At around 9:30 p.m. Saturday, the 2023-2024 prep sports school year ended for us at Leader World Headquarters.
As most of our readers know, we produce a bi-weekly edition of the Leader for the Eureka area. Eureka High sent its girls soccer team to the Class 4 championship game Saturday night against Nerinx Hall.
The Wildcats and Markers left it all on the field in a stirring game that lasted more than 107 minutes, through two overtimes, until Lauren Seppi’s penalty kick clanked off the crossbar and into the net for Nerinx’s second state championship and their first since 1988.
What I saw that night at World Wide Technology Soccer Park in Fenton will stick with all the attending fans, coaches and media – not to mention the players – for a long time and is exactly what makes this job so satisfying. If you want to read more about the game, go to myleaderpaper.com.
With another school year wrapped up and two months of summer coverage ahead, let’s review more of the coaching and administrator changes for 2024-2025. Hard to believe we are nearly five years removed from the COVID pandemic, but it still casts a long shadow and there’s scar tissue in our memories after all the uncertainty and fear it caused in our daily lives.
After superintendents from across the county voted to expel St. Pius X from the Jefferson County Activities Association in early March, both of the Lancers basketball head coaches resigned to take the same job at different county schools. Aaron Portell is the new girls basketball coach at Festus and Chris Miller is the new boys basketball coach at Fox.
Miller was the dean of students at St. Pius, and that position, along with the girls coaching job, were filled by Harrison Brumley, most recently an assistant at powerhouse Incarnate Word Academy, winners of 14 state titles and something like 130 games in a row. St. Pius activities director Tilden Watson said last week the school was close to hiring Miller’s replacement for the boys basketball job.
I’ve written here more than once that Portell is an excellent coach whose record, spread out over three sports, is unsurpassed among active coaches in the county.
I‘m surely not the only one who is eager to see what Brumley does with Brooke Blankenship, PJ Krodinger, Bridget Flanagan and Elena Ruble, the key players on a Lancer team that was fourth in Class 3 this winter – the school’s first state trophy in basketball, boys or girls. Pius lost to eventual state champion Fair Grove in the semifinals but bounced back the next day and proved they belonged with the elite teams, losing to Centralia by two points. Will Brumley get them over the top next season?
Miller, 40, was the head coach of the St. Pius boys for five seasons and had a record of 81-47. Their best season in his tenure was 2019-2020, when they finished 21-8 and won the Class 3 District 3 championship, beating Steelville 45-44 in the final. Miller lives in Imperial and will teach special education at Fox.
“We had a good run there and when the opportunity to go to a bigger school happened, I was looking for a new challenge and there’s some good things happening at Fox,” said Miller, who coached and taught at Grandview before going to Pius. “I’m thankful for my five years at Pius. I worked with some really great people. I credit any success I’ve had to good players.”
Miller is going from a private Catholic school with an enrollment of 227 to the third-largest public high school in the county, with 1,244 students (behind Northwest and Seckman). He had his first contact with Fox students last week.
“When you’re going to a new place, it’s about establishing a culture, no matter whether it’s private or public,” he said. “I’ve worked in both public and private schools for 14 years. At the end of the day, people send their kids to school for an education. Coming from a small school to a large one is an adjustment.”
Miller said he will miss coaching against Sean Breeze at Jefferson, Jason Jarvis at Herculaneum and Bruce Valleroy at St. Vincent. Breeze is off to new horizons himself as the activities director and assistant principal at Grandview.
“It’s going to be a different-looking JCAA (small-schools) next year, but there will be new rivalries,” Miller said. “I’m competitive and can’t wait to start new ones at Fox.”
The Warriors played their final game under Mike Wilken against Class 6 state champion Cardinal Ritter in the District 1 tournament and finished 11-16, his best season record in 11 years as head coach. Fox had one of the top scorers in the Suburban Conference in guard Kyle Gast, who averaged 18 points per game. He has graduated along with fellow starters Siego Piatchek, Mason Nance and Cayden Kiesker.
Wilken and his family live in Eureka and he has a son and daughter, both under the age of 10, who play sports. Wilken said he wants to step back from the pressures of varsity basketball and coach his kids. He’ll continue to teach business at Fox with the intention of eventually retiring from the C-6 School District.
“I had great support (from the Fox administration) and I’m thankful for the opportunity to coach that long,” Wilken said. “I went back and forth about (the decision) a bunch. This was the most wins we had and it was a great group of seniors, but I thought it was time to focus more on my own kids.”
“I’m proud to have coached all those guys. I’m friends with guys I coached 10 years ago. I couldn’t ask for a better group of seniors. It was nice to fight and compete against the state champions and hang with them until the very end.”