Miller’s Approach Simply Succeeds

There are a few things Tustin football Coach Myron Miller knows each morning when he wakes up. Among them: He will eat meat with every meal and his outfit will consist of a pair of football shorts and a T-shirt.

Miller, 53, has owned two suit coats--one of which he bought when he interviewed for the Tustin job in 1995.

“That’s the last time I wore it,” he said.

With this no-frills approach and a double-wing offense, Miller has turned the Tillers into one of the most ostentatious teams in the county this season.

Tustin, which won a total of four games in the 1993 and 1994 seasons, finished 4-6-1, 3-1-1 in the Golden West League last year, Miller’s first at the school. The long league defeat came against tonight’s opponent, Servite, 49-0.

This season, the Tillers are 6-0, 1-0 and defeating their opponents by an average of nearly 32 points.

The key is simplicity--run just a few plays, but do them so well that if your opponent’s defense fails to guess exactly which one you’ve called, there’s no way it can compensate after the snap.

Simplicity. Boil everything down to the bone--that’s what matters.

“I’m not a real disciplinarian about the clothes you wear and how you cut your hair, what I call the ‘small stuff,’ ” Miller said. “They have to be on time and they can’t miss practice and they have to give me the best effort they’ve got.”

Simplicity. In the 1970s, after his second push to make the U.S. Olympic wrestling team failed, Miller got into the bar business and by the 1980s owned nine bars throughout the county.

But managing nine bars got a bit complicated so Miller sold all except one--The Helm in Costa Mesa.

Simplicity. Want something done? Do it yourself.

At Costa Mesa High, where Miller led the Mustangs to the 1993 Southern Section Division VIII final, he decided the team needed a better weight room.

“If you go through the red tape of the bureaucracy of the school, all you get is ‘no,’ ” he said.

So Miller took his hammer down to the school to make the improvements and also donated some money for new weights.

For Miller, weight training is the most important part of his program. The most interesting part, however, is his archaic offense.

Miller picked up the double wing from Bloomington Coach Don Markham. In 1994, Bloomington set a national scoring record with 880 points and won the Southern Section Division VIII championship using the double wing.

Miller served under Markham from 1986-88 at Ramona High before taking over the program in 1989 and leading it to a Southern Section Division IV title in his first season as a head coach.

Miller has made small adjustments to the offense he took from Markham.

“I get talked into throwing the ball a little bit more,” he said.

The Tillers average about 105 yards a game passing, mostly done to keep the opponent’s defense off balance.

The success of the double wing depends on the skill of its multiple running backs. Tustin has three backs averaging at least 11 yards per carry--DeShaun Foster, Greg Cavral and Dominique DeGrammont.

Foster leads the team with 821 yards in 68 carries and 16 touchdowns. Another primary back, Brandon Lambert, has 606 yards in 67 carries and 10 touchdowns.

“The talent pool here at Tustin is big,” he said. “I always believed that they should have won.”

Miller knows a diamond in the rough--at Costa Mesa he led the Mustangs to their first outright Pacific Coast League title in 1993 with only 22 players.

Miller said he finds many students at Tustin with challenges in their lives. Miller’s father, a salesman and event promoter who was constantly on the move, died in a car accident when Miller was 10.

Throughout his playing days at Van Nuys Grant High, Los Angeles Valley College, Occidental College and San Fernando Valley State College (Cal State Northridge), Miller found solace in football and wrestling.

“I was pretty defiant and hostile, but my coaches always stuck by me,” he said.

He has tried to pay back the favors.

When Miller coached at Costa Mesa, his five-bedroom home was a hang-out for players. He and his wife, Kathy, have extended their home--already full with four kids of their own--to two players who have needed a place to stay in recent years. He said both situations were approved by the Southern Section.

“Whatever it takes to help that kid get through school, if they’ll meet me half-way, I’ll do anything for them,” he said.