Ciera Min started golfing at age 7 so she could spend more time with her dad. That and she liked playing with his club covers and acting like they were puppets. But it didn’t take long before she joined the Big Island Junior Golf Association and the sport became her one and only hobby.
College coaches took notice as she climbed the junior ranks, and during the early hours of Sept. 1, like clockwork, the Waiakea High junior started receiving recruiting emails from schools all over the mainland.
After months of “stress,” her decision came at 3 p.m. on St. Patrick’s Day. Always a bulldog on the golf course, Min gave her verbal commitment to accept a full scholarship to compete for the Division I Gonzaga Bulldogs.
Now, Min figures it’s time to live a little.
“I golf, that’s all I do, but’s it’s all paid off, all the times I had to tell my friends, ‘Oh, I’m sorry I can’t go here or I can’t go there,”’ Min said.
“I have a bucket list. I’m going to the volcanoes, I’m going to the beaches. I’m going to learn how to surf before I go.”
She chose the school in Spokane, Wash. — sight unseen — over similar offers from Washington State and the University of Oregon in part because of the strong bond she felt with coach Brad Rickel. It’s a similar relationship she shares with swing coach Kevin Hayashi and previous mentor Kyle Shimokusu.
“(Coach Rickel) was very one-on-one with me. It was different,” Min said. “All the coaches were great, but I felt a deeper connection with coach Brad. I don’t know if it’s because my coach has always been coach Kevin and he’s a guy. The program is really growing. They’re always in the top 100, but it’s really grown. I liked the program enough that I could commit before even seeing the campus.”
As an added bonus, Rickel’s wife is a professor in sports management, Min’s major-to-be. One day, Min would like to be — no surprise — a golf coach. She already knows one of her future Bulldogs teammates, having teamed up with freshman Alice Kim of Honolulu to win the Mary Cave Cup in 2010 outside San Diego.
“(Alice) has told she me everything is good at Gonzaga, and Alice is a real honest person,” Min said.
