Jon Kiester enters his fifth season as the head coach of the Missouri S&T women's soccer program and hopes that an experienced team will lead to a spot in the Great Lakes Valley Conference Tournament this fall.
The Lady Miners have made gradual improvement during Kiester's tenure as head coach and the team finished last season with its highest win total since 2003 by going 7-8-2. Missouri S&T's 29 goals scored during the season were the most since the 2000 season.
Missouri S&T posted a record of of 6-12-1 in 2007, which included a late-season win over a Missouri-St. Louis team that reached the championship game of the GLVC Tournament. The Lady Miners won four of its final five games in 2006 after a slow start and moved up three spots in the conference standings as a result. S&T finished with a 4-13-1 mark, but was involved in a number of close, low-scoring games throughout the season, as they gave up more than two goals in only two games over the course of the year.
Missouri S&T ended its first season under Kiester with a record of 4-12-3, but eight of the games were either ties or games the team dropped by one goal.
Kiester took over the program in the spring of 2005 after spending the previous six years as an assistant coach at the NCAA Division I level. He was an assistant coach at the University of Oregon prior to his arrival in Rolla, where he handled a number of responsibilities, including pre-game planning, recruiting, off-season conditioning and other administrative duties including serving as the assistant director for soccer camps.
Prior to his stint at Oregon, Kiester was an assistant coach at Baylor University for two years.
Kiester, who holds a U.S. Soccer Federation "B" license and an NSCAA Advanced National Diploma, started his coaching career in 1996 at South Torrance High School in California, where his 1998 team won the California Interscholastic Federation co-championship and posted a perfect 14-0 record in the Ocean League. He earned CIF "Coach of the Year" honors following the 1998 spring season.
From there, Kiester moved on to the collegiate level, beginning at El Camino Junior College where he served as an assistant coach with both the men's and women's programs during the fall of 1998. After one season at El Camino, he accepted the women's assistant coaching position at Baylor, where he helped to recruit one of the nation's top classes for the 2000 according to Soccer Buzz magazine.
He has also coached ODP teams in Oregon as well as club teams in southern California and Oregon, including a team that won the Oregon under-17 state cup in 2004. Kiester also coached Torrance United Soccer Club's under-18 team to a league title and the League Cup championship in the same year.
Kiester earned a bachelor's degree in history from Hawaii Pacific University in 1994, where he served as a team captain for three seasons. He went on to play professional soccer for two years with the Hawaii Tsunami.
"The attitude around the Missouri S&T department is very friendly and family-like as well as very professional," Kiester said. "I am looking forward to developing a winning attitude for this season."
