David Miller aspires to turn reborn La Salle baseball into a ‘destination program’

In the nearly 48 hours since his announced return to La Salle’s revived baseball program, David Miller combed through 550 text messages. Some were congratulatory wishes on his return to Philadelphia; some were his former Manhattan College players looking for their next move upon his departure from the Bronx.

His phone hasn’t stopped buzzing, and it won’t for a while. Miller is returning home to where he grew up, where he started his burgeoning baseball career at Chestnut Hill Academy. It’s where he coached Penn Charter to a 2014 Inter-Ac title, then took on his first college coaching job at La Salle, capturing a school-record 32 wins before the program was shuttered.

Two separate coaching stops and three years later, Miller wants to “take this team where we had started to take it three years ago.”

“Really exciting. I’m really happy to come home. Really happy,” Miller said. “I never sold my house when I left here; I still live out in Wayne, so I’m home. I moved my apartment out and [moved] out of the Bronx, so I’m already ready to go.”

The journey back for Miller has been humbling, he said. It changed the way he coached. He’s a much more relaxed coach now, after stops at Penn State Abington, where he set a school record with 33 wins in 2022 and coached the Division III national player of the year, Ryan McCarty. At Manhattan, he was 44-64 over the last two seasons.

Even from a distance, Miller stayed in contact with La Salle athletic director Ashwin Puri, who was hired away from Villanova last year. As the push for bringing back baseball grew stronger, Miller offered advice on the direction of the program, should it return. About a month after La Salle announced its intention to reinstate the baseball program while adding four new sports, Puri reached out to Miller, informing Manhattan’s athletic director that Miller was a top candidate for La Salle, which got the “juices flowing” for Miller’s possible return.

“I still stay in touch with most of my former players from La Salle, so I almost felt like I never really left,” Miller said. “But La Salle is where my college head coaching career started. So I feel like that truly always was my home. And I still do. I have dreams of turning La Salle baseball into a destination program in the Northeast.

“To me, baseball in Philadelphia, it’s just such a staple.”

Miller understands that the landscape of college sports has changed since he left La Salle. The rise of name, image, and likeness deals and collectives will impact his ability to rebuild the Explorers from scratch.

Navigating the new era, in which NIL deals factor into decisions to commit to a program or enter the transfer portal, will be important in the roster construction, especially early on. La Salle’s baseball team won’t return until 2025-26, but Miller is ready to embrace the challenges that lie ahead.

» READ MORE: La Salle baseball is coming back. Here’s what some former Explorers think about it.

“La Salle baseball isn’t going to be a program that’s going to be able to go out and offer the NIL deals that the Power Fives [can],” Miller said, “but you can’t come in and bring in 40 high school players. … You want to look at trying to bring 15 to 20 high school kids, and 15 to 20 kids who are in the portal that might have went to a program and they were just buried behind some studs or they went to a program that wasn’t the right fit for them. We [also] have to attack the junior college level.”

Added Miller: “The best part is, I have a year and a half to do this, so I don’t need to rush to get a team ready to go for this fall.”

Miller is also confident in his strong recruiting record, along with coaching and developing talent to move on to the next level. He’s had four nationally ranked recruiting classes between his time at Manhattan and La Salle. Though he coached McCarty for one season at PSU Abington, he introduced him to several big league baseball players, including former Toronto Blue Jays catcher Pat Borders, whom he played with briefly. (Miller was drafted 23rd overall by Cleveland in 1995.) McCarty went on to sign a contract with the Blue Jays.

Some of his former La Salle players were drafted in recent years. Tatem Levins, who transferred to Pittsburgh after the 2021 season, was selected in the eighth round of the 2022 draft by the Seattle Mariners. David Smith, a Perkiomen School graduate who left La Salle after the program announced it was cutting baseball, excelled in two seasons at Connecticut before being selected by Detroit in the 14th round of the 2023 draft. There’s also Ethan Pecko, who left La Salle in 2021 for Towson, and was drafted in the sixth round by the Houston Astros in 2023.

But before Miller begins constructing a team, he’ll need to hire his coaching staff and re-familiarize himself with the campus. And maybe that will include pushing for renovations to DeVincent Field.

“We’re talking with the athletic director about doing some fundraising to try to enhance the baseball field,” Miller said. “Maybe next year, when we start play, we’ll have a beautiful ballpark to come to where we can start getting some energy and excitement and some fans at these games from the community.

“Philly is just such a great place,” he added. “I just want to build it all back up to what it could be, what it should be.”