1,025 wins and 45 Years Later, Oregon Tech Basketball Coach Danny Miles Spends Last Season Saying a Long Good-bye
KLAMATH FALLS, OR: After more than 1,025 wins spanning 45 years as the coach of Oregon Tech men’s basketball team, Danny Miles is facing a new milestone at the end of this season: retirement.
Coach Miles is a sports legend in Klamath Falls, Oregon, home of the Oregon Tech Hustlin’ Owls. The majority of Oregon Tech’s nearly 4,800 students are at its southern Oregon campus, a rural area of the state that includes views of Mt. Shasta and the Cascades, proximity to Crater Lake, and the Pacific Northwest’s only public polytechnic university. Earlier this month Miles, who has coached at Oregon Tech since 1970, was a VIP at Klamath Falls’ Snowflake Parade, proudly distributing basketball collector cards printed with players’ faces and stats, both Men’s and Women’s Teams. It’s a special year at Oregon Tech, as it balances bidding farewell to Coach Miles with the emotions of trying to hold on to him as long as possible.
Miles’ tenure with the Owls has lasted from President Nixon’s administration through that of the nation’s first African American president. That’s quite a run. Coach Miles is legendary within National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) circles from leading the Hustlin’ Owls to three Division II national championships to garnering more wins than any men’s basketball coach in the nation, save two. The 78-year old NAIA is a governing organization of small athletics programs dedicated to “character-driven intercollegiate sports,” with 60,000 student-athletes as the focus of their mission. Coach Miles’ hundreds of players over four and a half decades, known as “Danny’s Boys,” admire him as a fair and fatherly taskmaster, as well as a mathematician of sorts. Danny Miles uses a sophisticated algorithm, called the Value Point System, to determine each game’s starters, based not just on points scored but on assists and other variables that add up to working as a team player. This is more than a strategy to win games, it also grooms collaborators who know that group engagement builds winning outcomes, whether on the court or in corporate America.
And this mathematical approach
with a heart has achieved some pretty great results by any measure: 1,025 wins, 3 National Championships (2004, 2008 and 2012), 4 National Finals, 14 conference championships, 5 Final Four appearances, and 17 national tournament appearances, in addition to the untold miles racked up across the Pacific Northwest and the nation in buses, mostly, and often in the type of road conditions that would intimidate the toughest long-haul truck drivers. The Hustlin’ Owls basketball team plays home games in Danny Miles Court, named after the Coach in 1995, on the Oregon Tech campus in Klamath Falls.
“As a community, I think we’re probably having some pre-separation anxiety when it comes to Coach Miles,” said Chris Maples, Oregon Tech’s president. “Danny has exemplified all of the best attributes of a coach and built teams of scholar athletes who have gone on to be very successful engineers, marketers and entrepreneurs. He’s more than an athletic coach, Danny is a life coach. We hear this constantly from former players who still consider themselves Danny’s Boys.”
The kudos have been many for Danny Miles over his decades in basketball. Besides being named NAIA National Basketball Coach of the Year in 2004 and 2008, Miles was awarded the National Association of Basketball Coaches Coach of the Year in 2012 and was named the national winner of NAIA’s Champion of Character award for all sports in 2009. Miles was also honored as A.T. Slats Gill All-Sports Coach of the Year (2004) and has been named Conference All-Sport Coach of the Year on four occasions. In 2013 Miles earned the DNA Award at the Oregon Sports Award show, while receiving the 2013 Guardians of the Game Pillar Award for Advocacy from the National Association of Basketball Coaches (NABC). Nominated in 2013, Miles is currently a Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame nominee. This past April (2015), Coach Miles received the John Wooden Keys to Life Award from Athletes in Action at the group’s Final Four breakfast, held in conjunction with the NCAA Division I men’s national tournament.
Earlier this year, Maples did a national search for an Associate Head Coach, with the idea that this person might be Danny’s successor. It had to be someone who could follow in the footsteps of a legend and take the team to its next era of new milestones, more wins, the same focus on the student as athlete and the necessity for success in both realms. Oregon Tech believes that it has found the right coach: former Danny’s Boy Justin Parnell, who played for the Hustin’ Owls from 2008-2010 and was an NAIA First-Team All-American in 2010 for Tech. Parnell previously held assistant coaching positions for Oregon Tech during the 2010-11 and 2012-13 Men’s Basketball seasons before he worked in alumni relations for the Oregon Tech Foundation.
With more than half the season still to go and a record of 8-3, Coach Miles remains his focused self, blowing his whistle, waving his hands, and teaching lessons that will stay with his Boys for years to come, including always knowing when to pass the ball.
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