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Loons goalkeeper Tyler Miller opens up about mental health struggles

Saint Paul Pioneer Press - 7/10/2020

Jul. 10--Providence Park in Portland, Ore., has been considered one of the toughest places to play in Major League Soccer. Thousands of members in the Timber Army supporters group are directly over the shoulders of opposing goalkeepers for 45 minutes each match. They often chant, "Dod-gy kee-per!"

If Tyler Miller had heard that chorus at the end of last season with Los Angeles FC, it would have rattled around inside his head, he told the Pioneer Press during a series of interviews.

"Am I dodgy?" he would have wondered. "I can't make a mistake."

Miller should have been enjoying career highs last season -- nine shutouts, 28 goals allowed in 28 games and an 18-2-8 record for LAFC in 2019 -- and his first call-up to the U.S. men's national team for the CONCACAF Gold Cup in June. Instead, that's when things started to go haywire.

During the continental tournament, Miller watched from the bench while compatriots Zack Steffen and Sean Johnson tended the net during the Americans' run to a second-place finish behind Mexico. Without playing a game in six weeks, he fell out of form and found it difficult to return to a rhythm back with LAFC.

"I started not enjoying soccer altogether," Miller said. "I didn't enjoy showing up to training. I didn't enjoy the daily grind or the work that was required of me to be successful.

"Once that started to hit, playing in games, really, they were fun and good, but when it was all said and done, I felt myself constantly in a cloud where I couldn't get out of it."

Miller was nearing the end of his contract and felt like he was underpaid with a paltry $77,565 salary. But with a January trade to Minnesota United, Miller has a new contract through 2022, and a club option for 2023. His compensation is yet to be released by the MLS players association.

Miller shared the difficulties of last season because he wants to remind people that it's OK to not be OK, a trenchant message as Americans struggle through the coronavirus pandemic. Multiple studies have shown how the pandemic, which shut down the MLS season in mid-March, negatively affected mental health.

"It's OK to accept and embrace that there are (bad) things happening right now with the virus and stuff," Miller said. "When you actually accept it, it becomes easier to deal with."

The Kaiser Family Foundation said nearly 20 percent of U.S. adults reported mental illness in the year prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, and their polling in April found 45 percent of U.S. adults reported their mental health had been negatively impacted by worry and stress over the virus.

The foundation said as the pandemic wears on, it is likely mental health burdens will increase.

Miller's funk ran through LAFC's run to setting MLS records for best goal differential (plus-48) and points in a season (72). When the team won the Supporters Shield for the league's best regular-season record, Miller enjoyed celebrating the moment but acknowledged he doesn't know how much that feat means to him now.

As the MLS Cup favorites, LAFC was bounced in the Western Conference finals by eventual champion Seattle and around the New Year, Miller said he felt especially low. He spoke to a sports psychologist, read books and tried mediation.

"My values weren't in the right place," he said. "This past offseason I was struggling to find a club. Minnesota came along and I was very fortunate and happy to be here, but I almost had a little bit of a mental breakdown. I was struggling. There was a day in particular and I was going through everything. That is when I re-evaluated where I want my life to go."

During preseason camp in Florida in January, Miller read Mark Manson's best-selling advice book "The Subtle Art of Not Giving A (Expletive): A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life." The book gave Miller a boost, and he jotted down notes on each chapter.

"I've never done it before," he said, "but I wrote down things that if there was a scenario I could go back and revisit it."

Miller was struck, in part, by the chapter titled "The Value of Suffering," with its focus on the dangers of seeking pleasure, material success, and always being right.

"I almost had developed this false sense of entitlement," Miller said. "That really set me on the downward spiral of (feeling) like I deserved certain things I didn't have, which led me to live in this kind of sense of feeling that I didn't have enough."

Miller said he was a perfectionist dating back to his collegiate soccer career at Northwestern and his first MLS stop with the Seattle Sounders. He then outlined what mattered to him: his family and friends, his work as a soccer player and with a children's cancer organization, the Austin Everett Foundation.

"I'm thankful to get away from my sense of entitlement that I've been living under, and come down to the core values that I care about," Miller said.

Another takeaway was the difference between "fault" and "responsibility" -- that you can be responsible for an occurrence, say, allowing a goal, but losing a game isn't necessarily your fault. Maybe the biggest thing Miller took away from Manson's book was an anecdote about guitarist Dave Mustaine, who was kicked out of iconic metal band Metallica and then started his own successful band, Megadeth.

Mustaine admitted in a 2003 interview that despite the success of Megadeth, he still considered himself a failure.

The book shared another musical example in Pete Best, who was kicked out of the Beatles in 1962. Best didn't have the same musical successes afterward as Mustaine, but his values changed and he said getting booted from the Beatles led him to his wife and then children.

"It has been very liberating," Miller said. "It felt like I had a weight on my shoulders, and getting to Minnesota and United has lifted it off of me and really allowed me to accept so much more in my life and embrace so much more of the journey of this game. OK, now I can go out and play."

Miller and the Loons' first game back is Sunday against Sporting Kansas City in Group D of the MLS is Back Tournament in Orlando, Fla. He said his realigned values helped him get through the quarantine without his vocation.

Miller, 27, said it was challenging mentally and it took a lot of patience, but the principles of the book gave him piece of mind. He hung out with his dog Nash, a husky-border collie mix, while also learning to play guitar.

Loons goalkeeping coach Stewart Kerr is working with Miller for the first time but said the same baseline principle with goalies is at play.

"I think if you are a goalkeeper and you get a game and know if you make a mistake ... you start to play tentatively. You don't play your normal game," Kerr said. "So, I think it's very important for the goalkeeper to know the head coach has full belief in him. Even if he makes mistakes, which will happen, because goalkeepers make mistakes."

Miller has that confidence from Loons head coach Adrian Heath, who in preseason called Miller one of the league's best.

"He has been fantastic for us," Heath said Wednesday. "I couldn't speak highly enough of him. Great young man, on and off the field. Comes in every day, trains really really well. ... As I said, I don't see any reason why over the coming years he can't force his way into" the U.S. national team.

When Miller played in front of that daunting Timbers Army in the 2020 season opener on March 1, he sloughed off their heckling. The Loons won the game 3-1 as part of their 2-0 start the year.

"It just made me laugh," he said. "I was just smiling at them while they said it. I was just bobbing my head to the song. Yeah, cool, cool."

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