This year's Assistant Coach-of-the-Year nominees fall into two categories. On the one hand there are the rising assistants. Those showing promise of great things and the future household names in the swimming community. Then there are the "Lifetime" or "Career" assistants, those who tirelessly work in in the shadows of their head coach, happy to serve.Today we highlight Lewis & Clark College's Michael Miller as an Honorable Mention selection for the Lifetime/Career Assistant Coach-of-the-Year. Although deserving, it is a somewhat unlikely award considering that over fifteen years ago, as head coach at Glacier Swim Club, he was told he had eighteen months to live. Today, the swimmers at Lewis & Clark benefit from the same attitude that beat cancer. It's a story, however, best told by head coach Chris Fantz and Senior Matt Yelin.
Nomination from Chris Fantz, Head Coach:
When I came to Lewis & Clark College in 2007, I needed to hire my first assistant coach. During my first few weeks, he contacted me with congratulations and his desire to get back into swim coaching. Michael came to us after more than ten years of what he refers to as his “Cancer Sabbatical.” His diagnosis, now fifteen years distant, necessitated a long time away from the grind and commitment of swim coaching. He was ready to return to the pool deck.
I quickly came to see that Michael, even after surviving three bouts with cancer—one of which has been survived by no other human—often outmatched the rest of us in energy and stamina.
Michael is without question the most generous, compassionate person I’ve ever met. Love and admiration follow him wherever he seems to go and we’re lucky that trail led him to Lewis & Clark. His work with our distance program and our breaststroke squad has given us a great boost in those events. He is a splits guru and a pace fanatic. He has complete authority over pacing with our distance squad and we’ve seen our kids excel through their time here.
Michael approaches all aspects of the profession with utmost care and great focus. He is a committed recruiter who gets to know each prospect personally and can keep immeasurable volumes of data straight in his head.
Within our athletic department, Michael volunteers for nearly any activity when the call goes out. He directed traffic for an inauguration and hosts a table at the Academic Fair. He volunteers to drive vans for other teams to the airport and he has accompanied our golf team to multiple competitions.
He teaches three swimming classes for our PE program and gives each of his students the same care he shows our varsity athletes. When his students or athletes have life problems, he helps them find the resources on campus that meet their needs.
Michael is an ideas guy and an outside-the-box thinker. He ties balloons on each hotel room door handle for our kids at the Conference Championship and I always know he’s been daydreaming about something big when he says, “Coach, what would it be if we....?”
Michael has been and Olympic torch-bearer and is a lifetime member of USA Swimming, both honors his former swimmers sought on his behalf.
As we work another season of collegiate coaching together I am still in awe of the energy for coaching and the compassion for all people that Michael brings to our campus. He has made his home with our program and every one of us is lucky to know him in our lives.
Nomination from Matt Yelin, Student-Athlete:
Although I did not know it at the time, having Michael join our team at Lewis and Clark was an incredible stroke of fortune for our program. Since his arrival, he continues to “wow” us with his truly incredible stores of knowledge and his warm heart and caring personality. He works tirelessly to improve our program and to improve each of us personally. All of this is made more incredible by the fact that he has already been a head coach, and a fairly legendary one at that. Despite the fact that he has coached future Olympians and even carried the Olympic flame for Alaska, he has a remarkable humility and approachability to him. He always has time to talk and is willing to help anyone with any problems they may have.
Michael’s technical knowledge is unsurpassed. He pulls out drills I’ve never even heard of and they are truly useful and helpful. He has an uncanny head for numbers, instantly quoting dates and times from swimmers he had decades ago. During practices he carefully observes everyone and is constantly tweaking and adjusting their stroke. I can’t tell you how many times he has told me to keep my hips up during my breaststroke kick, and he never got impatient or angry, he just kept reminding me until a couple of years later, it finally became fully ingrained in me.
Not only is Michael a fantastic coach, but also a fantastic human being. When he believes in a cause, he does everything he can to see it to success. Because he was diagnosed with cancer at an unusually young age, he has fought tirelessly to lower insurance companies’ minimum age for cancer screening. This carries over into his coaching career as well. During his head coach days, he tripled the size of his swim team in Alaska, and since coming to Lewis and Clark, he has spent hours finding and calling recruits, trying to get our team size and strength up to where we want it. The women’s team is already just about the perfect size, and the men’s team has nearly doubled. Not only has the size increased, but both teams have gotten significantly stronger as well.
