(Photo by SJSU Athletics)
By Matt Weiner (@MattWeiner20) – MBB Beat Reporter
Director of Basketball Operations Trent Miyagashima comes to grab me from the side entrance of the Provident Credit Union Event Center. Tone hushed, he quickly greets me and takes me through the back entrance because the team is watching film in the bleachers.
I’m there to interview assistant coach David Miller about practice.
Practice? We talkin about practice? Not a game, but practice?
Yes, we are here to talk about practice.
I’m a foreigner in this aspect of the world of basketball while Miller was born into it.
The son of NBA and college basketball assistant coach — and former Los Angeles Sparks color commentator Dave Miller — he was destined to gravitate toward hoops.
“From the day I was born he was bringing me into the gym,” Miller said.
Driblets of sweat blanket his forehead while childhood nostalgia begins pouring out.
“I have a little brother who’s 30. We’d just go to practice every single day when he was at USC. It was my favorite thing.
We’d watch practice, we’d rebound, we’d jump in drills just to pass. Luckily we had a head coach Henry Bibby, my dad’s boss, who’d treat us like his kids so he’d [Miller’s dad]let us be involved.”
Those moments would amount to putting Miller on the coaching carousel.
First stop was coaching Manhattan Beach Middle School in his last year of community college. Next stop was at the University of Arizona, where he was a student manager for three years and a graduate assistant for nearly two, before making his way to Tuscaloosa.
He spent two years at Alabama, one as a basketball analyst and video coordinator and the other as a director of player development. That gave him an opportunity to return home to sunny Southern California, where he spent two years as director of basketball operations at the University of California Santa Barbara. In 2019, he jumped back to his alma mater, University of Arizona and stayed for two years before joining coach Miles and his staff at San Jose State University.
Miller has seen what it takes to be a prominent program and for players to develop into valuable NBA prospects. During Miller’s first go around at University of Arizona, he had the pleasure of working with current Lakers forward Stanley Johnson.
“He was obsessed and I think what separated him at the college level was his love for the game,” Miller said. “You don’t have to ask him to work out. You don’t have to ask him to come in early. He’s texting you.”
Stanley was a top-10 overall pick in the 2015 NBA draft and after pinballing around the league, has found his footing as a crazed lockdown defender on the Lakers. Shutting down James Harden relentlessly on Christmas Day was an accumulation of everything he did when bleachers were empty.
“Someone like Stanley Johnson went harder in practice than games because he knew that’s how you get better,” Miller said.
Miller witnessed the focus, consistency and intensity needed to become successful as a whole. One particular way was by tracking stats for each practice.
“At Arizona we had this thing called the gold jersey. We kept practice stats every single day. We had a manager whose job was to chart every live segment, points, rebounds, steals, assists, turnovers, into a numerical value. The guy at the end of the week who had the highest value won a gold jersey.”
Coaching in college requires one to exist in a world where it’s easier to find an alien than job stability. They are teachers without the luxury of tenure. On the drop of a dime, a phone call could come in and make them start anew all over again.
With that inherent lack of not being able to put roots in a city, comes the experiences and lessons that make you better at your job.
Miller has gathered life experiences and uses it as a guidebook for making players better. He knows what’s going on between the ears for players, especially transfers Trey Anderson and Tibet Gorener.
“My thing to [Anderson and Gorener] is motivation,” said Miller. “You never want to get back to the feeling where you’re sitting on the bench and you have no effect on the game. Here they have a direct effect.”
During the practices I attended, Miller was in two forms.
One finds him with an Expo marker in his left hand and a white board in the other. Like a mad chemist calculating the perfect balance of chemical mixtures and concoctions to build a winning formula.
The other is a man in a red pinnie flying around the court with a fiery exuberance. Giving a little grin after a jump shot or playing aggressive defense.
In these moments you can hear him use a word that’s an epithet in the basketball world. One that immediately sparks anger, if not vengeance.
Soft.
“Earning that trust with guys to know saying soft to get them motivated isn’t an attack and isn’t personal,” MIller said. “That’s something coach Miles and our staff like to say, it’s never personal, we are saying it to get you better.”
Soft is an indictment on a player lacking the killer instinct. A word assigned to describe the player who’s natural instinct is to freeze or flee rather than fight.
Miller has earned the right to use this word because he has put in what he called “sweat equity”.
“If Trey Anderson knows that I’m working him out every day, he knows that we are watching film after practice — watching film after games — he sees how bought in I am to him individually, not just with the team,” Miller said. “When I come to you and say that you are playing soft, that trust is there.”
He uses it as a challenge rather than a put down.
For a player like Gorener, this reigns especially true.
“It’s like ‘hey man you gotta be tougher’. Tibet’s biggest battle is saying ‘I’m not soft’. That’s the knock on Tibet. He’s a great shooter, he’s a finesse player, but can he go get a rebound? Can he guard a big 6-foot-9 inch dude that’s twice the size of him? Can he body him up and actually box him out?”
The bond between Miller and Gorener is a window into the life of college basketball. Miller recruited Gorener to play at Arizona and brought him over when he took the new gig. One man put all his eggs in a 19-year-old basket with the belief that enough preparation could bring out the best of his abilities.