Archdeacon: Steele getting Miami ‘back to where it should be’

Once he tried his hand as a shoe salesman, albeit not a successful one.

“Yeah, here’s a story,” Steele said as he stood in an otherwise deserted and dimly lit hallway at Millett Hall on Tuesday night a good while after his Miami basketball team had just dispatched of Bowling Green, 84-76.

The victory upped the RedHawks’ record to 14-4 and extended their winning streak to eight straight games, something no Miami team has done in the past 27 years.

Those were the heydays of the RedHawks’ iconic coach and former star player Charlie Coles, who was the target of Steele’s sales pitch.

“Back in the day, I tried to get a job with Charlie,” Steele said. “I’m like 23 years old and he doesn’t know me from Adam, so I send him a shoe — a tennis shoe ― and I wrote a note with it.

“I said, ‘Listen, I’m trying to get my foot in the door. Dude, I know you don’t know me, but I feel like I can help you. I’ll work harder than any human being to help you.’

“And he was nice enough to call me back. We talked, though he didn’t end up hiring me.”

Two decades later, Steele doesn’t just have his foot in the door at Miami, he’s walking in the footsteps of Cole, the last RedHawks’ coach to have success there.

For the past decade and a half, Miami basketball has been in decline.

The RedHawks have had one winning season in the past 15, and that was a 12-11 campaign in the COVID-impacted 2020-21 season. They haven’t been to the NCAA Tournament since 2007 or the NIT since 2006.

During some of the down times, the King Library on the Miami campus often has been a more rockin’ place than Millett Hall.

After Coles retired in 2012, John Cooper took over for five seasons and he was followed by Jack Owens, who also ran the program for five seasons. Both were fired.

Three seasons ago Miami was shopping for another coach, and this time Steele didn’t need to shed a shoe to get in the door.

“What I really enjoy about Travis is that everything he told us he was about and was going to do, he has done,” said Miami athletics director David Sayler. “He’s a man of his word.

“He’s run the program exactly how he told us he would. He kept pointing to year three and, with that in mind, here we are in his third year.”

After going 12-20 in his first year in Oxford, Steele led the RedHawks to a 15-17 record last season.

The RedHawks are 6-0 in Mid-American Conference play this season, The last time that happened was 19 years ago.

With a team loaded with marksmen, they are among the Top 10 teams in the nation in four offensive categories: field goal percentage, effective field goal percentage, three point percentage and three point field goals per game.

When he took over the Miami program in 2022 — after spending 13 seasons at Xavier, the last four as head coach — he said “I felt like it need to be shaken a little bit, just reenergized,

“I told (Sayler) to stick with me a little bit. I said, ‘The first couple of years are going to be rough. We’re going to build slow – we’re not going to take shortcuts; we want to build a culture, a foundation that holds – but then the change is going to happen fast. There is going to be as spurt.’

“I said by year three we’d have an opportunity to play for a championship. We’re going to get this program back to where it should be.”

Like Miami, Akron is also 6-0 in the MAC and that sets up Saturday afternoon’s showdown on the Zips’ homecourt, the James A. Rhodes Arena, which is better known as The JAR.

Adding to the hype is that Akron is coached by Steele’s older brother John Groce.

‘Everything you could ask for in a coach’

They grew up in Danville, Ind.a. Groce is 10 years older and Steele followed him around like a wide-eyed little brother.

He’d go to John’s high school games and those at Taylor University, too.

When Groce joined former Miami coach Herb Sendek’s staff at North Carolina State, Steele was a young teenager and would come him visit him and was awe of the college hoops scene.

Sean Miller, a former Miami assistant and now the Xavier head coach, was on the Wolfpack staff, too, so Steele wasn’t just making connections, he also was hearing about Miami basketball in the conversations.

When Groce moved to Butler to join Thad Matta’s staff, Steele was a student there and became a team manager.

Later, when Matta moved to Ohio State and brought Groce with him, Steele joined them as a grad assistant.

Eventually Steele was hired at Xavier by Miller, who stayed one more season and then moved on to Arizona State.

Chris Mack took over and Steele remained with him for eight seasons.

When Mack got the Louisville job, Steele finally was hired to take over the Musketeers’ program.

Steele had four winning seasons — he went 70-50 overall — but was fired after Xavier won its first game in the 2022 NIT Tournament, which Xavier then went on to win without him.

The downfall for him was his teams never making the NCAA Tournament or finishing above .500 in their Big East seasons. The last team looked headed for the NCAA Tournament, but then lost eight of its last 10 games.

Steele was too good of a coach to be out of a job long and Sayler made his second run at him,.

“I’d actually interviewed him when our job had come open before, but he was a Xavier assistant then and would become their head coach.

“He’s everything you could ask for in a coach. He’s a great teacher, a dogged recruiter — which you have to be in today’s college environment — and he’s delivered on what he promised. He had a plan, he executed it and he never wavered.”

‘It’s on’ between brothers

This year’s team includes 10 freshman and sophomores Steele and his staff recruited out of high school and four players they picked up out of the transfer portal: Kam Craft, Peter Suder, Antwone Woolfork and Dan Luers.

“We knew all four guys before we took them,” Steele said. “Peter Suber comes from Bellarmine where Scott Davenport is a tremendous coach. Kam Craft is from Xavier and I respect Sean Miller a lot. Antwone Woolfork came from Rutgers where he played for Steve Pikiell, who I respect a lot.

“And Dan Luers (Eastern Illinois), we knew him from before. We had a relationship.

“In today’s landscape you want to know what you’re getting. Anybody can go recruit stats.

“The thing that’s more important: who are you getting as a human being? Who are you bringing into your locker room, into your family? If you don’t fit our core values, I don’t care how talented you are – you can be averaging 28 points a game – we’re not interested.”

Craft leads the team in scoring (15.2 ppg). Suder is second (14.1) and Woolfork is fourth in scoring (8.4) and the top rebounder (5.9).

Although Bowling Green led 40-39 at the half and the lead would change 11 times in the game, Miami took the lead for good at the 12:31 mark of the second half and held off a late surge by the Falcons,.

Miami had six players in double figures and edged BGSU in bench points, 25-2.

That sets up the showdown with Akron.

“I know it will be a great college basketball game in a high-level environment at the JAR on Saturday. That thing will be packed,” Steele said. “It will be two great teams battling.”

Now that he’s at Miami, Steele and his brother have coached against each other three times. Groce has won twice, including knocking Miami out of the MAC Tournament last March.

“My brother has always been my idol,” Steele said. “He’s the reason I’m in coaching. I always thought it would cool to coach alongside him.

“I cheer for him every game now, other than when he plays us. I love him to death but once our game tips off, ‘It’s on’ between us.”

Just as was the case last January when Miami edged Akron 70-68 at Millett Hall – their mom, Barbara Steele, will be in the stands watching.

“It’s hardest for my mom,” Steele said. “With both of us out there, she dresses neutral and she said she doesn’t cheer. She stays pretty quiet and just tries to enjoy it as much as she can.”

But she has to be proud.

She has two sons who are successful basketball coaches, albeit one who could close a shoe sale.