When Herb Sendek recruited Archie Miller to North Carolina State in the Class of 1997, he got both a point guard and a future employee, and he had every reason to believe that was exactly what he was getting.

At the time, Miller’s father, John, was already well-established as a high school coaching legend, and his older brother, Sean, was a member of Sendek’s staff. Sendek could tell that Archie had everything necessary to follow them. He hasn’t been surprised at all to see Archie become his contemporary, leading Dayton to the Elite Eight in 2014 before being hired at Indiana three years ago.

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“All three love basketball,” said Sendek, now the coach at Santa Clara. “All three are great competitors. And all three have really advanced IQ and knowledge.”

Sendek was himself a coach’s son, and he was playing his high school ball in the east suburbs of Pittsburgh as John Miller  was creating a powerhouse in Beaver County west of the city. Miller took over at Blackhawk High School in 1975 and went on to win 583 games and four state titles there in 29 years. Sendek played point guard and was a team captain at Penn Hills, went on to play four years at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh (where he finished with a 3.95 GPA) and then spent a year as an assistant coach at Pittsburgh Central Catholic High School.

Sendek’s first college job was on Rick Pitino’s staff at Providence, and he was transitioning from being a graduate assistant to a full-time assistant coach when the Friars recruited Sean Miller, who had led his father’s program to a district championship in 1986 and took them back to the title game in 1987. Sendek got to know the family well during Sean’s recruitment, and they maintained a connection even though Sean stayed close to home and starred at Pitt. Sendek followed Pitino to Kentucky, but when he got his first head coaching job at Miami (Ohio) in 1993, he hired Sean as an assistant. Miller went back to his alma mater for the 1995-96 season, but then rejoined Sendek when he was hired at North Carolina State in 1996.

At that same time, Archie led Blackhawk to its second straight Class 3A state title. He was just 5-foot-10 and 160 pounds, but he was twice named to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Fab 5 as one of the best players in the area. As small as Miller was, Sendek thought he had enough skill and intellect to play point guard in the ACC.

“The thing that really gave Archie separation was he was an elite shooter,” Sendek said. “He really had a great feel and a high IQ for the game. The other attribute that really stood out was his competitiveness. Through those three attributes, he was able to play at the highest level of college basketball successfully, even though he didn’t have the typical level of athletic talent and didn’t have the gift of size at his position.”

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With Sean on the staff, Sendek landed Archie without much of a problem. Growing up, Archie idolized Sean, who is 10 years his senior, and the chance to play for him made North Carolina State his obvious choice.

When he was brought in, however, the coaching staff created structures to make sure the familial connection didn’t cause any friction between the two brothers or among the players. The Millers are famously intense, so the other coaches made sure that family trait didn’t turn negative.

“My job at times was to be the buffer between him and Sean,” said John Groce, then an assistant at N.C. State and now the coach at Akron. “A little brotherly love. Those guys would get after each other at times. Sean’s bar for all the players was high, and when it’s your brother, it’s higher. My job was just to make sure he was doing OK. Arch is pretty tough and smart, so a lot of times he could figure it out on his own, but I just made sure he could talk to me.”

But Sendek and the coaches didn’t let up on Archie and he didn’t let up on himself. From the time he arrived in Raleigh, Archie operated the way Sendek expected a son of John Miller to operate. He didn’t just have a good work ethic, but also an informed one. He understood what every drill was supposed to accomplish, and why it was important to go all out on every rep.

“He had good habits right from the beginning,” Sendek said. “He went hard in everything he did. He understood what going hard looked like. A lot of guys really don’t have an understanding of that. They may think they’re going hard in a drill or a workout, but they’re capable of doing so much more.”

Sendek’s offense, which bore a resemblance to the Princeton system with its screens and back-cuts, was not similar to what Miller’s father taught at Blackhawk, but his skill set and his aptitude allowed him to pick it up quickly anyway.

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He also developed physically. He couldn’t get any taller, but he did put on a significant amount of muscle that allowed him to hang in there with the athletes he had to guard in the ACC at a time when the league was particularly loaded.  The league produced at least one Final Four team in all five years Miller was at N.C. State from 1997 to 2002.

“He got himself in elite-level shape,” Groce said. “He was in superior condition. Was really physically strong. Even though he was smaller, he was one of the strongest guys on our team, pound for pound. And he learned Herb’s system and knew it like the back of his hand by the time he got older.”

And his outside shooting kept him on the floor. He hit 55 3-pointers coming off the bench as a true freshman. His sophomore year ended after three games because of a back injury and he took a medical redshirt, but in that time he hit 7 of 9 3-point attempts. He hit 42 3-pointers each in his redshirt sophomore and junior years, knocking down 58.6 percent of his attempts in season that was ended by a stress fracture in his leg.

“His shooting was such an equalizer,” Groce said. “He’s certainly top five of all the guys I’ve ever coached in 25 years as an assistant and head coach. He was an elite-level shooter with big-time range. He already could shoot the ball before he got there, but all the ballhandling and passing skills, he had been doing all of the those drills since he came out of the womb.”

In Miller’s first four years, the Wolfpack never reached the NCAA Tournament. They made the NIT in his first three years  and reached the semifinals in 2000 before losing to Wake Forest in Madison Square Garden, but they were 13-16 in 2001 and their season ended in the first round of the ACC tournament.

So for his fifth year, Sendek asked Miller and his teammate Anthony Grundy to lift their games. He had a meeting with them in December of that season after the Wolfpack had suffered back-to-back losses to Ohio State and Massachusetts.

“We just really challenged them to be at a completely different level for our team,” Sendek said. “They were in essence going to be the key as two seniors that we were counting on. Archie and Anthony really took that to heart and embraced that message.”

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A week later the Wolfpack beat a top-10 Syracuse team on the road, went 20-9 in the regular season and beat eventual national champion Maryland in the ACC tournament to grab a No. 7 seed in the NCAA Tournament. They handled No. 10 seed Michigan State and took No. 2 Connecticut to the wire before losing, 77-74. Miller set career highs in scoring (9.9 points per game), assists (2.9) and 3-pointers (72) and also posted a career-high 44 steals.

Miller went straight from playing to being a graduate assistant, left for a year to be an assistant at Western Kentucky, returned to North Carolina State to work for Sendek as an assistant for two years, then followed him to Arizona State for another year.

“He can connect with all different types of guys who came from different geographic locations, different socioeconomic status,” Groce said. “Different years in school, freshman, sophomore, junior. People that were adults. He’s got on ability to connect with all different types of people. That was almost a natural thing for him.”

And it wasn’t surprising at all for Sendek, who has 477 career wins as a college head coach, to see Miller advance. Four years after Miller left Sendek’s staff at Arizona State, he took over at Dayton in 2011.

“The writing,” Sendek said, “was on the wall.”

(Photo: Michael Allio / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)