Focus on Sports
Ice pond to hardwood
Carolyn Kieger comes from a family — and a state — that’s nuts about hockey. So how did she end up becoming a Marquette basketball star? As a child, Kieger honed her skills on the frozen pond in her Minnesota backyard, where she played ice hockey with her parents and five brothers and sisters. When she expressed interest in taking it to the level of organized sport, her father, an inveterate fan of the game, took her straight to the local rec team.
Carolyn Kieger hopes to play professional basketball and then coach — maybe someday at Marquette.
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In second grade, she picked up a basketball for the first time. “As soon as I held it, I knew I wanted to learn how to play,” she says.
Her dad was initially disappointed. But by the time Kieger was a freshman at Roseville High School, she had dribbled and passed her way to becoming a nationally ranked point guard, with six letters and all-state and all-conference credits. The honor student also lettered in softball and soccer.
Kieger was recruited by several colleges; by her junior year she knew she wanted to attend Marquette. “I liked the coaches’ values, the family atmosphere on campus, the individual attention in the classroom,” she says. “Plus, I clicked with the team.”
At Marquette on a student-athlete scholarship, Kieger, a broadcast journalism major, is a star on the women’s basketball team. She has started every game of her Marquette career and achieved more than 1,000 career points and 500 career assists — only the second woman’s player in Marquette history to have done so.
Still an honor student, Kieger was named to the Division I AAA Women’s Scholar Athlete Team and inducted into Kappa Tau Alpha, a national honor society for journalism and mass communication students.
On the team, Kieger is known as an intense competitor and a leader. “I like to set others up to succeed,” she says. “My goal is to make others around me better.”
After graduation, Kieger’s ambition is to play professionally in the WNBA or overseas and eventually coach Division I basketball. “I’d love to come back here to coach,” she says.
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