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From E. Palestine to OSU
By BRIAN DZENIS
YOUNGSTOWN
Matt Miller’s time playing the hometown hero for the Youngstown Phantoms is over.
He is one of 17 players scattering into the college and professional hockey ranks after the team’s season finale on Saturday, a 5-4 overtime win against Team USA at the Covelli Centre.
While his teammates travelled from across the country and beyond in pursuit of their spot in the show, Miller rarely strayed too far from his hometown of East Palestine during his junior hockey career.
“I think a little bit of him died today,” Phantoms coach John Wroblewski said on Saturday. “The purple and orange has been such a staple and he wears it so proudly.”
Miller didn’t argue his coach’s sentiment.
“I’ve been here for three years. It’s definitely apart of me,” Miller said. “I’ve lived here my whole life and got to play hockey in front of my friends and family. It’s been incredible.”
Northeast Ohio has never been considered a hockey hotbed. The Mahoning Valley only has one high school ice hockey team, Canfield. Youngstown is Ohio’s only USHL franchise and there are only three Division I college ice hockey teams in the Buckeye State: Ohio State, Miami and Bowling Green.
It seems like the odds would be against a player from Columbiana County playing for an extended amount of time close to home, but most of Miller’s eight-year hockey career was spent no further than an hour away.
Miller has no explanation for how things worked out in his favor.
“It was definitely luck,” the defenseman said. “I was blessed and lucky to get here.”
To hear him tell it, Miller’s parents loved the Pittsburgh Penguins. After they won the Stanley Cup in 1991, they wanted their oldest son, New York Rangers forward J.T., to become a hockey player.
“They decided to get my brother in hockey and I just followed in his shoes,” Miller said.
To make that dream a reality, the family moved to Coraopolis, Pa. Both brothers played for the Pittsburgh Hornets youth program. Matt Miller also played one season for Moon Area High School.
“It was just me and my brother coming from [East Palestine],” Miller said. “We got a lot of looks from people because playing hockey here is definitely a weird thing.”
For a while, Matt and J.T. appeared to tread the same path until they each reached the USHL. J.T., who is three years older than Matt, was a Phantoms’ draft pick in 2010, but he never appeared in a game. Instead, he played for Team USA, the national developmental program that was then based in Ann Arbor, Mich.
If a player declines to play for Team USA, his USHL option is the team that holds his draft rights.
In the 2011 NHL Draft, J.T. Miller was a first-round pick of the New York Rangers and has spent the last three seasons with the NHL team.
The same year, Matt Miller was drafted by the USHL’s Des Moines Buccaneers. He appeared in five games for the Buccaneers before he was traded to the Waterloo Blackhawks. Shortly after that, Miller was traded to the Phantoms.
In three seasons, the defenseman scored 11 goals and 12 assists in 172 games In his final season, he was named an assistant captain and recently committed to play college hockey at Ohio State.
“He’ll immediately be a fan favorite there and a favorite in the locker room amongst his teammates right away just because of how intense he is and how hard he plays,” Wroblewski said. “He particular epitomizes the organization to a T.”
Miller, who will attend Ohio State on scholarship, chose the school because of it’s proximity to his family. He’s thrilled to have learned the game in Youngstown.
“On the ice, it’s a thousand things, but off of it, it made me a better person,” Miller said of the lessons he’s learned. “I’m a man and I was a kid when I got here. [The Phantoms] made me 10 times better on the ice and off the ice.”