CLOSE-UP : At Granada Hills, It’s Miller Time

At halftime of his team’s City boys soccer playoff game, Westchester High Coach Howard Smith walked across the field to meet the Granada Hills coach. He stopped next to a cooler, where a woman was talking to several of the Granada Hills players.

“Where’s the coach?” Smith asked, eyes fixed on the woman’s face.

In the next moment, Smith realized he had found her. Her?

“I generally get the same reaction,” said Midge Miller, coach of the Highlanders. “When I say I’m coaching a team at Granada Hills people ask ‘Well, how are the girls doing?’ ”

The shock ends when they hear of Miller’s experience and her team’s 11-4 record this season. Miller, 42, has played soccer for seven years. She’s coached youth leagues and has two sons that play.

Miller has been an English and business teacher since 1968, most of that time at Granada Hills. Several years ago, she asked school officials why there wasn’t a girls soccer program on campus. They asked her to coach one; she declined because of time conflicts.

The offer resurfaced in 1984 when the boys coach fell ill.

“But I never considered it was going to be the boys varsity team,” Miller said.”

So far, except for some minor friction with some of the other male coaches at Granada Hills, it’s been a smooth career. The team enjoys playing for her and thinks she knows her stuff.

Said halfback Sean Platt: “People always ask if she’s a good coach, or just supervising?

“They wondered why I didn’t go to Chatsworth. When I said I went to Granada they said it didn’t have a good soccer team. Well, we’re still in the playoffs and they’re not.”