Jul 16, 2025 By Jerin Steele 4 min read

Sam Miller started pondering his baseball future a couple weeks ago when he learned that he probably wouldn’t be drafted this year.

Coming off a second consecutive strong season at Columbia that resulted in him being named Ivy League Player of the Year, he wondered what interest he’d garner in the transfer portal.

It wasn’t an easy decision.

Finish off his career at Columbia and get an Ivy League degree or see what was on the other side?

He chose to follow his dream of playing baseball in a major conference and now he’ll be lacing up his spikes in the SEC.

Miller, a Peters Township graduate, officially committed to Florida last weekend.

“I wanted to test the waters and see what the portal was like,” Miller said. “It’s not something I decided at the end of the spring. I was committed to coming back to Columbia, but about two weeks before the draft I started to think about it. It was a really tough decision, because I’m really close with the guys at Columbia.”

Miller said he talked with his family about the difficult decision of giving up a potential Ivy League degree to pursue a higher level of college baseball and they were supportive.

When he entered the portal, he said he had SEC schools contact him within five minutes.

It quickly became clear that Florida would be the best fit.

“A lot of the schools were saying the same thing where they had three other guys, but we want you to come in, but Florida told me I was their guy,” Miller said. “They said they wanted me to work for it and produce, but showed they really wanted me. I want to see if I can do it at the SEC level.”

Miller hit .355 with a dozen homers as a sophomore at Columbia and followed that up with an even better junior year. He had 16 home runs, a .407 on base percentage and a 1.013 ops. He led the Ivy League with 57 RBI.

Columbia won the Ivy League and made the NCAA regionals. The Lions upset Southern Miss in the opening game of their regional, but lost their next two games and were eliminated.

“It was pretty cool to build on last year,” Miller said. “I was more known this year and teams came in with a plan on how they wanted to pitch to me. I succeeded through it. My sophomore year nobody really knew who I was, so I was getting a lot more pitches. This year I had to really work for it and still ended up having a better year, which I thought was awesome.”

Another difficult part of the decision for Miller was no longer having the opportunity to play with one of his best friends, Jack Kail.

Kail and Miller were teammates at Peters Township before they went to Columbia together. They were double play partners at Columbia, Miller the shortstop and Kail the second baseman.

“We’ve been playing together since we were seven years old,” Miller said. “When I called him and told him what I was doing, he told me to go chase my dream and that it was what we always wanted to play at the highest level. He was very happy for me and very supportive.”

Miller spent the early part of summer playing in the MLB Draft League in Morgantown for the West Virginia Black Bears. He said playing there was an “unreal experience” and learned plenty about the mental side of baseball.

He’ll spend the rest of the summer training at home before heading to Florida.