Molly Miller wasn’t supposed to ever leave Springfield, Missouri. Everyone, including her, thought she’d be in town forever. She knew every street corner and every stop sign, from Kickapoo High to Drury University. So what inside her made her choose to pick up everything and move to Phoenix, Arizona?
“There was a plan for me that God laid out in place and I just kind of followed that plan,” she says.
Faith has always been a central tenant in Miller’s life which is how she ended up at Grand Canyon and how she now sets her sights on building a contender in the ashes of the Pac-12.
Missouri to the core…
There are few people as authentically Missourian as Molly Miller. From the moment she started playing basketball, her connections to Springfield already ran deep.
“I was a ball girl for the [Missouri State] Lady Bears,” she remembers.
Back then, the university was named Southwest Missouri State and their women’s basketball team was one of the original mid-major juggernauts in the history of the sport.
“Cheryl Burnett coached them and she took them to a Final Four with Jackie Stiles and I was the one that got to go on the floor and wipe up their sweat with a towel”, adds Miller with a laugh. “I loved that. I was like ‘I get to wipe up Jackie’s sweat!"‘“
It wouldn’t take long for the ball girl to become the girl with the ball in her hands. As a high schooler at Kickapoo in Springfield, Miller helped lead the team to a pair of state titles. Along with Heather Ezell — the state player of the year at the time and now current head coach at the University of Wyoming — the Chiefs went 31-0 in 2003 and were ranked 13th in the nation by USA Today.
She had tasted winning and wanted to continue to do it at the next level. While there were a handful of Division I programs interested in her, she kept one Division II school in her top five: a local university in Springfield called Drury.
“I'm ultra competitive, and they had just gone to the national championship the year before my freshman year in college,” she explains. “So knowing that I could go there and win? That was huge.”
In her four years at Drury, the Lady Panthers went 112-18 and made a 2007 D-II Elite Eight. Miller finished her career as the program’s third all-time leading scorer and second all-time leader in assists and steals.
But in the spring of 2008, she faced what many longtime players do: the prospect of retirement and the real world looming on the horizon.
A Leap of Faith
Miller didn’t have any plans of leaving Springfield so she hung around and entered the private sector. She knew her outgoing personality would be a career asset and she set her sights on the world of marketing and public relations. After earning an MBA from Drury, she took a job as a marketing director for a group of neurosurgeons at the university.
But then in 2012, in what could best be described as divine intervention, an assistant coaching job at Drury opened up. While Miller didn’t think much of it, everyone around her did.
“They're like, you should really look into coaching,” she remembers. “And the more that happened, I went to the head coach [Steve Harold] at the time — who had coached me for a year — and I was like ‘is this something you would encourage me to do?’ And he was like ‘heck yeah I would encourage it!’”
She took a roughly $15,000 pay cut and spent a few years as an assistant before being promoted to head coach in 2014. Although she didn’t know it at the time, that move would set the stage for the rest of her adult life. Over the next six years, Drury went a combined 180-17 and a stunning 105-5 in Great Lakes Valley Conference play. They made three straight Sweet 16’s and one D-II Final Four. Heading into the spring of 2020, Miller’s Lady Panthers were a perfect 32-0 and 20-0 in GLVC play. But, like many other programs, a potential dream season was lost to a global pandemic.
“Covid cut us short,” she says. “We were going to march our way to the National Championship that year. And so I was like ‘we’re coming back’. There’s a fire lit. Next year, we’re going to take the whole thing.”
It was in that time that Grand Canyon athletic director Jamie Boggs started poking around and gauging Miller’s interest in jumping to Division I. The Springfield kid had a big choice to make, especially knowing she had a title contender at home.
“To be truly transparent, I didn’t really think about a next level jump,” she mentions. “I’d gotten phone calls every year.”
But something about Grand Canyon felt different to her. Some of it had to do with Boggs herself — a forward thinking, no-nonsense daughter of Thai immigrants who was the first female athletic director in GCU history and the fourth Asian-American A.D. ever. Another piece was that success felt attainable at the school. GCU had spent years pouring resources into their athletic department, specifically men’s and women’s basketball.
The last component was something close to Miller’s own heart: a mission of faith.
A Grand Vision at Grand Canyon
GCU is unique in that it is the only Division I for-profit university in the United States. At multiple points in the last decade, the school’s administration has applied for nonprofit status, a distinction the school held until 2004. Back then, GCU was tens of millions of dollars in debt with a student base of less than a thousand. So they turned to the investment class to save the school. It is believed to have been the first time venture capitalists bought an existing university.
As a result, GCU has had to endure certain — and sometimes deserved — stigmas on two fronts: being a for-profit institution and being a Christian school associated with the Arizona Southern Baptist Convention.
But over the years, Grand Canyon has worked to not be attached to for-profit stereotypes; the degree mills that typically prey upon disadvantaged and disenfranchised students. However, there have still been bumps in the road to legitimacy. A Department of Education investigation found that GCU hadn’t been fully honest about the cost of its’ doctoral programs and levied the school with a $37.7 million fine.
The religious aspect — trying to maintain a faith based mission while avoiding a perception of being a fundamentalist institution — has been a different story. In part, because the definition of religion — and one’s connection to it — is extremely nebulous and ever-changing. For Miller, who has always incorporated the tenants of Christianity into her life, she faced a big question when she arrived to lead the program.
How does one balance faith with a sport that is rooted in many concepts that ardent Christians may be inherently opposed to?
Put another way, can faith be progressive?
“I think so,” says Miller. “If you were to come and look at our team, look at the dynamics we’ve got. You are having this group that is this melting pot of student-athletes and I believe that’s what the church should look like and, in turn, that’s what our community should look like.”
“There’s a lot of different types of faith and religions,” she continues. “So we understand, we accept, we explore, we learn and I truly believe that’s what our community should look like. That’s something we talk about in our program, that you are in the spotlight. Like ‘look at us doing it and having this service mentality. And I think that’s important for us to teach.”
To Miller’s point, her roster is something of a pastiche of backgrounds. Lucy Ghaifan’s family are Sudanese immigrants who reside in Grand Island, Nebraska. Trinity San Antonio is returning from the 2024 Olympics where she played for the Puerto Rican national team. Asha Sra is one of the few Sikh-American representatives in the world of women’s basketball. And that’s before you start getting into the various states and communities that create the Lopes diverse roster. To hear Miller tell it, it’s all those different backgrounds and viewpoints that allow her players to become more well-rounded versions of themselves with varying — but respected — levels of devotion to faith as a binder.
As a university, for instance, Grand Canyon isn’t affirming of LGBTQ+ identities. Within the school’s moral and ethical positions, it defines the union of marriage as being between man and woman. But there are those on campus, like GCU’s Sexuality and Gender Awareness Club (SAGA, for short), that operate in the space where theology meets sexuality and gender. The group hosts guest pastors, counselors from the school’s Office of Student Care and is involved in the The Reformation Project, a non-profit Christian organization that works to advance LGBTQ+ inclusion in the church.
That intersectionality is something Miller has tried to preach within her program. It’s an idea that faith can be equal parts defined values and consistently evolving ways of living by them. It’s a big reason why the 37 year old head coach feels she can stay at GCU for awhile and build something unique on and off the floor.
‘Lopes in a new league
At a few points last offseason, Molly Miller’s name was up for some major jobs. She was a popular fan pick for the University of Kentucky and was floated as a potential hire for Virginia Tech. But she didn’t entertain them all that much. With Jamie Boggs leading the athletic department at GCU, Miller thinks that conference realignment has set the stage for the Antelopes to potentially become a force in the southwest.
“What gives me confidence to be able to have good teams every year is because I think we’re good on the recruiting and you have a product you really believe in,” she says.
Since arriving in Phoenix, Miller’s program has regularly improved. She’s 85-35 all time at GCU and is coming off a 24-8 season in which the Lopes just narrowly missed the NCAA Tournament. But future seasons will be different. With Grand Canyon joining Seattle University in the West Coast Conference starting in 2025, that type of record might be enough to secure a tourney bid.
“I love when [Jamie Boggs] says ‘I don’t like saying Power Five. You either have resources or you don’t have resources.’,” Miller adds. “And we have the resources.”
Oregon State and Washington State, both without a home since the Pac-12 collapsed, will be in the WCC for at least the Lopes first season. Assuming no more realignment happens in the next two years — specifically regarding Gonzaga — Miller’s conference foes could include three perennial Tournament teams and open the possibility of a new power league in the sport forming out west.
“I think that is a good push in that direction for us to compete against Gonzaga and St. Mary’s and some of those top notch teams that we know have been elite programs,” she says. “And that’s the school’s vision. So when you have someone that’s as competitive as me and wants to win, you hope that’s going to mirror what the school wants and that’s our President’s vision. That’s our A.D.’s vision.”
Phone calls will continue to come for Miller, especially as the coaching carousel begins to spin this season but she’s firm in her position: the grass isn’t greener, at least not right now. The confluence of faith and basketball keeps her constantly growing individually while the success on the floor challenges her as a basketball mind. From those humble beginnings wiping Jackie Stiles sweat off the floor of the Hammons Student Center, she’s found her calling in a new home. All it took was some faith.
“People know the name [GCU] now and that’s probably half the battle when you don’t have history like some of these other schools,” she finishes. “We’re building that history right now which I think is exciting. I love that challenge and I want to be a part of it.”
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