Q&A with Korey Miller, Jersey Bearcats Special Teams Coordinator

T.J.: All right, it’s been a while. We used to coach together in Reading and won a championship, fifty-eight to six with the Raptors. You’ve stayed in coaching since I’ve gone to the media side of things. We did have a lot of time to talk and get to know each other while we were there, my first question is what made you get into football initially either growing up or on the professional level now in arena?

Korey Miller: Well it’s kind of crazy. I’ve been playing football my whole life, played all through high school but didn’t get a chance to play in college. I’m not going to get into that but Ireceived an offer to go play arena football from some random guy who hit me up. I can’t remember his name but he was like a GM or coach.

He just shot me a message saying I saw you play when you were on this team, I think you could make a good fit here. It was like a low-level arena. It wasn’t anything too crazy and I kind of just kind of springboarded from there. Bill, the owner of the Raptors, was trying to get me out because I’m originally from Reading. So he’s been trying to get me on that team since he first found out I was back playing semi-pro. I played like one game for them but my body was breaking down.

That’s initially why I got into coaching because I was having a disc issue on my back. When I was coaching for the South County Stags I ended up there because they needed another line coach and a running back coach. So I was like, hey, I can coach running backs. I was happy because if not I would have just sat at home all summer. So that’s initially how I got my start in coaching and then I transitioned into coaching with the Lancaster County Cyclones. We won the GEFA every year I was there, undefeated, and never lost a game. And then I got the phone call from Bill and Coach Mo.

They’re like, hey, you’re pretty good at this. Would you consider coaching at the arena level? And I was like, yeah, I want to coach special teams. I want to be a coordinator. Then that was the birth of the two best special teams co-coordinators in the history of arena football, me and you. Hey, we lit it up that year, man.

Table of Contents

1 Reliving the Glory Days

Reliving the Glory Days

T.J.: Yeah, we did.

Korey Miller: We had a really good kickoff setup going. If our kicker Mitch would have been able to put the ball where we wanted it, I think it would have been a lot better.

T.J.: You have to love Mitch. The low ceiling at Relevant didn’t help either.

Korey Miller: Yeah, there was no chance to hit the uno down there.

T.J.: As he showed us in that championship game that year, he had a solid game.

Korey Miller: Yeah. He killed it in that game. I’ll never forget when Caleb started getting the Mitch chants going when he hits the uno. I thought he was going to cry.

T.J.: He was close. He was close. Those are some of the moments that I hold on to because that was a good day.

Korey Miller: Yeah. That was a great day. We blocked a kick. We did all types. The special teams locked it down. Our old team locked it down.

T.J.: Second half, we started with a kick return.

Korey Miller: Was that Manny?

T.J.:Yeah, Manny.

Player Performance Puts Coach on the Map

Korey Miller: I have to give him a lot of credit. He put me on the map because of what he was doing. I met him when he was playing for a semi-pro team in GEFA. We blew them out badly, and he was yelling on the sidelines something about how I didn’t skip my kid’s birthday party to get blown out by a bunch of bums. You could just tell he’s passionate about football. I didn’t know who he was, but I wanted him on my team.

I think he was the second call I made when I got the Raptors job was to Manny because he’s always been an elite kick returner. So, yeah, I mean you could tell he was and he made our jobs easy. That’s all I’m going to say.

T.J.: It was nice having him and Barry back there on kicks.

Korey Miller: He was always the smallest guy out there but he never let it bother him, and I think it fueled him because he always put in some work no matter where we put him. That kickoff team we had was pretty good too. We had Beamer down there sprinting down, Manny, Rich Adams blowing everything up.

T.J.: D-Lo.

Korey Miller: Oh, D-Lo. Was D-Lo on that team?

T.J.: Yeah, he was early on in the season but he got hurt or he tweaked something, so later in the year he was kind of just a fill-in. But early on he was primary.

Korey Miller: Yeah, you’re right and he was a psycho. He was running down, running and gunning, trying to knock people out. He’s the single most intimidating five-foot-seven person I’ve ever met in my life. He’s got that edge to him. I’d feel bad if anyone would try to mug that dude. He’s got a screw loose. I love guys like that though, you need them.

T.J.: Yeah, he was the glue, both on defense and special teams.

Korey Miller: I think it was when someone did a coverage wrong or something like that he started chewing into him. I was like man, this dude’s freaking nuts.

Joining the Jersey Bearcats

T.J.: So since since Reading went on their hiatus, you joined the Jersey Bearcats and you went on to win the inaugural AAL2 championship game. What made you go to Jersey?

Korey Miller: I wasn’t looking at coaching at all. I was like, so I do stand-up comedy and I was so involved with that and it was taking up so much of my time. And then I think it was Joey Ramirez, from the Bearcats, he hit me up. He said we might be looking for a coordinator, would you be interested? I’m like, I don’t know if I want to drive three hours one way to get up there.

Then Steph, their quarterback, hit me up too and I’ve known Steph for years. I played arena against Steph. He’s a really good dude, funny. He’s a lot of fun to coach. He’s very frustrating to coach at times, but there are other times when he just wants everything to run smoothly because he’s been doing it for so long. It’s tough at that level because you don’t have a lot of arena vets coming in, so you’ve got to teach the arena game to players that can play and it’s a completely different style of football.

I tell people that all the time. Take pretty much whatever you know about football and just toss it out the window. I get it. There have been times that this year we cut some guys that were better athletes because they just weren’t getting it. So, yeah, I got the phone call. Me and AJ talked on the phone for a good 45 minutes. I said, hey, I’ll give it two practices and see if I like it. If I don’t, I don’t. I ended up driving up there after about thirty minutes into practice I was like, I think this is what I’m going to end up doing this spring/summer.

So we started up in I think it was February that year. We only had a two O lineman at the time, well, one O lineman. So I ended up bringing in Steven Nelson the center, the starting center. He unfortunately got hurt when we played Harrisburg this year and he’s finally starting to heal up. I think this is going to be his last year, this coming year. And then I ended up signing two guys out of Lincoln College who were real game-changers. And they actually, signed NAL deals after the season was up. So then we got Jules after week twoand he was a starter for the Warbirds. I think he tweaked his ankle or something, and they decided to just part ways.

So we had a good O-line that year. We started calling it Dudleyville. We had a little Spike Dudley in the middle, and then we had Brother Devon on the right, and then Bubba Ray on the left. And the best part about doing this reference is they had no idea what Dudleyville was because they’re in their early twenties. Like they had absolutely no idea, I had to Google it for him and they thought it was the dumbest thing in the world, but that’s what we ended up going with.

So yeah, that’s how I ended up pretty much Steph recruited me, AJ and Joey. I went up to one practice and made a decision and I was, I’m going to run the O line and run special teams. We had a pretty good special teams unit. In my first year there, the kicker was a little hit or miss, hot and cold. Once we got everything rolling I think we ended up housing four kicks that year. So we had a pretty good scheme kick return-wise. I had two pretty good returners. I had three that could potentially if they caught it, if they saw a crease they would be gone.

So it’s always nice when you have a two-year starter from UMass returning kicks for you. That’s always a nice thing. Then, Sadiq Nathaniel, I think he was all-conference his senior year at Stevenson College for kickoff return and Kyle Ward, of course, everyone knows Kyle Ward. He’s been doing it forever. So once we got the basic scheme down, it was pretty hard to stop.

T.J.: I bet it was with all that on the roster.

Korey Miller: Yeah, that’s always nice when you don’t care where the ball goes as long as it ends up in one of your returner’s hands.

Returning to Jersey??

T.J.: So this past season you guys got back to the semifinal game, so another great season. What do you see next? Are you returning to Jersey next year as well, or maybe checking out a different team, league, or anything like that?

Korey Miller: I got a few offers to go coach. I’ve had three or four teams that have reached out and I’m trying to make a decision right now. I’m waiting on one thing if this one team ends up working out. I’m probably going to sign there. That’s probably what I’m looking at and then I got interviewed for three other teams and then offered one position so far. I think one didn’t get back to me because their coordinator is coming back. So I got some offers out there. I don’t know if I’ll be back with the Bearcats per se, just because the travel is getting crazy.

I had to take off all this time from work, and I ended up putting myself in a hole every single season I have to dig myself out of it for like a month or two after the season’s over. So I’m not a hundred percent sure. I would like to go back there in a perfect world, but unfortunately, it’s just not a perfect world.

T.J.: Gotcha. Can you leave any Easter eggs, maybe ideas of the teams that have hit you up are from?

Korey Miller: My lips are sealed.

T.J.: Had to try. Had to try.

Korey Miller: Yeah, it’s just one of those things that we’ve got to keep everything under wraps until it gets announced.

Comedy Career

T.J.: I hear you. Well outside of football, which I knew a little bit about because we would talk about it, you were trying to get into comedy. We’re still keeping contact on Facebook and I’m always seeing you sharing things. You’re starting to promote shows as well now. What got you into comedy and in what way is that career for you thriving right now?

Korey Miller: Well, it’s one of those things. I’ve always naturally been funny. When I was working at Giant Distribution over COVID, we brought in a bunch of store associates and trained them to be order selectors. I used to just kill it in the break room and just goofing around and one of the guys does stand-up. He mentioned to me, he’s like, you should think about doing stand-up. I was like, that’s something I’ve always thought about doing but just never really itched the scratch, you know what I mean?

Then I started going to open mics with him like two or three days a week. I was terrible when I first started, I was really. It’s way harder than it looks because to take what is funny and make it funny on stage, take it from your mind to a notepad to a stage, and make it funny is very, very hard to do. In the first like three or four months, I think I got two good reactions the whole time. It was something I just had to keep chugging along at. So I’ve been trying to launch Mad Dog Productions about a year and a half ago and I keep trying to get venues to it.

Some venues would back out or they would double the rent payment for the night, stuff like that out of nowhere. So I’ve been trying to get my shows off the ground and I started working for PJ D Entertainment and we have a special events room. That is a very underutilized space and my boss came to me and said, hey, we need ideas for the den. So they called we need ideas for the den to generate some revenue. It just sits back there empty half the time. We only really use it maybe like ten times a year. And I mentioned to him why don’t we start doing stand-up comedy in there.

We kept having meetings about it, kept having meetings about it, and then finally, I just said to him, like, do you guys want to do this? I have four comics that’ll commit to this tomorrow. You know what I mean? If I make the calls, I can get I can get probably like forty people there easily just by word of mouth. Then if they bring some people and we could get the hundred and fifty seat venue, that’s like the max.

So this is one of those things that is slowly gaining some traction. We’ve just had our second show. We did pretty well with attendance and then the whole goal is to get everyone to come over to the other business afterwards and spend money. I think it worked out. We had a little bit of spike at about ten thirty when the show wrapped up to about midnight and then everyone went home. So it’s all about whether can you draw money and that’s that’s my goal. I’m meeting with them tomorrow to talk to them about doing some more events since the first two did well.

We’re talking about doing a roast battle. Team New York versus Team Philly versus Team Harrisburg versus Team New Jersey. So I’ve been reaching out to a few comics I know from the New York scene, a bunch in Philly, and then a few in New Jersey. Our PA announcer for the Bearcats is a professional stand-up comedian. He’s probably going to be the team captain of one of them. My goal, I’ve been trying to put on my shows for like a year and a half. Then I think it was July, we finally got the first one off the ground. It did pretty well.

Then they just, they green-lit it. They’re like, let’s start slow, gain some traction, get a little bit of a groove, and then we’ll go from there. Well, I hope the meeting goes well tomorrow because I’m excited for it. I have all my notes in order. I feel like I’m game-planning.

T.J.: Well I hope you get a lot of good news tomorrow then and it’s awesome that you’re doing well both on and off the field. Hopefully, we can talk again soon and get some updates on all these moves.

Korey Miller: Absolutely man, just let me know. It was good talking with you, see you again soon.