The Ol' Ball Coach

Milliken prepares to finish career

By Steve Dorsey, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 10, 2007

After 23 years of coaching high school baseball, Russ Milliken has decided it's time to move on. He said Monday this will be his final season coaching at Forest Hill High in West Palm Beach.

Milliken has coached the Falcons the past 12 years, enduring a few seizures as a result of a near-fatal bout with encephalitis after a mosquito bite in 1991. After he came out of a coma that year, a Miami doctor told him there was a good chance he might die. Milliken overcame memory loss and the seizures, though, and has continued to teach and coach at Forest Hill, a storied baseball program.

"If ever anyone was given a second chance at life," Milliken said a few years ago, "the good Lord gave Russ Milliken a second chance. ... The doctor said I was just too stubborn to die."

With two weeks left in the regular season, Forest Hill appears to have a solid chance at making the regional playoffs, as long as it can make it to the championship game of the District 14-4A tournament in Fort Pierce. The Falcons enter tonight's home game against a strong Park Vista team with a 13-7 record.

Milliken said he actually contemplated stepping down after last season, but decided to coach one more year for the Falcons' six seniors. Three of them - Patrick Roedel, Ethan Root and Mike Wunderlich - have grown under Milliken's tutelage since they were 8 and attended his annual summer baseball camp.

Milliken is not calling it quits completely, however. He said he will continue to coach, but it will be at the Little League level at Phipps Park, where his two sons, Madison and Kyle, play. He said he's looking forward to that experience, but he knows it will be an emotional moment when he coaches his final high school game sometime in the next few weeks.

"I really, really enjoy high school baseball, and I don't want to go to the point where I don't enjoy it any more," Milliken said. "My two favorite times of the day are going to baseball practice and going home to my family."

Milliken said the only thing he regrets is that his father, who died in 1982, never had the chance to see him coach. Otherwise, he said it's been a wonderful experience.

"I've had great assistant coaches in Tony Morales and Scott Friday, and I've met a lot of great people," Milliken said. "And getting to know all of the great coaches around here, guys like Jack Kokinda (at Cardinal Newman) and Dave Manzo (at Lake Worth), has been great."

As he took a break from Monday's practice, Milliken stared toward the center-field fence at Forest Hill's Jim Heaton Field, and then in his typical comical manner, gave another reason for stepping down after this season.

"There's only one guy who has been here longer, Jim Heaton, and they named the field after him," Milliken said. "I told my wife I don't want anything named after me because that usually means you've died. ... When I die, I just want them to spread half of my ashes over the baseball field at Forest Hill and the other half over a fishing ground in the Keys."

Copyright © 2007, The Palm Beach Post.