Playing the Field: Carolyn Kieger

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In Playing the Field, we profile women who are making an impact in the world of sports, either in competition or behind the scenes. For this installment, we spoke with Carolyn Kieger, who just began her inaugural season as Marquette’s women’s basketball coach.

There’s an interview in a campus magazine from Carolyn Kieger’s senior year at Marquette University in which she said she’d love to come back and coach the Golden Eagles women’s basketball team.

It turns out that wasn’t just lip service. Less than a decade after graduating, Kieger has returned to her alma mater to take the reins of the women’s basketball team after the university didn’t retain the services of Terri Mitchell, who had coached the team for 18 years.

Kieger has arrived during a transition time in the Marquette Athletic Department, with both basketball coaches and the athletic director starting new this season. There will be a lot of pressure to deliver, a lot to learn and big shoes for her to fill. Marquette has had a women’s basketball team since 1975, but Kieger became just the fifth coach in program history when she was named to the position in May. She now finds herself in the unusual position of taking over from one of her mentors.

“It’s a very unique situation. I love Terri Mitchell to death,” said Kieger. “I think this program is amazing, always was amazing. I look at it as that I wouldn’t want anyone else to take over for her other than me. I think it’s a cool thing—I get to build upon what she’s built, I get to build upon her legacy and uphold everything that she stood for and that’s important to me because I’m a big character person and she taught me a lot of that. I’m looking forward to taking this place to its next stage and building a national powerhouse. I’m excited to help and bring this place to a place we’ve all envisioned it could be. It’s not all going to happen overnight. I’m not going to be the only reason it gets there. It can get there and it will get there, but it’s just a matter of when.”

While Kieger grew up in a world where she could aspire to the WNBA or European League play, she said she knew as early as 10 years old that she wanted to be a coach. A point guard on the court, she said the vision, playmaking and leadership skills she developed as a player made a natural transition into coaching.

Kieger was a three-year captain at Marquette. She spent the past six years as an assistant coach for the Miami Hurricanes. In leaving the Midwest to coach in the South, Kieger said she both experienced culture shock and learned to love getting out of her comfort zone. She also found that the style of basketball in the South varies greatly from the style she had grown up playing in the Midwest.

Now as head coach at Marquette, she thinks a melding of those styles will be the path to success.

Fans of men’s basketball often knock the women’s game, deriding it as slow and low-scoring. Kieger called herself a realist and admitted that the women’s game is different from the men’s game, but she thinks the speed of the women’s game is constantly improving and can be brought up. She said the intensity is not the thing the women’s are lacking.

“They are different games,” she said. “I just think at the end of the day we need to focus on what’s important and that’s growing the game and getting a better brand of basketball and getting a better brand of female sports so that the next generation can get better as we go. I know it’s not going to get better overnight. But if we can make little strides every day, then that’s what we’ve got to do.”

One of those strides is pushing pace of play. As female athletes have gotten more athletic, the realization that they can play a speedier style that’s more adapted to long-range shooting has helped bring up the profile of the women’s game. But, Kieger said, those things can’t be done at the expense of fundamentals. Her focus early in the Golden Eagles’ fall practices was pushing the speed of her team’s play while maintaining the fluidity and grace of the game. Kieger admitted those weren’t the prettiest practices.

“We as coaches have to do our job of developing them and being able to teach the fundamentals while being at that pace. It can’t be sloppy. We don’t want to play so fast that it’s chaotic and we’re turning the ball over 25 times. Our goal is to play really fast while staying fundamental at the same time, which is hard to do for the girls in the beginning. [At the beginning of this season’s practices] it looked so crazy, like you want to put a hard hat on, bodies flying everywhere, ball flying everywhere. They just have to push themselves,” she said. “Pushing their comfort zone, I believe that’s when you grow—you grow when you’re at the edge of your comfort zone.”

When Kieger walks in a room dressed for practice, she’s indistinguishable from her players. But that youth and proximity to her playing days are something she said are much more a help than a hindrance. As the game has evolved, so have training techniques. Add to that the different demands being a college student in the technology age faces and Kieger’s ability to relate because she’s lived through it all really sets her apart from other coaches. And she said she doesn’t worry about her players mistaking the line between friendship and leadership—she said her authoritative personality asserts itself on the court and there’s no question she’s a coach and not a cohort when the ball is on the court.

Women’s sports always struggle to get fans to attend, but Kieger said there’s nothing she won’t do to make sure her team gets the support it deserves. From getting her players out in the community to encouraging women’s groups to attend, nothing will be off limits to make sure that there are fans at the Al McGuire Center cheering for the women’s basketball team.

“It’s my job as a head coach to make sure that we’re getting the best environment for our student athletes as possible. We’re going to do anything it takes to get fans in the stands. I’m willing to think outside the box. I’m willing to get progressive and innovative. What that is, I’m not 100% sure yet, but we’re going to try anything. … We, as females, have to do a better job of supporting each other. Females need to watch more women’s sports. When we’re on TV, we need to get better ratings. When our seats are empty, we need to have more females in the stands. It’s our job as females, if we want this: if we want to be comparable, if we want better ratings, than we have to do a better job of getting each other involved in the game. We have to support each other.”

The small generational gap between Kieger and her players means she grew up idolizing Michael Jordan, but her players were able to watch Maya Moore, Diana Tauresi, Skylar Diggins and the rest of the WNBA. The current Golden Eagles were able to grow up in a world where they could dream of playing professional sports. Kieger said that while as many of her players have dreams of going “pro” in something else as do hope to continue playing basketball, she and her staff look to support them in whatever their goals are after college.

“I talk to all our recruits about playing at the next level,” she said. “I want kids that want to play in the WNBA, that want to play overseas. I’m not saying that they have to, but that have that drive. That’s a goal of our staff’s, to help them get there. Much like if they want to be a doctor. That’s a goal of our staff’s, too. We’re going to help them get there. We talk about both. We just make sure that whatever they want to be, we help them be the best version of that.”

At a Jesuit college also competing in big time athletics, Kieger has to find a balance of recruiting players that meet the college’s expectations of well-rounded student-athletes that fulfill the Jesuit teachings while fielding a basketball team that can compete in the Big East against the best programs in the country. Serving both those goals and finding the balance between building a Division I powerhouse while sticking to Jesuit values might be the most difficult part of Kieger’s job.

“It’s really important,” she said. “It’s important to me. It’s important to the administration. It’s important to the whole Marquette community. I want, as a staff, for us to bring in people that represent that and can uphold the Marquette values and tradition on a daily basis—whether it be in the classroom, whether it be on the court. We want kids to come in here that want to be great in every area of their life, not just on the basketball court and I think finding that student athlete that wants to be the best in every area is where we’ll have our biggest success because then they’re going to be competitive not only in practice time, but in their whole time here and they’re going to make Marquette a better place than when we got here and I think that’s the kind of student athlete we need to recruit and we will recruit and that’s when our program will be most successful.”

The Marquette women’s basketball team opens their season Saturday, Nov. 15 vs. UW-Green Bay at 1 p.m. at the Al McGuire Center on Marquette’s campus.