Hilltop Happenings

Coatesville, Pennsylvania, is a small city with more than its fair share of history. “The Pittsburgh of the East” once boasted a thriving steel industry, employing over 10,000 workers at its peak. But it has also had its share of tragedy, which events do not need recounting here. The steel mills still operate, the work force down to some 2,000 nowadays, still a significant portion of the town’s 13,000 residents. Fifty years ago, Coatesville’s Lukens Steel Company was one of the contractors for the World Trade Towers, providing the iconic structures with forged steel beams from its foundries. Some of these beams withstood the 9/11 terrorist attacks and remained standing amidst the devastation. In 2010, those defiant, skeletal remnants made the trip back to Coatesville for display in the National Iron and Steel Heritage Museum.

Dymere Miller ’20 is a product of this proud city, where the Friday night lights that illumine Coatesville High’s football games are every bit the beacon that they are in towns like Odessa, Texas. Like Odessa’s Permian High School – made famous in the book Friday Night Lights, H.G. Bissinger’s classic study of high-school football and its relationship to the surrounding community – Coatesville High is a perennial state-title contender, the crowds in the stands peppered with college football recruiters. Miller’s father was a multi-sport star for Coatesville in his day and made the Delaware State football team as a college player. Before that, Miller’s grandfather starred for the Coatesville basketball team. An uncle currently plays baseball at Virginia State. Football is not the only sport for which Coatesville provides its athletes a springboard.

Miller’s Coatesville gridiron teams were good, good enough to advance to the semifinals of the state tournament last fall and the fall before that. Miller talks about last December’s game as if he had just stepped off the field, the sting of a 27-24 loss still fresh. “I had one of my best games,” recalls Miller. “Seven receptions for 176 yards and a TD, against a defensive back who had ten Division One scholarship offers. But,” he hastens to add, when asked to rate his showing that day, “while my performance was probably a 10-out-of-10, I would rate the game itself a 0-out-of-10 because Coatesville lost.”

Surprisingly, Miller did not see himself as a football player until last year. He always had better players ahead of him on the depth-chart. “I have probably come the longest way of any other athlete out of Coatesville,” Miller opines. “Going back to when I started playing organized football around age eleven or twelve,” he elaborates, “other guys always got more attention than I did. I always had faith in myself, always knew I had it in me, but there were always two or three players ahead of me. I enjoyed playing, definitely, but it was really only last year that everything clicked for me, and I started taking the sport seriously and thinking it was something that could get me to college.

“Before that,” Miller continues, “I never had a goal of working toward playing in college, much less at the D-I level. I was also struggling with a herniated disc in my back that affected both my play and my attitude. The pain was so bad at times that I had trouble walking, and it prevented me from maintaining off-season [weight]lifting programs.”

The disc problem, which originated during Miller’s sophomore year kept him out of the first three games of the 2018 football season but has cleared up, save for the occasional twinge during certain stretches and bends. He still finished that 2018 campaign with 22 receptions for 566 yards and ten touchdowns.

Sometimes, in towns like Coatesville, even today, as in eras past, football is just something boys do, without questioning, like attending church. Perhaps some of Miller’s underestimation of his potential stems from that experience of simply upholding a community’s expectations rather than doing something for oneself. And no one who has followed Miller and the Salisbury football team this fall can have any doubts as to his talents. In the team’s last two games, against Hotchkiss and Kent, Miller has demonstrated uncommon versatility, scoring touchdowns by (1) returning an interception 87 yards, in the process threading his way on a cross-field zig-zag through most of the opposing offense, (2) posting a 65-yard kickoff return, and (3) leaping over a defender in the end zone to collect a 35-yard scoring strike from quarterback Clark Stephens – restoring the Knights’ lead over Hotchkiss on the final play of the half, as time expired on the clock. In sum: a defensive TD, a special teams TD, and an offensive TD.

In that Hotchkiss game, Miller had dropped a Stephens pass in the end zone earlier in the half. What’s more, a touchdown pass to teammate Jack Hanau had been nullified by a penalty seconds before the scoring reception that ended the half. How, a curious fan asks Miller, do you overcome those kinds of setbacks? Miller responds without hesitation. “To me,” he asserts, “everything is just the next play. My drop, I put right behind me. The penalty call on Jack’s catch, same thing. It took me until high school to have the mental discipline to put the last play behind me.”

Miller’s talents in other sports may also have contributed to his not giving higher regard to his potential as a football player. He started at guard last year for a Coatesville team that lost by five points to the eventual state champion in the semifinal round of the playoffs. In track, he experienced further success, anchoring a 4x100 relay team that broke the state record in the state championships last spring. Coatesville’s winning time of 40.99 toppled the mark of 41.10 set earlier in the season by the relay-team at Central Buck East H.S., who finished second behind Coatesville in the state meet. In addition, Miller’s time of 20.5 in the 200-meter race brought him the third-place medal in that event.

“I started running track my junior year,” Miller shares, “and it seemed to help strengthen my back after the disc problem. Colleges,” he points out, “do not give full scholarships for track, but football players are allowed to run track. I look forward to doing both sports in college.”

Academically, Miller pursued an honors curriculum at Coatesville H.S. but did not always feel he was working to his potential, one of the reasons he decided to pursue a post-graduate year. [Ed. note: League rules allow Salisbury and the other schools in the conference to carry four post-graduates on their rosters. Hence, those four spots are highly coveted by candidates, who are carefully screened by Knight head coach Chris Phelps and his brethren at the other member-schools.] Miller has welcomed the rigors of Salisbury’s college-prep curriculum. “Before coming to Salisbury,” Miller points out, “I had never done anything like the nightly two-hour study hall and – ” he adds emphatically – “it’s really helping me. My favorite course? Well, math and history are probably my highest grades, but I really like English with Mr. Rees, even though it’s my toughest class. The books can be difficult, but we have great class discussions. I can feel completely lost with the reading, but then discussing it helps make sense of everything.”

Miller’s academic program extends beyond the classroom. “To get ready for college,” he explains, “I also do an on-line program through Kahn Academy, and I’m enrolled in the High-End SAT Prep program that meets on the weekend.”

Following college, Miller already has clear ideas. A work-related injury years ago forced one of Miller’s grandfathers out of Coatesville’s steel mills, but there was a silver lining: eventually, that grandfather established his own real estate business as well as a property management business. “I’d like to join the business,” Miller enthuses. “I did some work for my grandfather this past summer on some of the properties he owns. It has helped clarify my interest in studying business in college.

“There are a lot of people cheering for me back home,” Miller reflects, appreciatively. “When I got my first D-I offer, so many people seemed to find out about it and congratulate me. It’s crazy how supportive Coatesville is of its athletes.”

In recent years, heightened concerns about concussions and their possible long-term impact have rippled through the game at every level. Despite such concerns, high school football remains an extraordinary binding force in communities such as Coatesville – a force that palpably and positively affects the lives of young men like Dymere Miller.

- Procter Smith, Director of Sports Information