Tammy Millsaps arrived at the NEPSAC Girls Scholastic Showcase on June 13 a few hours before her new Dexter Southfield team would compete. Millsaps wanted to get a sense of the landscape; she had never been involved with NEPSAC basketball before. After some time, she walked up to Ayo Hart, the showcase organizer, with her first observation.
"I said, 'Is it usually this quiet in the gym? I'm a little fiery,'" Millsaps said. "Anytime there's a ball thrown up and officials are on the floor, I'm in coaching mode."
Millsaps, one of the most highly-regarded high school coaches in Connecticut, is taking over one of NEPSAC's most entrenched schools and girls basketball programs after Dexter Southfield and Kristen Campopiano parted ways following last winter.
Many recent head coaching hires in NEPSAC girls basketball have been younger names. It's often their first time as head coach at any level. Millsaps is a stark outlier; she's been a head coach at the high school level for 14 years in addition to her previous collegiate coaching experience. She knows her reputation as a passionate, demanding winner in Connecticut.
"I'm an intense coach," she said. "I have high expectations. I think a lot of coaches have a lot of high expectations for their players, but I've first got to look at myself. I have high expectations for myself and how I prepare — how I'm an athlete myself, a former athlete, continuing to keep myself in great shape — so I'm not telling the kids to do anything I'm not doing."
Millsaps is referring to her Division 1 playing career at VCU. She was a high school standout in North Carolina, but her college career was derailed by a torn ACL. After college, Millsaps first thought she'd try television. At age 22, Millsaps was helping out former Virginia men's star Cory Alexander at a summer camp while she also worked for NBC.
"It was there that I saw that I could be a really solid coach — that I saw that I picked up on the game easy," she said. "I understood strategy. I knew how to teach the drills. I knew how to teach a certain work ethic, and the kids would listen. So I decided I was going to lead a legacy as a coach."
Millsaps started at the college level with stops at Bloomsburg (Pa.), Virginia Union, NJIT and Southern Connecticut. Then she earned her first high school head coaching job at Capital Prep, immediately catching fire and leading the school to four consecutive Connecticut state titles as part of a nine-year stint. Millsaps spent the last five years at New London High. She led New London to a 2023 CIAC championship with a seven-girl varsity roster (and only five rotation players, Millsaps adds).
Along the way, Millsaps has coached a slew of elite high school talent. That includes Kiah Gillespie (a McDonald's All-American and 2020 WNBA Draft selection), Desiree Elmore (who played in college at Syracuse, Seton Hall and Rhode Island before a pro overseas career), Serenity Lancaster (a former New London star who is now one of New England's top prospects at New Hampton) and more.
"One thing that I've learned that works, no matter where you are, is set the bar high. They'll climb up there and they'll get it," Millsaps said.
The bar will be high at Dexter Southfield. Dexter was sixth out of seven Class AAA teams last winter but remains loaded with young talent. Leading the program is Ella Peper, ranked fourth in the national 2028 class by ESPN and one of New England's top prospects in recent memory. Millsaps has already marveled at Peper's versatility on the wing, her athletic gifts, and her desire to be great.
"One thing that, as a coach, I look for in players that have tremendous potential is their coachability," she said. "Ella wants to be coached, and she wants to be coached tough, and she's got the right one. She wants to be pushed. She wants to be a leader. She wants to be the one to lead everything."
Beyond Peper, Izzy Adams, Avery Bollin and Brooke Nunnally-Gardner headline the many college-bound talents on this roster. Youth showed itself in last year's roller-coaster season before an eventual quarterfinal loss to Tilton. Millsaps wants to establish higher standards for her players; she specifically emphasized discipline in post-practice recovery and stretching. She also thinks building confidence is important, especially on a still-young roster.
"All they want to hear from a coach at the end of the day is a coach say, 'You busted your tail for me. You ran through a wall for me. You gave it your all.' When kids can hear those type of kid things from the coach, they're going to run through a wall for you,'" Millsaps said. "And that's what I've been able to do in my years of coaching, is just feed into kids and give them so much encouragement and support that they want to play for me."
Though Millsaps is a coaching veteran, she's still learning the prep school ropes. Recruiting talent to Dexter is a new dimension to the high school level she's not used to. The opponents are, for now, unknowns.
But Millsaps left New London to seek a new opportunity. She first looked at Division 1 assistant coaching jobs before hearing about the Dexter opening. When Millsaps found out about the talent on hand and the program's potential, she couldn't pass up the chance. Now she expects to deliver.
"I really think that this is a program that could be a top 25 program in a matter of three or four years," Millsaps said. "I'm a big thinker. Some people might hear that and think, 'That girl's crazy,' or, 'Let's wait and see.' I've always been that way. I'm a big thinker, and I think that we can be a national program in three or four years."
