A look into Northwestern’s ace’s winding path to the mountaintop of the Big Ten.
On May 7, 2023, Ashley Miller threw her final pitch for Michigan State in a 3-1 loss to Indiana on the last day of the regular season. The Spartans’ loss dropped them to 14-32 on the season and the team failed to qualify for the Big Ten Tournament. Aside from the disappointing season, Miller knew something was wrong. As much as she appreciated her three seasons in East Lansing, she no longer was having fun playing softball — the sport she loved.
One year and one day later, Ashley Miller has been named the Big Ten Pitcher of the Year.
Three days after her final outing in green and white, Miller entered her name into the college transfer portal. After coaching turnover and a career-low 4.22 ERA in 2023, Miller felt like Michigan State was no longer where she was supposed to be. Practices and games weren’t fun for her, and Miller said after talking with friends and family, she realized that being a student-athlete who wasn’t enjoying one-half of that title was not the way it was supposed to be.
Approximately 240 miles west on the I-94, Kate Drohan and Michelle Gascoigne took notice of the newest name in the transfer pool. Northwestern’s head coach and assistant coach were in the midst of a promising postseason run but identified a potential game-changer for their 2024 roster in a former opponent.
“We opened up the 2021 Big Ten-only season against Michigan State and they threw in this freshman at the end of the game,” Gascoigne said. “I think she shut us down, like six in a row, and we were like ‘Who is that?’”.
That pitcher, of course, was Miller, who put together a stellar freshman year that earned a spot on the Big Ten All-Freshman Team. She took her game to the next level in her sophomore season, improving her ERA from 1.98 to 1.81 while tossing over 190 innings.
With that quality of player on the open market, the Wildcats were quick to pounce. Drohan said the staff reached out to her as soon as she entered her name in the portal. Miller heard from a variety of Big Ten and SEC programs but had three main criteria on her wish list. First, she knew she wanted a new experience with a fresh start. In addition, she wanted a chance to make an impact and win a championship. Finally, she prioritized a school where she could receive a great education.
With Northwestern checking all the boxes, Miller lined up an official visit to Evanston. She arrived on campus to watch Northwestern defeat Kentucky and Miami (OH) in the Evanston Regional and advance to the NCAA Tournament Super Regionals.
But that trip wasn’t Miller’s first foray in Evanston. Heck, that may not have even been the trip that had the biggest impact on Miller’s eventual decision to come to Northwestern. For as much as Drohan and Gascoigne had scouted Miller and dreamed of getting that elite spin rate and lethal drop ball in a purple uniform, Miller had been scouting Northwestern too.
When Northwestern hosted Michigan State back in 2022, a series Northwestern swept, Ashley Miller couldn’t help but look over to the other side of the infield.
“[Northwestern] played with so much passion and so much joy for the game,” Miller said. “I just remember being in the third-base dugout thinking, ‘I want to be in that first-base dugout. I want to be on a team that plays like this.’”
Although on paper NU looked like the perfect fit — the academics, the ability to compete for a title and even familiarity with some players considering Miller played travel ball with Northwestern’s Kelsey Nader and Lauren Curry when they were 16 — Miller wanted to be thorough with her decision.
She conducted her own research and consulted her parents, who Miller described as “the most supportive people in [her] life.” When Miller, who calls herself an indecisive person, asked for her parents to offer advice on where they thought she should go, they responded with an adamant, “No, we’re not deciding for you”. Instead, Mike and Sharon Miller simply told their daughter, “If you’re happy, we’re happy.”
A little over a month after entering the portal, Miller put pen to paper, making her commitment to Northwestern official. The rest of the Big Ten may not have known it at the time, but that decision would prove to be one of the most monumental dominoes of the 2023 offseason.
After a much-needed break from softball over the summer, Ashley Miller was refreshed and eager to get back to the sport. Once it was go-time for summer conditioning and training, Miller said she had a new sense of excitement and “felt like a freshman again.” She relished the opportunity to go in and show her teammates and coaches that she was the player and person Northwestern thought it was adding in the portal.
As her competitive side kicked back in and she reminded herself, “Hey, I belong here. I can do this,” she began to fall back in love with softball. Her coaches quickly noticed how focused and determined she was to make the most of her final season of college softball.
With presumed starter Lauren Boyd unavailable to play with an injury, Miller was thrust into ace status from the onset. Northwestern fans immediately saw what the transfer was capable of. In her first start for the Wildcats, Miller tossed a complete seven-inning shutout, striking out a season-high 11 batters and only allowing four hits as Northwestern captured an opening day win over Arizona State.
Miller continued to bamboozle batters throughout the non-conference slate. The grad student carried a minuscule 0.93 ERA into the first Big Ten series of the year — a matchup with Michigan State, her former team. The script writers could not have drafted it any better.
Miller admitted it was “kind of weird” to face the program she had been such an integral part of for three seasons. But with nothing but respect for her former school, she tried not to think too much of it and committed to focusing on playing her best.
Miller’s stat line that weekend? 14 innings pitched, one run allowed, 19 strikeouts and a 2-0 record.
Around this time is when the lofty comparisons began to trickle in. Miller took the circle for the ‘Cats in 2024 after Danielle Williams spent the previous five seasons blazing one of the most legendary careers of any twenty-first century Wildcat athlete. Williams exited with 106 wins, the program’s all-time record, and her name was synonymous with Northwestern softball during one of the team’s most prosperous stretches. Murmurs of “Danielle Williams 2.0?” began to surround Ashley Miller, but Drohan warns against making any types of comparisons.
“I think everyone in our program works really hard,” Drohan explained. “And when I mean everyone in our program, I mean our entire coaching staff, all of our stakeholders. We work hard to give our women permission to be themselves. So what a shame it would be if she tried to be someone different…We don’t want Ashley Miller to be Danielle Williams. They’re one of a kind.”
Miller knows this. She said she doesn’t feel the weight of stepping into Williams’ shoes, and said that’s not something anyone could ever get close to. She described Williams as “the sweetest human ever,” and mentioned how much she’s appreciated the support from Williams and the Northwestern alumni. All Miller focuses on is doing the most she can to help the team.
And Miller has certainly done plenty to help the team. She is a primary reason why this Northwestern squad, who many expected to take a step back in 2024 after the departure of Williams and several other program icons, finished atop the Big Ten regular season for a third consecutive season. The Wildcats had not accomplished the back-to-back-to-back feat since 1985-87.
Miller’s 1.34 ERA leads all qualified pitchers in the Big Ten, as does her .164 batting average against. Her 16-4 record is among the best in the conference, and three of those four losses came in 1-0 early-season defeats before the offense had found its footing. As Drohan puts it, “She gives you a shot to win the ball game every time she takes the field.”
Oh, and she’s accomplished all this while earning her Master’s Degree in the Kellogg School of Management.
So will Miller’s newfound award recognition affect the way she pitches? Probably not. Miller’s trophy case has already gotten substantially heavier this season with a handful of Big Ten Pitcher of the Week honors and appearances in national Top 10 pitcher rankings, but Miller said it doesn’t play much of a factor.
“We’ll hear about it, talk about it, and then we’ll flush it really quickly,” she said. “So we acknowledge it and we own it because, yeah, we deserve that and it’s awesome to be recognized like that. But Kate does a great job of letting us know, ‘Hey, it’s awesome to get that recognition. But know that the true goal is ahead this coming weekend.’”
The weekend Miller was referring to was the final regular season series against Indiana that clinched the Big Ten regular-season title for the Wildcats, but this upcoming weekend holds similar magnitude. With three wins in the Big Ten Tournament, Northwestern can win its second consecutive conference tournament and become the first team since Michigan in 1995-96 to win both the regular season and tournament titles in back-to-back seasons.
After the conference tournament, Northwestern will have the chance to compete in the NCAA Tournament — something Miller has dreamed of doing since she was a kid growing up in small-town Indiana.
“I don’t think I could ever see myself or would have expected to be in this role,” Miller said. “Growing up, you’re watching the World Series and you’re watching these kinds of games on TV. And it’s like, ‘Wow, I wish I could be out there.’ So it’s really surreal now that I am, and we’re one of those teams that’s right there in the mix.”
In the NCAA Tournament, almost any game can be your last, and Miller knows there is a finite amount of time remaining in her college career. She said that the “lasts” are easy to get caught up in, but she uses it to savor her final season and leave it all out on the field with no regrets. “It’s good knowing that in two months from now, I’m going to be wishing I was back playing again,” she said.
Suffice to say, Miller is pleased with her choice to enter the transfer portal and commit to Northwestern, but not just because of the on-field success, accolades and championship-chasing. Miller has rediscovered the joy in softball. She’s having fun again. She shouted out her teammates and coaches as major reasons for the transformation.
“I think no matter what this season entails for the rest of the remainder of the season, I can always hang my hat on the fact that I’ve made great relationships with my teammates and we’ve made a lot of great memories,” Miller said. “I think that’s what really matters anyway. You’re not going to remember the scores of the games but you’re really going to remember how you felt with your teammates and those funny stories of stuff that happened on the trips.”
Her coaches have noticed that newfound jubilance too. “I think that’s the thing that I’ll remember most about this year with her,” Gascoigne said. “Just being able to see that fire come back in her, I think that’s a special thing.”
When that fire is lit, as it has been for all of 2024, there is no scarier sight for batters in the Big Ten.