Lisa Brown-Miller’s Legacy Will Carry On

The hockey world lost an icon earlier in May.

Lisa Brown-Miller, a member of America’s first IIHF Women’s World Championship squad and a gold-medal winner with the 1998 U.S. Olympic Women’s Ice Hockey Team died on May 2. She was 58 years old. 

The Union Lake, Michigan, native was inducted into the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame in 2009 as a member of the 1998 Olympic team. Brown-Miller also was inducted into the Providence College Athletics Hall of Fame in 2008 as a member of the 1998 Olympic team.

She played in six World Championships where she totaled 13 goals and 25 assists in 30 games. At just 5 feet 1 inches, Brown-Miller was the tiniest player on that Olympic squad, but coach Ben Smith said she played way bigger than her size. Teammate A.J. Mleczko described her as the smallest player on the team with the biggest heart. 

Brown-Miller left her job coaching the Princeton University women’s team in 1996 to train full time for the Olympics. She knew how special it would be to play in women’s hockey’s Olympic debut and worked to make the team, but she did it at great personal cost, recalled her teammate Chris Bailey.

“Lisa chose to forgo her personal and professional life,” Bailey said. “She sacrificed for her sport and dove into preparing for the Olympics. She was extremely focused, extremely intense and a vicious competitor. If she was going to try to go to the Olympics, she was going to be focused only on that. She wasn’t going to be able to do multiple things while preparing and give everything that she would want to give. That wasn’t her nature. Her nature was to go all in on things.”

Even still, Smith said Brown-Miller was humble. When it came time to reveal the final roster, Brown-Miller assumed she had not made it and was packing up her belongings, prepared to return to Michigan from Lake Placid, New York, that very night. The idea was laughable to Smith when he heard about it afterwards.

“If Brownie is not on this team there’s almost no reason to have a team because she’s the epitome of a team player.” Smith said. “She wasn’t a flashy player or a superstar-type, but she was an ingredient we had to have.”

Smith said that Brown-Miller’s commitment and tenacity while also looking to put a spotlight on the team instead of herself made her somebody the players could rely on. On a team of players still in their collegiate years, Brown-Miller also fulfilled the role of an additional coach, Smith said.

In the high-pressure environment leading up to everyone’s first Olympic experience, Smith said he and his staff asked a lot of players both physically and mentally. By virtue of her work ethic, drive and will to win, Brown-Miller set a standard for the team that drove them to be better. 

“She never wavered. She knew exactly the price that had to be paid and paid it, and her teammates rallied behind that and followed her,” Smith said. “And if the others didn’t meet her there, they wouldn’t have been able to look her in the eye.”

Bailey said that the team naturally looked up to Brown-Miller by virtue of her age — at 31, she was the oldest player on the roster — and her national team experience. Fiery and fierce on the ice, Brown-Miller was the kind of player that led by example and pushed her peers to be better, said U.S. teammate Cammi Granato. No one wanted to disappoint Brown-Miller, she said. Brown-Miller’s will to win drove the team.

“Lisa set the tone in terms of what level we were going to compete or participate,” Bailey said. “If she was sick or injured or not with us for a practice or gym session, we noticed. She was the fabric of that group. That was a team filled with a lot of high-performing people cut from a similar cloth and she still stood out and was a role model. She always brought the team up a notch.”

Never the loudest person in the room, Brown-Miller most often led by example, said Smith. When she did speak, the team really listened, said Granato. 

“She talked when she had something to say, and it was always meaningful,” Granato said. “Everyone respected her with the way she conducted herself and the way she worked and her personality.”

The word former teammates and coaches used most often to describe Brown-Miller was “gritty.”

She was a battler and tough as nails. She outworked and outskated the best players in the world. She hated to lose, even during drills in practice.

Granato remembers endless circles of skating drills from blue line to blue line where no matter how hard everyone else on the team skated and focused on it, they couldn’t catch or outskate Brown-Miller. 

“She made all of us better. She was the ultimate teammate,” said U.S. and Providence teammate Cindy Curley. “I don’t think anyone who ever played with her could honestly say that they didn’t hustle a little more and try a little harder in the corners because of Lisa. She was all about the grit and the determination. It made you a better player, practicing against her every day. An opponent is going to fight every step of the way for the puck and that’s how Lisa was. She never gave up. She just knew where to be. She had great hockey sense. She was just a once-in-a-lifetime, smart hockey player.”

If only for her perseverance, skill and success, Brown-Miller would be remembered as a legend of American women’s hockey. But to only look at how she performed on the ice and in the weight room only paints part of the picture of what made her such a special member of Team USA. 

Brown-Miller was just as fierce off the ice in her support and care for her friends and teammates, said Curley. When it came to anything other than hockey, Brown-Miller was the kindest and softest person Curley knew. 

“Off the ice, she would give anything to anyone,” Curley said. “She was an outstanding person. She was kind and caring and giving. But on the ice, she wasn’t giving anyone anything.”

That dichotomy — the ability to go full steam on the ice and be a caretaker for the other players off it — is what Curley said makes Brown-Miller such a role model. 

Brown-Miller was decades ahead of her time in that way. 

“In those days, leadership tended to be autocratic. We didn’t necessarily see empathy or self-awareness as primary goals of leadership,” Bailey said. “Today there’s a much more holistic, high empathy and emotional intelligence approach. The things we look for in leaders of business or sports today, Lisa was already doing almost 30 years ago. She was a high-performance athlete that set a tone of humility, empathy and self-awareness.”

Granato remembers Brown-Miller’s humor, saying that she can still close her eyes and hear Brown-Miller’s unique and infectious laugh.

“She had a great laugh and a great smile,” Granato said. “When she laughed it would make everyone else laugh. She had a sly smile and then she’d giggle, and it just spread through the room.”

She was also an attentive listener who was fully engaged with the people she spoke to, said Bailey. If Brown-Miller asked about a teammate's mood or well-being, she really meant it and genuinely wanted to know the answer.

“What I want people to know and remember about Lisa is that yes, her work ethic was unmatched, and she set the tone, but just as importantly, she was selfless in the most competitive environment you could ever find yourself in,” said Bailey. 

Brown-Miller was unselfish without sacrificing her competitiveness. She had the ability to turn the aggression on when it came to competition but then channel that passion differently when it came to interpersonal relationships off the ice, said Curley. She showed her teammates how to be the best player and the best human being — to be difficult and pesky and unbeatable on the ice, but funny and warm off it. 

Brown-Miller didn’t just set the tone for the 1998 gold-medal winning Olympic team, but she set a template for the work ethic required for U.S. women’s hockey players to have success. Her influence will continue to echo throughout the game thanks to the impact she had on everyone around her. 

Story from Red Line Editorial, Inc.

Brown-Miller’s memorial service will take place on Friday, May 16, at 11 a.m. ET.

For those unable to attend in person, the service will be livestreamed on YouTube and Facebook.

In lieu of flowers, donations may be made in her honor to the following organizations:

Lisa Brown Miller Memorial Fund — Southside Ice Arena
Providence College Women’s Hockey
Boston University CTE Center
West Michigan Wildlife Conservancy

 

Source: usahockey.com