Courtesy/Coach Miller
After 12 seasons leading Academy football, head coach Robin Miller tallied his 87th win with a 29-9 victory at Franklin Heights on Friday, October 2, surpassing the previous school record of 83 wins by four victories for a head football coach.
Miller has served as Academy’s head varsity football coach since 2015. During his tenure, he led the Vikings to nine playoff appearances and three league championships in 2017, 2020, and 2025. In 2025, he won the Central District Football Coaches Association’s Sportsmanship, Ethics and Integrity Award.
Despite the record’s significance, Miller is quick to shift the attention away from himself. “It’s the epitome of a team group honor,” Miller said. “They gave me that game ball with my name on it, but I didn’t block a soul, I didn’t tackle anyone, I didn’t score a touchdown.” For Miller, the record represents the contributions of hundreds of players, coaches, families and fans who have supported Academy football throughout his career. “There’s been hundreds of kids who did all that work and put the blood, sweat and tears in,” he said. “There’s been tons of coaches like Coach Reichle and my assistants who’ve done so much to help achieve it.”
Miller’s path to coaching began with his lifelong love of sports. Although he realized he was unlikely to pursue athletics professionally, he discovered that coaching let him remain involved in competition while helping others reach their goals. “I always just loved playing and competing. I loved being a part of the team,” Miller said. “When I realized I probably wasn’t going to play, I thought maybe I could get into coaching.”
This philosophy made coaching a long-term passion for Miller, who said he enjoys working with students and doing something different every day. Even with the pressure surrounding each game, Miller sticks to his routines. He follows a similar schedule each week and admits that changes to the routine, like a Thursday night game, can throw him off. Miller also has a few game-day superstitions. He makes a point of hugging Coach Street before every game. After a win, he wears the same game pants, while a shirt or pullover worn during a loss will not return on future game days.
After a victory, however, Miller’s attention quickly shifts from football to spending time with his family, particularly when his children attend the games. “My kids always give me a hug, win or lose,” Miller said. “It’s a reminder that whatever we just did, win or lose, really isn’t that important. There’s something far more important, and that’s my family.” Once the excitement settles, Miller typically joins the other coaches to review film, check scores from around the area, and decompress from the week.
While he now holds the school record, he views the achievement less as an individual milestone and more as a reflection of the program as a whole. “We always tell the kids in a game, if a kid drops a pass or makes a mistake, that in a glaring moment they can think, ‘Oh, I lost us that game,’” Miller says, “But there were 159 other plays in that game that we could have done better on or worse on. It’s never one play.”
The same principle, he said, applies to his record. “For all these wins, it’s never one person,” Miller says. “All the kids who’ve played for us, who’ve made that commitment, all the coaches, all the support of the families, the fans, the student section, it’s all played a part in it, and it has very little to do with me and a lot more to do with us.”
Miller’s 87th win represents more than a coaching milestone. For him, the record belongs to the players, athletic staff, parents, and fans of Academy football who built this program alongside him over the past 12 years.
