Enoch Miller was sitting on a Florida beach during spring break when it all sank in.
“I’m watching my wife play in the ocean with my kids, and I was thinking to myself, ‘Literally a year ago, she was on oxygen to walk to the bathroom,’” said Miller. “And I was wondering about my coaching future. But there I was, sitting and watching her healthy and play with my kids. And on Monday when I got back, I had a meeting to pick out our rings.”
Those rings are for Roosevelt’s girls’ team, which won the school’s first basketball title in Miller’s first year as the coach. The Rough Riders ran the table to the Class 5A championship despite not having a senior on the roster — a scrappy, tenacious effort that made Miller the 2023 Denver Post All-Colorado girls’ coach of the year.
Miller spent the previous seven seasons coaching the Frederick boys but stepped away at midseason in 2021-22 in order to care for his wife, Brittany, whose multiple sclerosis amplified the effects of COVID and left her in critical condition at one point. Following was a long rehabilitation at National Jewish Health.
When Miller’s wife recovered, he took the job at Roosevelt, his first time coaching girls. There wasn’t a learning curve.
Roosevelt’s leading scorers were sophomore combo guard Ryanne Bahnsen-Price and freshman forward Kyla Hollier. The Rough Riders used multiple unrelenting presses to break their opponents’ will, and Miller consistently made the right adjustments at the right times as Roosevelt overcame an early deficit to Air Academy in the Great 8, trounced Durango in the Final Four and then wore down Windsor in a 54-44 win in the title game.
Miller said his team’s two losses this past season, to Class 6A Cherry Creek in the season opener (46-29 on Nov. 29) and then Class 4A Riverdale Ridge in the regular season finale (70-57 on Feb. 16) set the table for the team’s championship push.
“We came out of that Creek game saying, ‘We just played one of the best teams in Colorado and we were right there for the first half,’” Miller said. “But we also had a chip on our shoulder and a motivation to get better. It set us up for the season, to just have a healthy fear of losing and to compete hard all the time and not just coast.”
The Rough Riders won 21 games in a row between their loss to Cherry Creek and the shellacking from Riverdale Ridge, in a game where Ravens All-Colorado freshman guard Bri Crittendon torched the normally stingy Roosevelt defense for 34 points.
“We were feeling ourselves too much after winning 21 in a row, and that loss was brewing because through the last couple weeks of the regular season we were kind of sleepwalking,” Miller said. “We needed a slap in the face and a reality check, just to refocus us. And we went out and had the best couple practices we had in weeks after that loss, and that prepared us for the stretch run.”
And now with a title under their belt and everybody back for next year, Miller’s Rough Riders could only be just starting to accumulate hardware.
“If these kids want to put in the work, the sky is the limit for them,” Miller said.
