It’s Miller time at CMS
Ronnie Miller will take over helm of Hawks football program
After a string of coaches in recent years, Clinton Middle School has hired Ronnie Miller as the school’s head football coach.
Miller, a class of ’87 graduate of Clinton High School, has spent the last year as an assistant coach at Clinton High School, but has been coaching in some capacity or another for years.
“I’ve been coaching for the last year at the high school with Coach Keith,” said Miller, “When the opportunity became available, we wanted to start a program that starts in middle school and continues into high school using the same concepts and terminology to make that transition more fluid. I said I would love to do it, and applied, and I’ve kind of gone from there.
“I’ve got about 15 years of coaching,” he said. “I’ve coached at Clinton for four different years. I’ve coached at Lenoir City High School and coached track at Hardin Valley Academy. I was the head coach at Anderson County doing track for a while.”
Miller said he has goals in mind for the program.
“The first thing I want to try to help them with is stability,” he said. “They’ve had three head coaches the last four years. I’m a Clinton graduate and a Clinton guy and I want to develop some pride in the program again. I think it’s been an afterthought over the past several years, and I want to reinstall the pride that the people of Clinton used to have in the program. We’re going to really be working with the high school as well as the Little League teams so we have a program that starts as a 6-year-old and continues smoothly all the way up to high school.”
In addition to coaching for the school, Miller will be teaching there.
“That’s something else we haven’t had for the last couple of years: a coach that’s in the building,” Miller said.
“We’re hoping that makes a difference as well.
“I’m a business teacher, and with Clinton Middle being a college-ready school, I’ll be teaching classes regarding careers and business subjects.”
Miller said that mostly he’s just glad to have the opportunity to coach at the middle school.
“I’m very excited, and really hope to build a lot of interest from the community,” he said. “We’re going to try to be involved in the community and be out and about, doing things as a team and building community support to have that in the coming months.
“We’d love to have that community support.
“We’re going to have a parent-interest meeting Thursday, April 29, then we’re going to be hurriedly getting everything together for spring practice to start the following Monday,” he said.