People know that Hoot Miller was the first basketball coach at OLS, but they don’t always know how he was brought to Our Lady of Sorrows in the first place. The story goes that my dad Dick Schulz and Mr. Foley—John Foley Senior—were members of the Legion of Mary, which used to welcome new parishioners to OLS. When Hoot Miller and his family moved to Gedney Terrace, right behind where Emma’s Ale House is now, my dad and Mr. Foley went to welcome him. Mr. Foley was quite a good basketball player in his day—he played for City University back in the 50s when it was one of the better programs in the country—so the three of them all got to talking sports. They mentioned to Hoot that OLS needed a basketball coach and directed him to contact Monsignor Murtha, who was then the pastor of OLS. And next thing you know, Hoot became the coach of Our Lady of Sorrows.
Now, Hoot was a Marine and a sergeant in the White Plains police force. He didn’t take any guff from anybody. He used to come into the gym with his gun holster on in his uniform, and he’d have somebody mop the floor, and then we’d run laps. It was very organized. He had no patience for lollygagging. Outside our parents, he was basically the role model for all us guys.
One thing he set up was pretty clever. He had an intramural league in the school for fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth graders. What he did is he paired up the eighth graders two by two and they were the captains of the team. Then, they used to give you like 60 points to bid on the younger players, sort of like a draft.
He treated those eighth graders, who were like barely 14 years old, as men, as adults. You were your own boss and you were responsible for the draft.
The intramural league played on Friday nights. It was so much fun coming back to school on a Friday night to play. We had enough boys to populate both teams.
At the beginning of the season, Hoot would have a meeting with the eighth graders and say, “Okay, so we’re gonna have a vote here right now, and you’re going to tell your parents. I want to see raised hands—how many of us are going to play to win the game?” Virtually everybody would raise their hand, right? Then he’d say, “Okay, tell your parents: we play to win.” That meant he narrowed it down to maybe eight guys playing in the game if it was close. You were on the team, but you might not get that much playing time. The parents never complained — parents didn’t complain back then, and the players didn’t either. If Hoot heard you complain, you wouldn’t last long.
He had these connections all over the place, too. There was the Kennedy Tournament. Bud Tolomer from Sacred Heart started it at Stepinac and all the Divine Compassion schools were involved—maybe nine or ten schools from the Bronx all the way up to Katonah. We used to pack Stepinac, and they had cheerleading contests and everything. We looked forward to that every year—it was the biggest thing of the school year.
Hoot taught us to be stand-up people. He knew how to get our aggression out, too. I remember one situation where we were playing and one guy fouled another guy, and the kid took a swing at him. Hoot just blew the whistle and said, “Okay, everybody make a circle. We’re gonna have a fight, these two guys in the middle. Go ahead.” They’d start whaling on each other, and then he stopped it after like 30 seconds. He’d go, “That’s it. We’re all done.” That was the Marine way of doing things. He got the aggression out, and then you could get back to business.
We won the JFK tournament at least three years in a row. We had some guys come through Our Lady of Sorrows that were unbelievable — guys like Brian Lynch, who ended up being the MVP of the City League and playing for Providence. After the season was over, we’d go to the School for the Deaf and use their pool — Hoot knew them there and he’d hook that up — and then we’d go back his house for a cookout. He’d host the whole team. It was a lot of fun.
He retired from the police department in ’70 and took on a security job at one of the department stores, so he didn’t have as much time for coaching. That meant he didn’t coach us for our eighth-grade year — we were really upset! We couldn’t believe we had made it to eighth grade and Hoot was no longer our guy. But what he built at OLS stayed with us. Looking back, those Friday nights in the gym were the best times. With Hoot running the show, you learned how to play the game right and you didn’t just play — you grew up.