Basketball Preview | The Price of Inheritance

It’s the break of a new day at the Palestra — that’s what your eyes tell you, anyway. By a little after 7 a.m., sunlight beats in through the arena’s stained glass panes, the hardwood gleams with a fresh wax job from hallowed building custodian Dan Harrell, and a few players have already taken the court to get up some jumpers.

In the gym’s far corner, coach Glen Miller pushes a wheeled crate of balls towards the sideline, decked from head to toe in his blue Penn sweatsuit.

“You want the program to have high standards,” he will contend later. “Good losers lose often.”

The remaining stragglers funnel out of the locker room to complete the shooters’ symphony. Whish. Clang. Clang. Clang. Whish. Whish. Whish.

Success and failure, it seems, come in bunches, as one high-arcing offering after another rotates towards the championship banners overhead. And back down again.

Leaning on the crate, Miller stops, gathers himself, and keeps pushing, looking out on the world he inherited.

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Inheritance. That’s the rub, isn’t it?

In his first season, Miller led the Quakers to 22 wins, an Ivy title, and a riveting near-miss against Texas A&M; in the opening round of the NCAA Tournament. Only one coach in Penn history had amassed as many victories in his first year on the job. His name was Chuck Daly.

But Miller inherited that loaded roster, fresh off of back-to-back Ivy titles, from current Temple coach Fran Dunphy, who brought 10 Ancient Eight crowns to the Palestra in 17 years before migrating across town in 2006. Did Miller really deserve credit for guiding the brainchild of his beloved predecessor? (In a word: yes, according to a current upperclassman.)

More to the point, he inherited a position unique in the pantheon of college sports: as head of a program with a hoops history matched by few, in a conference more likely to uncover a John Nash than a Steve Nash.

“There’s a lot of responsibility, high expectations,” Miller said. “I have a saying: Embrace the struggle.”

It’s a noble, if nebulous, sentiment. Since arriving in 2006 with 13 years of head coaching experience at Connecticut College and Brown — and before that, seven years of work as an assistant at the University of Connecticut, his alma mater — Miller has produced a 45-45 record.

His rousing opening act was followed by a predictably middling second season, when a lineup rife with underclassmen scrapped to a 13-18 record and a third-place conference finish.

And then there was last year. The raw numbers were grim: 10-18 overall, sub-.500 Ivy mark for the first time since 1991, and a winless Big 5 slate.

The anecdotal evidence was at least as damning: nagging injuries, restless home crowds (including one youngster gracing the Palestra with a paper bag mask), and four players — including second-leading scorer Harrison Gaines — choosing to leave the program for reasons other than graduation.

“Sadly, more with college sports than with pro sports, it’s kind of the culture that it comes down to the coach. You’re not kicking kids off the team for not playing well,” said junior forward Jack Eggleston, who acknowledged that the team “heard some rumblings” about Miller’s job security after last season. (Despite this, he said, most deemed a termination “improbable,” reasoning that a contract buyout for Miller’s remaining two years was unlikely in this economic climate.)

“It can’t all be on Coach Miller,” Eggleston continued. “I would like to play better as a team to make him look better, so he’s not getting blamed for things that were, for the most part, out of his control.”

Sophomore point guard Zack Rosen believes that the shared experience of last season has caused the Quakers to rally around their coach and teammates.

“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” he said.

Senior big man Andreas Schreiber agrees that while some of the adversity facing the team, in general, and his coach, in particular, has been “personal,” it’s now incumbent upon the team to “prove everybody wrong.”

Miller, for his part, likens the circumstances to those of another local team with a demanding home crowd.

“Sit at a Phillies game,” he said. “They won a World Series last year. I was at a World Series game this year, and you hear some boos, you hear some disgruntled fans.”

Such is the burden of triumphs past, the ominous specter of those banners flapping in the Palestra’s upper ethers.

“That’s why I took the job,” Miller insisted.

That’s inheritance.

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Pavlov and Seinfeld, with a hint of compliment-averse boss.

That’s the crude, Twitter-ready Glen Miller coaching profile.

After a win? Lighter practices and movies on the bus during road trips. Otherwise? Bruising workouts and Greyhound game-tape sessions by moonlight on I-95.

“If you lose, everything sucks. If you win, everything’s great,” Eggleston summarized. “What are you gonna do?”

Beyond this bit of psychology, a little healthy sarcasm — gentle or otherwise — lies at the heart of Miller’s day-to-day motivational approach.

“You’re going to have some serious times, [but] you have to have a light side,” Miller said. “They kid back with me.”

The coach’s quips “usually involve profanity,” Rosen added, with a grin, “which is good.”

A recent (and printable) example, according to Eggleston, came when a player failed to hustle after a loose ball in practice. Miller turned to the offender and bellowed, “I bet if that was a beer keg, you would have got it!”

Members of the team say they appreciate the impetus behind the ribbing — though a deadpanning Schreiber clarifies that “[as] a foreigner, I don’t really know anything about sarcasm.”

More difficult to stomach, at times, are Miller’s blunt assessments about team or individual progress.

Though players claim to appreciate the honesty — as well as Miller’s consistent open-door policy — his appraisals are sometimes “a little more honest than you’re ready to hear,” Eggleston acknowledges.

“He has a worry or a fear about people getting their egos too big,” Eggleston said. “He gave me a compliment from the scrimmage [two weeks ago]. He said, ‘You did a good job fronting the post.’ I said, ‘Thanks, coach.’ We’re sitting there for another second. He says, ‘I don’t want you to think you played well or anything, but you also did a good job hedging on screens.’”

Assistant Mike Martin, who played for four years at Brown under Miller, says the coach’s mentality can best be explained as a disciplined emphasis on the game’s finer points.

“Since I’ve known Coach Miller, when I was 17 in high school, he’s been the same guy,” Martin said. “He’s an intense coach who values the details.”

Sounds something like the first man Miller worked for at the college level, Hall of Famer Jim Calhoun of UConn.

Miller says that Calhoun, who could not be reached for comment, has been “like a father” to him since Miller’s days as an assistant from 1986 to 1993, and confirms that the two have remained in close contact to this day.

When UConn was assigned to play its opening round NCAA Tournament game at Philadelphia’s Wachovia Center in March, Miller convinced his former boss to practice at the Palestra.

“The best thing that Coach Calhoun brings to the table is he never has a bad day, never has a lazy day,” Miller said. “I think he saw me as somebody who had a good basketball IQ, who was highly committed to the team.”

It was at UConn that Miller first had the opportunity to hone his oft-praised craft with the clipboard — long-time Saint Joseph’s coach Phil Martelli remarked last year, “I would like to one day coach offense the way Coach Miller coaches offense.”

Eggleston asserts that Miller “won the Columbia game for us” last season by drawing up a last-second inbounds play on the fly to free up then-senior Kevin Egee for a buzzer-beating three-pointer.

With regards to personality, Miller’s players employ a term often saddled to Calhoun: fiery.

“He’ll grab a technical,” Schreiber said. “He’s the kind of person where if his back’s against the wall, he’s a much better coach.”

And fans and players alike have grown accustomed to the ritual removal of Miller’s sportcoat during particularly tense moments in games — a practice Miller defends with a smile.

“Coach’s apparel is not appropriate for the activity a coach has in the game,” he joked. “Really, we should all be wearing sneakers and sweatsuits.”

And when the situation calls for it, Miller has a flair for the occasional locker-room oration. It’s hardly “Knute Rockne before every game,” according to Eggleston, but the well-placed speech can serve its purpose.

“There are definitely times,” he said. “He pulls it out when he needs to.”

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It’s after practice, gym clearing out.

Today was a good day — good enough to let the gang slip out before 10, in the Pavlovian tradition.

Miller settles into a seat in the stands behind the Penn bench and leans back.

“I think a lot of coaches would love to be in this position,” he says. “We’re in a better position than we were last year.”

And he’s probably right. Four starters return, the roster has no major injuries to speak of, and even after two rough years, Miller has secured a 2010 recruiting class that one publication unofficially ranked as the 25th best in the nation.

“We’re trying to build back up to a championship level,” he says. “There’s a Final Four banner hanging up there.”

After hours of practice, with the players now darting off to class and the crate of balls exiled to a back closet, the well-worn hardwood still retains a shimmer.

Miller glances up at the empty arena.

“Nobody that comes to our games,” he says, “can have a higher expectation than I do for myself.”

His eyes drift down, then up again, towards the window panes.

Indeed, it could still pass for dawn at the Palestra, even a few hours into the morning.

But it’s how the place will look a while later — once darkness has descended on a weekend evening and the ball is hovering over center-court for either side to claim — that will determine the inheritance Miller leaves for the next guy.

Whenever that happens.

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