When Fran Dunphy ended his 17-year-long tenure as the coach of the Penn basketball program, he set off a chain reaction of personnel shifts that touched colleges around the country: Temple, Brown, Northwestern, even Central Connecticut State.
But the one man who may have made the biggest adjustment over the past several months was Glen Miller, the man with whom athletic director Steve Bilsky chose to start the new era of Penn basketball.
Miller became the first man to ever run two Ivy League hoops programs, but by and large he is starting anew with the Quakers. Only one of his former Brown assistants - Mike Martin, who also played his collegiate ball with the Bears.
"Mike is a guy I recruited, coached as a player and had alongside me on the bench this past season, so I know he will do a terrific job here," Miller said in a statement about the first assistant he hired.
For the other spots vacated by the relocation of the Quaker's entire coaching staff to Temple, Miller surprised some by reaching out to Chris Sparks, an assistant at Central Connecticut State whom Miller had worked with for just one year.
"Chris is another person with whom I shared coaching experience with, and he was someone I thought of immediately for my staff," Miller said
For his final hire, he tapped Perry Bromwell, a familiar name to many die-hard Quakers fans. Bromwell was a three-time first-team All-Ivy selection playing for Penn in the late 1980s, but who had never worked with Miller or coached within the Ivy League before.
However, Miller "felt it was important to hire someone within the Penn basketball family" as well.
Those new members of the Penn basketball family were put to work immediately, with Miller and his staff hitting the pavement and recruiting for much of the summer months. In addition, he and his staff faced several issues within the program. Chief among them was dealing with the loss of David Whitehurst - a junior who would likely have been a featured guard in the new offense - to academic issues. (Whitehurst could return for the 2007-08 season.)
He also raised a touchy issue over the summer when his former player at Brown, Keenan Jeppesen, who applied to transfer but was turned down by the Admissions Office.
But not all of the new coach's time has been consumed by personnel issues. Miller has also firmed up his team's schedule for next year, following up on work began by Dunphy to get Penn a matchup with ACC powerhouse North Carolina over each of the next three years.
But as he has said before, Miller is also concerned about making the radical move from Providence to Philadelphia and the changes this will mean for him personally.
But as he has indicated, location was also a factor that helped him make this decision in the first place. At the press conference where he was officially introduced, Miller said he has "always enjoyed bringing my teams to play at the Palestra, and I look forward to enjoying the home court advantage that the Palestra affords our team."
