For 41 Years, Town Cheers Oregon Tech Coach Danny Miles

For four decades, he has coached here, mostly basketball, through the collapse of the logging industry and the Klamath Basin water crisis, for more wins than all but three coaches at any level in the history of college basketball. He turned down other jobs, at bigger schools, in larger towns. He was fired and rehired, divorced and remarried, thought he had prostate cancer and found out he did not. At the Oregon Institute of Technology, where they slashed his athletics budget so low at times he almost quit, they also named the basketball court after him.

So there Danny Miles stood in late December, pacing the sideline at Danny Miles Court. The night before, his players stumbled at home, losing there for the first time since 2008, ending the nation’s longest home winning streak. This had produced an unintended casualty: Miles’s voice.

His players, the Hustlin’ Owls, known as Danny’s Boys to the locals, strained to hear the instructions Miles whispered. They took their cues from the color of his bald head, which turns crimson when embarrassed, scarlet when angry and beet red when ready to explode. On this night, when his team topped Concordia University of Portland on the way to obtaining the No. 1 ranking for N.A.I.A. Division II colleges, Miles rarely reddened.

Win No. 954 was in hand.

Most 66-year-olds collect social security. Miles, while technically retired, still collects basketball victories like stamps. Before this season, Oregon Tech totaled every game Miles ever coached, at different levels of basketball, softball and baseball. The count was 1,816 victories. The walls to his upstairs “man cave” contain letters from famous basketball coaches, among them Mike Krzyzewski, Dean Smith and Bobby Knight, and two presidents, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. His bust resides in three halls of fame.

This season, his Owls, still Hustlin’, have already qualified for their national tournament, held next month in Point Lookout, Mo. They did so despite the death of Nathan Maddox, a redshirt sophomore who committed suicide Feb. 12. Maddox left a four-page note, Miles said, and died with a Bible in his lap, turned to John 3:16. Miles called the past two weeks the toughest stretch of his career.

For years at the school he calls “my Notre Dame,” Miles drove the team van to away games, washed the sweat from uniforms and endured 13-hour bus rides up mountain passes and through storms. “All the way home, I’m thinking, As soon as I get back, I’m turning in my resignation. This time, for sure, I’m going to retire,” Miles said. “And here I am.”

He shrugged.

“I’m a coach.”

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Win No. 900: Of the victories Miles can remember, none meant more than this milestone, reached in February 2010. Oregon Tech trounced Southern Oregon, its biggest rival and Miles’s alma mater, while wearing pink jerseys to raise awareness for breast cancer. (The institute’s former president, Martha Anne Dow, died of breast cancer in 2007.)

In honor of 900, the school gave Miles his own parking spot. For weeks he left his cramped, windowless office and found the car parked one spot left, or two spots right, of his assigned space. He wondered if he had sustained too many concussions playing college football. He told his wife he needed to see a doctor. At that point his assistants told him the truth about the car.

They had been moving it.

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The streets of downtown Klamath Falls, where the Umpqua Dairy serves its signature ice cream and the Daily Bagel names sandwiches after newspapers, feel transported from a simpler time, which, most definitely, this is not. For all of its charm, Main Street is pocked with empty storefronts, and organizers of Occupy Klamath Falls tied black ribbons on each in protest.

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