say in how the middle-school leagues were run. But basketball? It was a winter-only pastime.

Miller made the year-round, hook-’em-early approach a staple of his basketball programs. When he started at Riverside High, Miller opened the gym often in the summer, drove players to the grittier parts of town to play street ball, and even made players part of the work crew for his summertime roofing business so they would develop muscles, character and team unity.

At Blackhawk High School in the mid-’70s, football still ruled, but Miller implemented a “Little Cougars” program at the elementary-school level, followed by the “Highland Jump Shot League” for middle-schoolers. By the time players reached high school, they knew his system backward and forward.

But it wasn’t just an ability to teach the fundamentals and plays that made Miller successful. He was a persuasive motivator.

“I just had that knack of being able to take a guy and get that player to love the game,” he says. “I think that was my forte a little bit. I could take guys and get them to work so hard in the off-seasons, and I got them to really, really love the game.”

His success at Blackhawk, in the middle of football country, is the stuff of legends. Miller won 72 percent of his games in 29 seasons, including eight Western Pennsylvania Independent Athletic League titles and four state championships (plus a loss in the finals one other year). Overall, his teams won 18 section titles, and at one point they had a 111-game section winning streak.

Among the players Miller coached at the high-school or AAU level were Dante Calabria, Danny Fortson, Kenyon Martin and, of course, Miller’s two sons. As head coach of the East squad in the 1996 McDonald’s All-American Game, he also coached NBA legend Kobe Bryant. His teams’ trademarks were relentless defense and incredible shooting. His 1991-92 Blackhawk team averaged 91 points a game.

“As time moved on we became kind of a juggernaut,” Miller says. “We were pretty skilled. My guys could shoot the ball. We’re not going to beat ourselves.”

It all came down to hard work and dedication – the kind Miller’s father employed in order to negate the effects of polio in his young son. The kind Bill Connell demanded of his Wingate players.

Although he retired from teaching and coaching high-school ball in 2005, Miller is as involved in the game as ever. In addition to watching his sons coach, he runs the Drill 4 Skill Academy, which runs training sessions for young players and operates 25 AAU teams, one of which Miller coaches.

Basketball, after all, is his life.

As Miller’s wife, Barb, tells him: “‘Yeah, you're nothing but basketball. Everything else, you can’t do. You’re like the emperor in basketball.”