Gray-Miller Focused on ‘winning the day’ as Texas Tech interim coach

Gray-Miller knows all about hard work and overcoming perceived obstacles.

She grew up in Flint, Michigan, and her mother, Bonnie Miller, worked on a General Motors assembly line for 36 years.

Gray-Miller rode the city bus to the YMCA every weekend when she was just 11 to play basketball with the boys.

She earned a scholarship to play at the University of Michigan, serving as a team captain and receiving an award for her leadership and dedication. During her redshirt junior season, the Wolverines didn’t win a single conference game, going 0-18 in the Big Ten.

Michigan had several players quit or get kicked off the team. By the end, their roster consisted of only seven players – five freshmen, a sophomore and Gray-Miller.

“That team went out and tried to win every game and never quit. Every game we felt like we had a chance to win,” said Gray-Miller, who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in sociology and a minor in law and criminology. “I called a few of my teammates when this happened at Texas Tech and asked how we did that. I asked them what inspired us to keep going, and they said we had a great captain, loved one another and we had fun together. We just focused on one another and having fun.”

An eternal optimist, Gray-Miller has upbeat nature that radiates through her words and actions.

The positivity stems from a distressing phase of her life when she was the head coach at Saint Louis University.

“I had a really dark period when I got sick and and stressed myself out and worked myself to death. I would stay up late at night watching more film and was making decisions based on trying to keep my job,” Gray-Miller said. “That is the wrong way to live and I came to the realization that I was doing it wrong and going about this wrong. I was so worried about keeping my job that I was not living life and it was actually hurting the team more in the long run.”

Gray-Miller found some salvation by reading the book The Energy Bus by Jon Gordon.

“That really resonated with me and I adopted my ‘Win The Day’ concept in 2011. Literally my goal is to wake up every morning wanting to win that day and only that day by minutes at a time and control the controllables,” Gray-Miller said. “It’s a pretty good life perspective and it shifted the way I was doing everything.”