Longtime Glen Lake basketball coach Don Miller received the John Wooden Lifetime Achievement Award Sunday in Detroit.
The National High School Basketball Coaches Association (NHSBCA) presented Miller with the award for his leadership and support to basketball in the State of Michigan.
“I read all his books, I read his book before every season,” Miller said.
Wooden is arguably known as the greatest college basketball coach of all time and won 10 national championships in a 12-year period from the University of Central Los Angeles (UCLA) in the 1960s to 1970s.
Miller met John Wooden twice in his life before Wooden died in 2010. First in 1973 at age 23, when he squirreled himself into a Grand Rapids clinic with about 200 other coaches listening to Wooden.
Miller eventually worked up a nerve to ask him a question that changed his life and coaching career forever.
He asked coach Wooden “what’s the difference between handling your players from when you started in the 1950s to 1973?”
Coach Wooden looked at him in front of 200 other coaches and called out Miller, “Young man, you don’t handle your players, you handle animals and pets. You work with your players as equals to make them better. Never say handling your players,” Miller explained.
Miller remembers slinking his way out of the clinic, somewhat embarrassed, but it was a lesson of a lifetime for the young coach.
“It was a lesson of a lifetime. You work together with your players to get better as a team. You don’t handle anybody like their objects. It just kept sinking in and sinking in over my career,” Miller said.
The second time Miller, 50, met coach Wooden was during another speaking engagement in Grand Rapids.
Miller stayed until the end and he slowly made his way to the front. Eventually, Miller found himself one-on-one with Wooden and then Iowa basketball coach Tom Davis for a roughly 20-minute conversation that he will remember forever.
After getting over his nerves, Miller brought up the conversation that happened a few decades ago about handling your players.
Miller remembers Wooden confessing to him that during that time he was writing a basketball book called “Practical Modern Basketball.”
Miller recalls Wooden saying he had a chapter called ‘Handling Your Players’ and that he had to change the title. That book was published a year before they first met in 1973.
“I was off the hook 20 years later,” Miller said.
Wooden died at the age of 99 in 2010.
“I remember one of the things that (Wooden) said that I will never forget. You never celebrate and we will never feel sad ... If we win this game, lose this game, do it in the locker room ... One of the privileges of basketball is to play the game and play your best and not worry about the results ... He had these simple little phrases that helped me along the way,” Miller said.
Only one coach in Michigan receives the John Wooden Lifetime Achievement Award.
Miller coached at Glen Lake for 31 years where he accumulated 523 wins including 14 Northwest Conference Championships, 16 district championships, nine regional championships, six semifinal appearances, Class D runner-up in 1996, and the 1977 Class D State Championship.
Miller was named the Basketball Coaches Association of Michigan (BCAM) Class D coach of the year in 1983, 1984 and 19995.
Miller has been a BCAM allstar coach four times, and led the 1985 intra-state victory over Iowa’s all-stars at Carver-Hawkeye Arena.
He also served on the boy’s basketball all-state selection committee for 10-plus years.
Miller was nominated by the BCAM to be the national coach of the year. In that process, Miller was selected in January 2000 as regional coach of the year covering five states (Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana and Illinois).
Miller was inducted into the Michigan High School Coaches Association (MHSCA) Hall of Fame in the fall of 2006.
Miller is the official photographer of BCAM clinic and hall of fame banquet. Him and his wife of 56 years, Sandy, have two grown children, Josh and Johanna.
Miller was accompanied by two former players at the ceremony as Brad Fosmore and Todd Ciolek made the trip south.
“I never had to go in my wallet,” Miller said.
