Four years can come and go in the blink of an eye. Just ask any college athlete. One athlete who now finds herself in her fourth and final season is Stanford women’s volleyball senior setter Kami Miner. Before the season, Miner took the time to chat with CardinalSportsReport.com about how she’s feeling about her senior year and what she thinks the team can accomplish.
Now that she’s a senior, Miner can’t believe this is it. One final season on The Farm. Rather than being sad about it, Miner is excited and eager to see how the season unfolds one match at a time.
“Yeah, I'm really excited,” Miner said. “It's crazy that it's my last year here. But I'm excited for us to get traveling, get going. We’ve put in a lot of good work this preseason. Gotten better. We’ve improved on a lot of things from last season throughout the offseason and the spring with this new group, so I'm just excited to get out and compete with the new younger group. But it'll be really really fun. I’m excited.”
On the move to the ACC for her final season, Miner is thrilled for the opportunities that the league possesses and the chance to visit places she hasn’t been before. She has some friends at Louisville and Pittsburgh, so those are two programs she’s especially excited to face.
“Yeah, I'm just excited to travel to a lot of different places I haven't been before,” Miner said. “I think Louisville and Pitt, I have a lot of good friends on those teams and I'm excited to be able to get to go to those campuses and play again. We played Louisville last preseason so it was really fun to get to travel there and then both those teams just great programs, great players, and so I'm excited to get to compete against some new faces.”
With it being a different team than last year with a talented crop of freshmen arriving and key veterans leaving, Miner has made it a goal to really build chemistry with everyone on the team. If she is going to set people up for easy kill opportunities, it’s imperative that she knows her teammates’ tendencies on the court inside and out.
“Yeah, I think it's been just reestablishing setter-hitter relationships with of course the returning players and then with the new freshman and I think something that's exciting each year because every person is different,” Miner said of what she’s most been focusing on. “But especially adding some new hitters. It's been really fun this year particularly to get to know everybody and get to know what they need as a hitter and to be able to play around with speed and tempo and I think we've gotten all those relationships established and so we're ready to actually show out and perform in the games and so I'm excited for that.”
While each season presents new challenges and opportunities for growth, Miner can’t really say which year she had the most growth in from year to year. That said, something that she feels is unique about her senior year is it’s really given her a chance to focus more on her teammates and their needs.
“Yeah, every single offseason I think it's like the previous year was there's no way I could make, you know, another jump, but I think that time in the spring and in the winter is just so valuable I don't think I could really pick a year,” Miner said. “I think from junior year to this year, it's been really really cool to kind of just get really external and not be so much internal focused on myself and improving, just focus on what I can do to help my teammates be better and I think that that's been really really fun to do from this past season coming into this season and just focus more on my leadership role and just getting to know all the younger players and I think it's cool how it changes from year to year with what your focuses are.”
Being a setter, Miner has a lot of control at her fingertips. She plays an incredibly important position on the court that literally sets her teammates up for opportunities to put balls away. She likes having all that control and being someone who can dictate so much of what happens on any given play.
“Yeah I I'm kind of a control freak so I like being the person that's in control and has you know full control of the offense and what we're doing offensively and getting to really just use my own IQ to kind of facilitate the game and I think that's really really fun to be able to get to do that,” Miner said of what she most enjoys about her position. “I think that's probably my favorite part.”
When Miner does graduate, she knows that Stanford will be in good hands with freshman Taylor Yu stepping into the setter position. She’s had a lot of fun getting to know Yu and helping her improve her game so that she can carry on the great tradition of setters that have played on The Farm.
“Yeah, it's been really really cool for me to get to see her improve and us to be spending so much time together and working together and getting to give each other feedback and help each other out on the court as setters,” Miner said of Yu. “It's a unique kind of relationship you have with the rest of the team. So for us to kind of get to communicate and just with tempo and the new hitters and the way we want to run the offense, it's always great to have someone you can get really close with and rely on and work with and us working together on the court and working with all the new hitters and being in that process together has been really really cool and she's so so talented and I'm really excited to see what she does the rest of her career here once I'm done.”
One teammate who will be getting a lot of assists from Miner this season is junior outside hitter Elia Rubin. Miner and Rubin have a great connection on the court and a lot of trust in each other. Miner is impressed with the way Rubin has improved her game and become such a reliable person for her to feed the ball to.
“She's incredible,” Miner said of Rubin. “She's one of those people that I never have to worry about how she's going to perform or what sort of energy she's going to bring to the court. It's just she's always so consistent. Such a rhythm player and just brings so much fire and passion.
“She has so much passion for the game of volleyball and it's something that I've absolutely loved playing with her in my time here and I have total trust in her in any moment on the court and so I'm excited for her coming back to be that big kind of player that will take those big swings and that will be that kind of rhythm player for us.”
On top of having great teammates, Miner loves the coaching she has received from head coach Kevin Hambly. She likes the way Hambly allows her to go out there and play her game without having to think too much. That’s made it so much for easier for her to run the offense and do what she does best.
“Yeah it's been it's been awesome getting to work with him the past, this is going to be the fourth year and I think we have a great line of communication and he really has given me free reins to make decisions that I feel are best for the team and with the offense and allowing me to kind of play freely and not feel like I'm getting too much feedback or too much coaching where I can't make my own decisions,” Miner said of Hambly. “And I think that we've really established that great kind of connection between player-coach in terms of giving me the freedom to run offense how I think is best.”
Another person who has been a major help to Miner is her father Harold Miner, a two-time champion of the NBA Dunk Contest. Given the nickname “Baby Jordan”, Harold had a four year career in the NBA with the Miami Heat and Cleveland Cavaliers after a standout career at USC. He was named Pac-10 Freshman of the Year in 1990 and Pac-10 Player of the Year in 1992. He’s one of the best players to ever come through USC’s program and has been someone who Miner can go to for advice on how to be the best that she can be in her sport.
“Yeah it's invaluable,” Miner said of the help her father has been. “I think having someone that's been to the top of sports in where I want to be, have someone to constantly pick at their brain and give me just advice on everything from how to take care of my body, how to deal with pressure, all that stuff throughout like the progression of my volleyball career has just been so invaluable to me. And so for us to have such a great relationship and if I'm ever stressed about anything I can always come to him, ask him, get advice from him and so it's such a blessing to be able to have someone like that to rely on.”
While her father was an amazing basketball player, Miner never felt pushed to go into hoops. As a matter of fact, she never seriously considered playing basketball. It was soccer and tennis that she first played before figuring out that volleyball was the best sport for her.
“Everyone asks me that. I actually never played basketball,” Miner explained. “I was a tennis player and then I played soccer. That was my big sport for a couple years and then one of my teammates’ moms played volleyball at Texas and college and so that's how we kind of transitioned into volleyball all of us from soccer.
“So it was never a basketball or volleyball sort of thing. He never kind of forced that upon me. I had free reins to choose and so it ended up being volleyball over soccer and then I ended up just running with that.
“Yeah I think what I liked most about volleyball in comparison to tennis specifically was just the team aspect. I didn't like kind of it being just me and the court and being alone. I like playing off of others’ emotions and being in the grind with other people and other girls and building those relationships. And so that was something that I loved when I transitioned to soccer and then eventually just volleyball, I think the sport itself I just was super passionate about and fell in love with that and then was able to continue to rely on that kind of team aspect and so that's why I ended up sticking with volleyball.”
Even though she doesn’t play soccer anymore, Miner as a former midfielder still enjoys watching the sport when she can and having friends on the Stanford women’s soccer team. She loves the way all the athletes at Stanford support one another and have such a close-knit community.
“Yeah, they're a super talented team,” Miner said of the women’s soccer team. “I have some really good relationships with the girls that are in my class that are also seniors here this year and so we love going to their games, getting to support them when we can and they'll be coming to ours, too. And so it's cool to have that relationship with other women's sports teams here and it makes it really really cool. It's special about the athlete at Stanford.”
On the academic front, Miner is majoring in economics. She loves her major because of the incredible professors she has and the support she gets from the entire department as an athlete.
“Yeah I am an economics major and so a lot of math classes that I've taken here at Stanford and yeah, I'll be finishing up my degree this year and I think there's been some incredible professors that I've been able to have here at Stanford that are super supportive,” Miner said. “Some of them, they even come to some of our late night matches here at Maples and then I'll go to class the next morning and see them in class and lecture and so it's been it's been such a huge support from everyone within my degree specifically and then kind of broader in terms of just academically at Stanford. It's been so many resources and wonderful people that are so supportive of us traveling in my athletic pursuits with here and with USA volleyball and then broadly and so I think it's been, I have had a wonderful time here.”
Known to be one of the tougher majors on campus, Miner is enjoying the challenges that come with economics. Macroeconomics is one class that stands out as being challenging, but really every year has brought something fresh and new that has forced her to expand her understanding of the subject.
“Yeah I think Macroeconomics was definitely tough or tougher, but all of it it's been really cool to be able to learn all the different kind of areas of economics in my time here and I still have more to go as I finish up my degree this year,” Miner explained. “And so they all have their different reasons why they're more tough than the other one because they all have slight differences but it's really really cool and really applicable to just my life after college.”
With it being her final season at Stanford, Miner knows it’s now or never for her to get to the Final Four. Two straight seasons of losing in the Elite Eight was painful, but rather than wallowing in the pain for too long, she’s used it as motivation to have her best year ever as a senior:
“Yeah I think I allowed myself for sure to sit in that pain of that loss for some of the offseason going into winter and then just reframing my perspective once we got into winter practice with the team we would be bringing back into this season.
"Just taking what I could from that loss and rewatching the game and seeing what we could improve on and really using that as just a chip on the shoulder sort of situation to motivate us coming into this year and I think it's something we've talked about a lot as a team is using that loss to grow, but not allowing it to be kind of the end all be all sort of definer of our team. I think we've redefined ourselves a lot culturally from last year to this year just because we have a new group and we have a lot of new players and so we've used it as a motivating factor more than anything.”
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