Head of the Hillmen: Famed Placer football coach Bill Miller dies at 85
He physically wasn’t able to attend Placer High School football games in recent years, but Bill Miller remained connected to what mattered so much in his life: family and football.
Miller mustered the strength each Saturday fall morning to place a call, like clockwork, a retired coaching giant connecting with grandson Joey Montoya, the current Placer gridiron coach of a regional powerhouse. Montoya has never been intimidated by the considerable coaching shadow cast by his grandfather that included scores of championships, but he remains inspired by it.
Miller died in his Penn Valley home Saturday after a long illness. He was 85.
Montoya was there for that last breath. On Monday, he recalled the Saturday calls — the wisdom, the insight, the humor — and the understanding that Miller was forever too important to ever disappoint.
Miller was a masterful motivator. He could get average athletes to believe that they could be good ones, and good ones to believe that they could be great. Along with co-coach Tom Johnson, Placer embarked on one of the region’s most storied football runs, posting a 93-18-1 record from 1972-82, including a six-year stretch of 78-5. Placer won five Sac-Joaquin Section Division II championships from 1975-81, twice finishing as the top-ranked team in the state at D-II by Cal-Hi Sports. The Hillmen went 11-0 during the 1975, ‘77 and ‘80 seasons.
“We lost someone special,” Montoya said. “He was the total package: Incredible father, husband, grandfather, great grandfather, coach, teacher, mentor, friend — everything. We lost a true legend.”
More than just football
Miller’s coaching greatness was never more evident than when he led the Placer girls tennis team to record success. Despite having never played the sport or watched much of it, Miller guided Placer to 12 consecutive league championships and nine section team titles. His tennis record was a remarkable 255-11.
The only thing Miller loved more than his Placer student-athletes over more than 35 years of campus teaching and coaching various sports was his wife of 65 years, Shirley. She was 19 when she met 20-year-old Bill Miller when he played football in the Navy after growing up in Southern California.
“Here’s my grandpa, the big man in the community, and grandma was 4-foot-11 — the backbone — and he knew who the real boss was,” said Miller’s other grandson, Steve Montoya, a Placer graduate and the longtime editor at Maxpreps.com. “He loved her more than anything.”
Program builder and shaved heads
Miller also embraced a challenge. He was the first coach at Servite High in Anaheim, starting in 1958 and kickstarting a program that is now nationally known. Miller was hired to lead that Catholic, all-boys school after Servite administrators saw how he managed and inspired children in church youth sports programs. Miller was paid $100 a month to coach football, basketball and baseball.
After assistant football coaching stints at Anaheim High and at Long Beach State, Miller landed at Placer in 1972. Known as an offensive guru, Miller was hired by principal Jug Covich and paired with defensive-minded Tom Johnson, who later became the school’s principal. The coaches were regional pioneers in implementing year-round strength and conditioning programs.
Placer went from a so-so program to a dominant one.
“Miller changed the way other coaches in the area had to prepare and coach against Placer because he was ahead of the times,” said longtime sports reporter/editor Mike Ray of Gold Country Media. “I’ll tell you what: his teams struck fear in opponents.”
Sometimes they struck fear without helmets. It was tradition for the Miller-coached Hillmen to meet on the eve of summer drills to have their heads shaved. Considering the long-haired times of those days, this was quite a sacrifice to commitment, and those shaved heads often had steam rising from them at the end of the season, punctuated by section championship celebrations that included carrying the coaches off the field.
“Shaving our heads, that was awesome, just great,” said Mike Sabins, who played for Miller, later became Placer’s head coach and is the longtime assistant to Montoya. “We shaved for solidarity, a cool tradition, signifying that we were in this together.”
Sabins added, “Great coach. There were times I couldn’t stand the guy, he pushed us that hard. But he always had that sense of pride, sense of team, sense of community, and that’s still the case with his grandson, Joey.”
“It’s him! Walk that way!”
Miller once told The Bee, “I was made to work with teenagers. Inspired, they can touch greatness.”
Miller fostered campus rallies on football game day, to raise school spirit. He also understood that he could not coach girls tennis players with near the same amount of volcanic verbiage as the football players.
“Well, there was no shaving of heads in girls tennis,” said Steve Montoya with a laugh. “He was a coach all day, every day. We’d go fishing and take long car rides. There was sports talk, of course, but it was more of how to be a good husband, how to be a good father, how to be a good person. There was nobody I feared more than my grandfather, and no one I respected more.”
The fear included holding hands with his high school sweetheart, now his wife, Amber.
Said Steve Montoya, “We’d be walking down the halls at Placer, and we’d suddenly stop holding hands. I’d say, ‘Oh my gosh! It’s him! Walk that way!’”
Lasting lessons
Scott Ditty played for Miller and was a starter on the unbeaten 1980 team. He carries with him lessons to lead and motivate as a seventh-year coach at Viewmont High in Bountiful, Utah.
“I was a 5-foot nothing guard who had no business being on a great team, but Coach Miller put his arm around me, helped me, believed in me, and I responded,” Ditty said. “On campus, you could see the respect and admiration he drew from people. When he walked into a room, he was in charge. At an all-year school reunion a few years ago, Coach Miller was surrounded by all us football players, and then a swarm of his former Placer tennis girls players stole him away. He just smiled. They just adored him.”
Ditty recalled a lunch meeting with his mentor some 10 years ago. The old coach told the young one that, “the best coaches are the ones who care the most about their players. Respond to your players according to their potential.”
“I took that with me, and that’s been my mantra,” Ditty said. “I took over a program here that was in the dumps, then we won three consecutive league championships. I saw Coach Miller in 2017 at a Hall of Fame banquet, told him about our success, told him he was the model. I saw him with a tear going down his face. That’s the last time I saw him. I cherish that memory.”
