‘It’s a Blessing and It’s Surreal’

The following article was written by D. Scot Fritchen, and posted on kstatesports.com, along with the pictures. Trenton Miller is the grandson of Veda Miller and the late Duane Miller, and John and Malee Berkley all of Stockton. His parents, Danny and Thui (Berkley) Miller, are both Stockton High School graduates.

Meet Trenton Miller. The 29-year-old Topeka native and Kansas State graduate is gabbing with Kevin Durant in a Paris hotel, he’s editing Grant Hill’s 25th wedding anniversary video for Instagram while sitting on a couch in an empty arena, he’s watching BarackObamasurprise the USA Basketball team at a 50th reunion at the Bellagio in Las Vegas — Miller shook hands with Rolando Blackman and Mitch Richmond, among other former superstar players — and each day Miller is dropping viral content on the USA Basketball social media accounts as he chronicles the USA’s run to an Olympic Gold medal.

Miller is the USA Basketball senior manager of digital communications, a position he’s held since 2019, and the K-State public relations graduate is in the thick of living a dream. He’s on day 21 of a 38-day jaunt living out of his suitcase, a journey that began when he left his Colorado Springs home on July 4, hit Las Vegas for 11 days, flew with the team to Abu Dhabi for two games, then traveled to London for a pair of games. Now he’s in Paris for the next two and a half weeks. Olympics. Four years funnels down to two weeks. The day that began with a run at 5:30 a.m. ends with Miller recapping his voyage on Zoom at 8:02 p.m. live from the Marriott Ambassador Opera Hotel in Paris. In a swirling world of hoops and practice and media and NBA and WNBA superstars and travel logistics and crowds of fans, quietness fills Miller’s hotel room — a rare novelty in a ceaseless grind that might only halt for the National Anthem.

“All these people stand outside here,” Miller says. “There are so many people who’ll wait hours just to see the players and they might not even say hi or sign anything. We’re the Beatles. It was that way at the Bellagio. It was that way in Abu Dhabi. We show up at a train station and before we know it there are cameras everywhere.

“There’s weight in those three letters, U-S-A, and everybody knows it.”

Miller is responsible for creating digital content, overseeing USA Basketball social media accounts and assisting the communications staff with the overall effort and publicizing of USA Basketball. He is immersed in diversity. The USA Basketball video director hails from Harlem, New York, his video manager is from Greenville, South Carolina, and his boss is from Denver. In all, there are more than 30 USA Basketball employees. Miller controls Meta, X, Tic-Tok and Instagram, posting photos and video clips that bring USA Basketball fans that much closer to their hardwood heroes during an overseas quest to bring home the gold.

Miller is charged with sending out content on the men’s and women’s USA Basketball teams, and the men’s and women’s 3-on-3 basketball teams. That’s four teams representing in Paris. A ton of action. And a ton of storythis telling.

“My day to day is following these guys and making sure we provide the social coverage to our USA Basketball channels and provide that connectivity as a liaison between the athletes and coaches and team and fans back home,” Miller says. “Right now, we’re not doing as many things that are super edited or longform. We still do those pieces of content, but we don’t do as much of it because we want the connectivity to be right there and the lifespan in the social media community is so small that we just have to churn and burn. That’s the nature of it.

“Everybody has to wear a lot of hats. You have to be assertive and take ownership of things. That’s perhaps why they liked me for role because I can do those things. My experience at K-State helped me to do that.”

Miller served in the K-State Sports Information Department, his skills rooted in writing and public relations. A December 2016 graduate, Miller spent more than three years assisting the K-State athletic communications department in various roles, including game day media relations activities surrounding K-State’s football, basketball, track and field, tennis, volleyball and golf teams. He spent the summer of 2015 as a training camp marketing intern for the Kansas City Chiefs and the summer of 2016 as a communications intern at the MLS Philadelphia Union.

He earned an internship with USA Basketball and was named USA Basketball’s digital communications assistant eight months later on Septemcrazy. ber 1, 2017. He was promoted to his current position one year later.

And now he’s here in Paris. And it truly is churn and burn.

“Woke up, got in an early run because there’s no time the rest of the day, then the men’s team practiced over lunch,” he says. “The commute was a little longer here because of the logistics with Paris traffic. You have to eat a big breakfast because you’re going to miss lunch. After we practice for a couple hours, we have media availability, come back to hotel, go through the day’s content. We don’t overthink it. People want to see LeBron, KD and Steph every day. We have the evenings to work more. Then, it’s rinse and repeat.

“Today was kind of Steph and KD did a news conference at the main press center here in Paris and there was a lot of global media, hundreds of people in a room for 30 minutes.”

It's one of the many things that Miller says he’ll remember most about his Olympic experience.

“The satisfaction is really being in this moment and going to these places with these guys and having surreal opportunities,” he says. “I’ll always remember being with KD today. I have a lot of those moments with the women’s team as well. It’s not really the ‘likes’ or the ‘clicks’ or viral videos, it’s the in between things where I’m like, ‘How am I a guy from Topeka living this?’ Those are the things that bring me a lot of happiness.”

So, does living the dream ever become taxing?

“My video guy and I came back from a 3-on-3 practice and we were pretty taxed,” Miller says. “At that moment, we were like, ‘This is tiring.’ But we were pretty positive in the moment, too. I was like, ‘This is what we sign up for.’ You want four teams in the Olympics. No other federation has four teams in the Olympics. We do, so that’s a blessing. We signed up for this, man.

“It’s a blessing and it’s surreal. Every day, we get to do this.”

There are plenty of highlights Miller plans to bring home with him from his Paris experience, but when asked to describe his favorite moment, he pauses.

“It hasn’t happened yet,” he replies. “It’s winning four gold medals. That’ll happen on August 11.”