Archie Miller – A College Basketball Head Coach

People have had many reasons to think highly of Archie Miller but the man is probably most admired for his coaching philosophy. The Beaver County Sports Hall of Famer hails from a family that has nurtured a passion for basketball over several decades.

Most known as a college basketball head coach, Ryan Joseph Archie Miller also played the game albeit not at a professional level. Born in Beaver Fall, Pennsylvania on the 30th of October and in 1978, Mr. Miller as at the time of this writing, is the head coach of Indiana University's Hoosiers men's basketball team. It was sometime in March 2017 that he assumed this position.

Before he started coaching the Hoosiers, he had a long stint as the head coach of the University of Dayton's Flyers. Guiding the men's basketball team from 2011 to 2017, Archie Miller was able to turn around the fortunes of the team for good. His impact was very robust to such extent he became a finalist for 2015's Jim Phelan National Coach of the Year Award. Although instructing the Dayton's Flyers was his first shot as a head coach, it wasn't the beginning of his coaching career.

To the best of our knowledge, he started off as an assistant coach with the Hilltoppers of the Western Kentucky University. This was in 2003. He soon joined the Wolfpacks of the North Carolina State University and then the Sun Devils of Arizona State University from where he moved to Ohio State. He would later serve the Wildcats of the University of Arizona from 2009 to 2011 which was the year he first became a head coach.

Archie's romance with basketball has been traced back to his days in high school. It is known that his father John Miller coached the Blackhawk High School team and, that Archie and his brother Sean Miller both played for their dad. The Hoosiers head coach has alluded to the fact that he learned most of his coaching doctrine from John.

When Archie Miller was set to move on to college, he settled for North Carolina State University and eventually graduated from the institution with a degree in Parks, Recreation, and Tourism. That aside, he played for the Wolfpack and was able to pull off stats ranked among the top 10 in the team's history. Archie was a playmaker for the Wolfpack and his performance earned him a spot on the ACC Championship All-Tournament Team.