Matt Miller, a study in perseverance, seeks new possibilities at Lebanon Valley

Brock Kantrow, a basketball guy through and through, was talking the other day about the life of a college hoops coach – the ups and downs, the ins and outs, the triumphs and disasters.

“It’s a difficult profession, man,” he said in a phone interview.

It’s nomadic and sporadic, and one’s fortunes are attached to the whims of a bunch of 17- to 22-year-olds. What could possibly go wrong?

Before settling into his present post as the athletic director at a community college in his hometown of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Kantrow coached everywhere from high school to Division I, notably serving as an assistant to Perry Clark at Tulane and Miami. So yeah, he’s seen some stuff. And when asked about the lessons young coaches must learn, he started out by cracking wise.

“It used to be, you had to be OK with being poor for a long time,” he said. “It’s changed a little bit now.”

Rosters are in this day and age so fluid (especially at Division I) that coaches have to re-recruit their teams every year. But it’s not just that. The spotlight is brighter. There’s a lot more noise, a lot more attention, a lot more geniuses offering advice from the stands and on social media.

So it comes down to this, in Kantrow’s mind: “The people that survive in the coaching world are the people that persevere.”

Those seeking immediate gratification need not apply, he added. This is a job for grinders, for guys who put their heads down and plow ahead. Who understand that steps cannot be skipped and that patience is a must.

Kantrow is convinced that one of his former proteges, Matt Miller, has the right stuff, and that he will prove as much in his new job as Lebanon Valley’s men’s basketball coach. It is the first collegiate head-coaching position for Miller, 43, who came aboard in May, following the retirement of Brad McAlester.

“They hired the right guy,” Kantrow said.

Everything is possible

Matt Miller, a longtime assistant with experience at multiple college programs, was hired in May as Lebanon Valley College’s men’s basketball head coach, taking over a team coming off a 7-18 season. (Provided photo)

Miller arrives in Annville at a fraught time in LVC history. The Dutchmen were 7-18 last season and have gone 41-84 over the last five. Their last winning season came in ‘20-21, the COVID year, when they went 8-3. The last time they breached the .500 mark for a full season was ‘17-18, when they went 18-10.

Miller has seen some hard times himself. He has served as an assistant on losing teams seven of the last eight seasons – five of those at Mount St. Mary’s (under his friend and former college teammate, Dan Englestad), one at Loyola, Maryland (under Tavaras Hardy), and two at New Hampshire (under Nathan Davis, the former Bucknell coach).

That came on the heels of a stretch in which Miller enjoyed great success as a head coach at two Maryland high schools. And way back when, at the beginning of a career now entering its 22nd year, he was part of a state championship-winning staff, at yet another Maryland school.

“He’s seen the worst of the worst and some of the best of the best,” said Kantrow, under whom Miller played and served as a student assistant at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, over two decades ago. “So he’s very capable of taking something that’s not quite what it’s supposed to be and making it something that is what it’s supposed to be.”

When things go sideways for a program, Miller said, the accent needs to be on development – making sure each individual, not to mention the team as a whole, improves bit by bit, every blessed day. That will certainly be the focus at Lebanon Valley, which has several promising young players, but the task beforehand is building relationships. That’s especially true in a situation like his – and goodness knows, he’s been working at it – but given player mobility it applies to every coach, every season.

The key, Miller said, is “really helping (players) understand what’s good for the program is also good for them. It’s not like what’s good for you and what’s good for the program (are) separate entities. I mean, almost like a Venn diagram – like, here’s what’s good for the program. Here’s what’s good for you. Here’s where we’re meeting in the middle. And it’s because you need them to play for you, and think about that season.”

Between seasons, yes, a coach and a player can huddle and discuss the arc of the young man’s career. But every fall, Miller said, the goal is to get “complete buy-in for that eight, nine months.”

Miller was sitting at the small desk in his office, the one overlooking the court within the Arnold Sports Center, as he said that. He had placed some books on a shelf behind him – both playbooks and books like Bill Simmons’ “The Book of Basketball” and Mark Kriegel’s excellent Pete Maravich biography – but it was clear that moving in was an ongoing process. A large flat screen sat on the floor, still in the box, and on one wall Miller had hung a sign: “Everything Is Possible” – a gift from women’s coach Julia Duggan, who just completed her first season at LVC.

Certainly it seems like something is possible for the men’s team. Three of Lebanon Valley’s top five scorers from last season – guard Giovanni Sejuste (13.8), swingman Reed Melvin (11.6) and guard Demarcus Bandy (10.5) – were freshmen. A fourth, guard Jason Penn (10.3), was a sophomore.

But the Dutchmen were not good at the dirty-work aspects of the game – defense and rebounding. And as Engelstad, now an assistant at Pepperdine, said, “If you don’t do that, it will be hard for you to play for Matt.”

Not for the faint of heart

Miller acknowledged that his background is “really lending to the defensive and rebounding side of the basketball.”

“So,” he added, “those will be key to us as we try to get off to a good start and try to get our guys overachieving early.”

After building his coaching resume through a high school state title and Division I assistant stints, Matt Miller now faces the challenge of turning around Lebanon Valley’s men’s basketball program, which has posted a 41-84 record over five years. (Provided photo)

A native of Washington, D.C., Miller attended Gonzaga College High School, an institution whose alums include Pat Buchanan, the late political pundit, and Pat Conroy, the late author of books like “The Great Santini” and “The Prince of Tides.” More recently, the school has produced Kris Jenkins, hero of Villanova’s 2016 national championship run, and New York Jets offensive tackle Olu Fashanu, who also played at Penn State.

Miller went on from there to St. Mary’s, where Englestad was a teammate and Kantrow the coach his final two seasons – only the first of which Miller played. An ACL tear sustained the summer before his senior year transformed him into an undergrad assistant. And that, Kantrow said, is a tough deal, since Miller was trying to coach guys who had only recently been his teammates. There was no guarantee they would take him seriously, no certainty that he would be viewed in the correct light.

“But he did a heckuva job,” Kantrow said, “and everybody responded to him.”

Miller graduated in 2005 with degrees in economics and public policy, then took a job at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But Englestad roped his buddy into helping him coach the summer-league team from Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, and the following winter Miller joined Englestad as an assistant to Whitman varsity boss Chris Lun.

“I caught myself spending all my time in my cubicle with the Bureau of Labor Statistics working on coaching schemes and drills,” Miller said, “and just understood that my calling was probably more in teaching and coaching.”

His time was well-spent that ‘05-06 season; a defensive-minded Whitman team won a 4A state title, beating Roosevelt 39-38 in the championship game.

“Matt,” Englestad said, “was the architect of that defense.”

Lun, still the coach at Whitman, agreed that Miller’s impact was immediate.

“The kids instantly knew, just listening to him explain stuff, that he knew what he was talking about,” he said. “As an assistant, that’s important.”

Thus bitten by the coaching bug, Miller moved on from his BLS job. He did graduate work while serving as an assistant at Marymount College in ‘06-07, then spent a season as the head coach at Wheaton High School in Silver Spring, Maryland, going 5-17. He wrapped a five-year run at Churchill High, in Potomac, and a four-year stint at St. Maria Goretti, in Hagerstown, around a single season as an assistant at Shepherd College, and it was in those two stops that he really began to establish himself. He went 79-41 at Churchill, 100-42 at Goretti.

Then he was reunited with Englestad at The Mount. And while there were struggles – the Mountaineers went 59-90 in the five years Miller was on the staff – Englestad believes the program was re-routed in the right direction. That was particularly evident when the Mountaineers went 12-11 and made the NCAA Tournament in ‘20-21, losing in the first round to Texas Southern.

The last three years have been even more challenging for Miller. Loyola went 7-25 the season he was there, while New Hampshire was 8-24 and 9-21 in the two seasons he spent on Davis’ staff.

“As an assistant coach, when you’re not getting the results that you want, you kind of feel that you’re not contributing like you want to,” Kantrow said. “So many things are going through your mind that may not be going through your head coach’s mind, and some head coaches listen more than other head coaches do. It can really be a burden when you’re having a bad season. It’s not for the faint of heart.”

Miller believes every experience has been valuable, no matter what the win-loss records turned out to be. From Davis he learned how important it is for the head man to delegate responsibility to his assistants. From Kantrow he had seen how the guy in charge can maximize a player’s potential. And from Lun and Englestad he had learned, way back when, perhaps the most valuable lesson of all.

“I realized,” he said, “I really like this. This is fun. This is great. You actually get to impact lives and help kids, help them graduate.”

So now he’s in Annville, his wife Nataly and young daughter in tow (with another child due in October). Now he’s going to try once more to persevere, in the hope of proving that everything really is possible. Or that something is, anyway.

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Matt Miller, a study in perseverance, seeks new possibilities at Lebanon Valley

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