- February 5, 2026
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On the road was how Dave and Erma Miller decided to spend their early 20s. They drove all around, and eventually, along the East Coast.
Sarasota was largely unknown to them at the time, but a cousin lived there — their only connection to Florida. A few days spent in the area soon turned into a few weeks.
Dave Miller took a job with a construction company, and with the financial compensation from a car accident he had been in, he and his wife put a down payment on a home.
So the young couple promptly left their car behind and got on a plane home to Kokomo, Indiana.
“I told our mom and dad, ‘Well, we’re here for a short time, but we’re leaving,’” said Erma Miller. “What a terrible thing we did to our parents.”
They uprooted their lives in 1969 to start anew. Today, nearly 60 years later, this is still home.
Dave and Erma Miller are busy with preparations for one of the premier events on Sarasota BMX's calendar. On Feb. 7, the track will host a stage of the USA BMX Gold Cup Championship Series, bringing together the best riders in the southeastern United States.
A love for bicycle motocross has long burned just as bright as their love for the area. The Millers have volunteered full-time at the country’s oldest continuously running BMX track since 2012, and previously worked as track operators there for 15 years.
Over decades of service to the sport, they’ve dedicated themselves to multiple organizations with local, state, national and international focuses. They’ve contributed to the development of race series, technical rules of racing and race management software at the professional level.
They were inducted into the National BMX Hall of Fame in 2025. And in the same year, the Florida BMX Hall of Fame honored them for a lifetime of impact.
“If you don’t have the passion to do this, you don’t last but a couple years,” said Erma Miller. “You last until your kid quits racing, then you’re gone.”
Their son, Doug Miller, gave them a real reason to care. At 7 years old, he brought home a flyer for a time and skill event, which was to be held at Sarasota BMX on Oct. 7, 1977.
The track was relatively new at the time, having been founded three years earlier. But that one competition was enough to hook his parents. They wanted to get involved.
Volunteering was their avenue to do so.
“You see these kids progress, doing their own thing, coming up with tricks and learning how to compete,” said Erma Miller. “The passion comes because you’re with these kids and the excitement they bring.”
Soon enough, they took on the role of co-track operators in 1980. Dave Miller got busy building amenities while Erma Miller dove into registration.
The years that followed were defined by innovation for both of them. They were on the scene when the track begged Florida Power and Light for old poles to build jumps with and asked the Sarasota Fire Department, before every race, to dump water into holes for riders to jump over.
Dave Miller helped develop the track’s first electronic gate, doing away with the manual model. He and his wife then went to a flea market and bought a traffic light as their new start light.
They initially placed it in the middle of the track, right in front of the riders, but quickly learned that it belonged off to the side through trial and error.
“We didn’t know any better,” said Erma Miller.
In the meantime, she had grown tired of relying on pens and paper to sign up riders and sort them into classes for competition. She enlisted the help of her 19-year-old neighbor to write a race management software to ease the ordeal.
It was implemented in 1986 and eventually bought by the then-National Bicycle League and then-International BMX Federation — now known as USA BMX and Union Cycliste Internationale, respectively.
As appreciation for their services spread beyond Sarasota, the Millers ascended to the state and national levels of motocross.
Dave Miller was state race referee for the Sunshine State BMX Association (1980-95) while his wife was state points keeper and race clerk (1984-99) for the same organization. Their simultaneous and subsequent involvement in the NBL was considerable.
Erma Miller served as national director of field operations (1989-2009) and director of planning and innovations (2010-11), whereas her husband was national referee and set up/truck driver (1995-2009).
Side-by-side, the couple served as the southeast regional race event team for the NBL from 1986 to 2007. That included development, organization and execution of the league’s Southeastern Championship Series in 1993, which was later adopted as the model for all four regionals.
Throughout their BMX pursuits, the Millers always managed to stick together.
“We had one child. In a lot of families, you go this way or that way because you have three or four kids,” said Erma Miller. “So for us, it was all together as a family, everywhere we went.”
They traveled the world when Dave and Erma Miller worked for UCI as race commissaire and chief administrative commissaire, respectively. Erma Miller even served as secretary commissaire for BMX in the 2008 Beijing Olympics — the first Games featuring BMX.
But that wasn’t her greatest endeavor. That began on Feb. 24, 2010, when she presented Sarasota County Parks with a proposal to turn Sarasota BMX into a supercross track and training center.
It took over six years and $2.4 million for her dream to materialize, but in August 2016, the track re-opened and held its first UCI BMX Racing World Cup in November of that year.
Sarasota’s track is now the only one in the country built to Olympic specifications. It will host the final stages of the 2026 and 2027 UCI BMX Racing World Cups, which will serve as qualifying events for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.
“What you put into this is what you’re going to get out of it,” said Erma Miller. “What we got out of this is being able to travel with this sport, learning from all these people from not only local, but (on the) national (and) international. And it’s something that we can still do.”
Dave and Erma Miller knew very little about bicycle motocross when they married in 1964. Over 60 years and one life-changing move later, they’re nearing a 50th year of involvement with the sport.
Together, they'll continue moving forward.
