Miller put Tupelo back on top after 20-year drought
Heading into this year’s Class 7A state title game, it had been 20 years since Tupelo had captured a girls soccer championship. It’s only fitting, then, that the coach who guided the Golden Wave to a championship in 2006 helped end the two-decade-long drought in 2026. Shelley Miller’s Tupelo squad knocked off Northwest Rankin, the back-to-back reigning champion, 2-0 in the championship game to put the Golden Wave back on top.
Miller is the Daily Journal’s 2025-26 Girls Soccer Coach of the Year. “I think in ‘06, we were supposed to win,” Miller said. “We had a lot of very, very talented players.
We were probably the most talented team in the state that year. So, to kind of get to experience and to watch kids of that talent level buy into the program and then to watch kids that maybe, not that they’re not talented players but maybe are the underdog players, also buy into the same expectations and consistency and culture that we used in ‘06. It’s pretty neat to see that different groups can all buy into the same culture, no matter where they stand.
” Tupelo made it to the state championship game last year, only to lose 3-0 to Northwest Rankin. But that loss gave a young Tupelo team a lot of valuable experience before turning the tables on the Cougars this year. “I think it was the reason we won,” Miller said.
“I think had we not made it last year and seen what the environment was like at the state championship game and felt the feeling it felt at the end of the year to lose it, it became the beginning of our season. We used the word TIM all season – The Inches Matter. We had an inchworm in our locker room because the first two goals in the state championship game last year were scored by inches.