When he left Providence, R.I. and the Brown basketball program for the head coaching job at Penn, Glen Miller was faced with the difficult task of replacing Philadelphia icon Fran Dunphy.
But in 1993, 13 years before he took over for Dunphy, Miller was replacing some of the lower-profile denizens of the athletic world.
"I had a stint where I was going in for a gym teacher on kind of a long-term basis so we played a lot of games - capture the flag and a lot of fun games like that," Miller said. "Quite different from coaching."
While Miller's pay as an assistant coach at Connecticut had been decent, a restricted-earnings rule would have dropped his total income to about $20,000 annually. If he was going to subsist on a low salary, he was going to be a head coach while he did it.
So he left his post at UConn in 1993 to take the interim coaching job at Division-III Connecticut College and with it a meager new salary of $12,000.
To supplement his income, he spent the year moonlighting. He worked for his wife's parents as a delivery driver and as a substitute gym teacher around New London, Conn.
Miller had driven a taxi during his summers in college, so he was no stranger to that line of work. But balancing a coaching job and other employment required serious juggling on his part.
"Sometimes," Miller said, "I would leave work and take a delivery trip, come back and go back to work and stay in the office until midnight if I needed to."
The interim tag would eventually be dropped, and Miller transformed Connecticut College into a D-III power - the Camels made the NCAA Tournament in two consecutive years at the end of Miller's tenure, including a Final Four appearance in 1999.
Today, having emerged from life in the service industry, Miller and his family have taken on a unique viewpoint fostered in part by the coach's odd jobs.
"My wife tips when she goes through the drive-thru at Dunkin' Donuts," he said, adding that "tip everybody" has become a sort of Miller mantra.
With an Ivy title and an appearance in the real March Madness under his belt, Miller can look back fondly on his time as a sub.
"It was a lot of fun interacting with the kids on a daily basis," he said.
But he knows he learned a valuable life lesson back in 1993.
"Recruit well and build a program," Miller said, "because you don't want to drive delivery and [be a] substitute teacher for your career."
