THE SINGULAR TALENT

The 2000s saw a number of scoring records in scholastic field hockey as skills and knowledge about the right way to play the game flowed through the high-school game. Every year brought a story about a teenager making the U.S. senior women's national team pool, whether that player was Katie O'Donnell, Katelyn Falgowski, or Katie Reinprecht.

But there was one more extraordinarily talented player, one who left behind a body of work and a work ethic that has made the team successful even after she graduated and began college less than two months after winning a state championship.

As the story goes, Chantae Miller was at the far end of the field at Williamsville (N.Y.) North High School for fall field hockey tryouts in August 2002. That first practice was for the middle-school players in the school's modified field hockey program, while the varsity and JV hopefuls for the high school were warming up on the other end.

Miller's field hockey experience was modest; she had only picked up the game a couple of years earlier to give her sister Brittany a hitting companion when she was a varsity player at rival Williamsville East. But in the 2002 practice, she used her extensive AAU basketball experience to wrong-foot opponents, and her travel softball muscle memory gave her the kind of hand-eye coordination needed to dribble around people. She even exhibited a reverse shot during that first practice, that was seen out of the corner of a very important person's eye.

"Go get me that kid -- right now," Kris LaPaglia, the varsity head coach, told her assistant.

It took a few minutes of convincing the seventh-grader to try out for the varsity, and it took more time and effort for her to train to make the team ("I fell flat on my rear end doing a footwork drill the first day of varsity practice," Miller remembers), but even before the regular season began, she was penciled in as the team's center midfielder.

Think of this: the previous certified record for assists in a field hockey career was 95, and Miller exceeded that record by some 20 percent even if you include only her last four years. In other words, she didn't just break the existing record; she up and crushed it.

Part of Miller's success is the fact that she has always been ahead of her peers in terms of physical traits and academics.

"For me, I matured really early on, so it wasn't an issue for me, physically," Miller says. "In truth, I don't see much wrong with allowing middle-schoolers to play on varsity teams under the right terms and conditions."

Miller's physical gifts, and the fact that New York Pubilc High Schools Athletic Association allows seventh- and eighth-graders to play on varsity teams, put in place the scenario for unprecedented success -- both individual and team. With Miller in the midfield and as the team's penalty corner striker, she willed her team to an NYPHSAA Class A championship in 2007, defeating several wonderful teams such as Greene (N.Y.) and Shrub Oak Lakeland (N.Y.) on the way to the title.

"There's only a few people who have that internal drive, and Chantae's in that group," LaPaglia says. "Her aspiration has been to be on the Olympic team, and she's got that natural desire to become better. She gets in that mode, can feel if the team is slipping, and she knows when to elevate the level of her play."

Part of Miller's development has been within the U.S. high-performance system, where she has been on one of the USA-Canada Challenge teams and was named to a U-19 Futures Elite touring team in Holland.

The coach for that team was Rolf van der Kerkhof, who was coaching at Michigan State University.

"He pulled me aside and told me during the tournament, 'You remind me more of a Dutch player than an American player,' I considered that a great compliment coming from him, and then he told me, 'I need to see more of your American side from you,' " Miller recalls.

Once Miller committed to Michigan State to play under van der Kerkhov, she and her family explored an unusual step: accelerating her graduation from Williamsville North to give her a head start on the rest of her field hockey career.

"Originally, we were considering sending me over to Europe so I could stay with one of our family friends and play with a local club," Miller says. "But once Rolf heard about that, he said, 'Why don't you start at Michigan State early?' "

Miller enrolled and took part in spring hockey only a few months after winning a state championship, contributing from that very first spring. In her two seasons at Michigan State, she has recorded 20 goals and 18 assists in 22 starts as a winger.

At Michigan State, she roomed with Jeamie Deacon for two years, and has been taking advantage of her teammate's appetite for tapping into the team's video library, looking for ways to get better.

"She's always wanting to watch either one of our games, or one from the Olympics," she says.

Whether Miller gets to pull on that red, white, and blue, however, is questionable.

"She's had injury problems over the last couple of years, but passion-wise, she can absolutely make it onto the national team," LaPaglia said. "Her road is endless."

Indeed, while numbers can measure Miller's greatness in terms of the number of goals she scored or set up, there's one more measure of Miller's greatness. Williamsville North not only won a state championship in the fall of 2007, the program was able to make the state final the next two years -- without her.

"She set a standard for us back when she was in seventh grade," LaPaglia says. "With her work ethic rubbing off on us, you'd think we were playing the game 24-7. The great thing is that we were able to fill out the team now from those 17 to 18 players up to 25 now. It's not that those kids are filling shoes. The core group who were freshmen when we first made a state title game are now juniors, and they never forgot that experience of winning the state championship."