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On Nov. 30, 2023, Saint Rose head coach Laurie Darling Gutheil was struggling to face her team as she stood in a Philadelphia hotel suite. Junior attacker Mia Klammer sat beside her freshman sister, Piper Klammer. After Saint Rose’s ongoing playoff run, the sisters planned to return for one last season with the Golden Knights.

That idea was dismissed within a matter of minutes.

A donor had called Gutheil minutes before the meeting. Saint Rose — where Gutheil had spent the past three decades coaching women’s soccer — was permanently closing after 103 years.

Tears streamed down Gutheil’s face as she ripped off the bandaid. She told the team to remain focused on its upcoming Sweet 16 matchup against Adelphi University, as if it were at all possible to do so while its school was collapsing. Players’ phones began to buzz, opposing coaches descending on the program’s carcass like vultures. Mia sat crestfallen as her teammates burst into tears.

Saint Rose’s season ended less than 24 hours later. Piper scored the final goal in the program’s history. It was assisted by Mia.

“We probably would have won a national championship with that group,” Gutheil said. “It was just something that you would never think would actually be possible.”

The sisters never got a chance to realize the picturesque finale they’d vividly planned. After being named Division II Player of the Year, Mia was forced into the portal and transferred to Syracuse. A season-ending knee injury in 2024 delayed her debut. Now fully healthy, Mia is second on the Orange with three goals through four games in 2025, finally given the chance to rewrite her own ending as the engine of SU’s attack.

It’s an opportunity she’s rarely been afforded in her soccer career.

Mia’s first club team, the Mahopac Rockets, disbanded when she was in middle school. As a senior at Mahopac High School in Mahopac, New York, Mia concluded her career from the sidelines due to COVID-19. And despite 44 career goals with Saint Rose, she never captured a national championship before the school’s unexpected shuttering. In her final year of eligibility, Syracuse might represent her last chance at closure in a sport she’s played for all of her life.

“(Saint Rose’s closure) was a heartbreaker, but everything happens for a reason,” Mia’s mother, Nicole Klammer, said. “We’re happy she’s at Syracuse now.”

After bouncing back from a knee injury that kept her out for all of 2024, Mia Klammer has scored three goals and notched two assists for SU. Courtesy of SU Athletics

Years ago, when the Rockets disbanded, Mia’s options to continue her soccer career were limited. Her hometown offered few club soccer teams. While her father, Peter Klammer, was an assistant coach with the Mahopac Elite, Mia was too small for his team.

One of his fellow Elite coaches, Joe Colatruglio, approached Peter with a proposition. He happened to coach the Mahopac Legacy, a younger boys’ club team. If Mia was too small for Elite, why not try out for Legacy?

Despite looks of disbelief from parents in the bleachers, Mia made the team. It was from that experience, Nicole said, that Mia developed a sense of toughness which has become ubiquitous to her playstyle.

Mia was lightly recruited out of high school, an issue of underexposure, exacerbated by the pandemic. The summer before her senior year, Peter connected with Division III Farmingdale State head coach Chris Roche, who offered Mia a chance to play alongside his team at a tournament in California.

Impressed by what he saw, Roche reached out to a friend at Saint Rose. Though he couldn’t offer her a scholarship as a D-III program, he was determined to ensure she’d get one.

“Listen,” Roche said to Gutheil. “This is a girl for you.”

In the fall of her senior year, Mia visited Saint Rose, and she committed to the Golden Knights that December. Gutheil knew she’d pulled off an absolute coup. As a freshman, Mia immediately slotted in as her strongest attacker.

“In my program, talent has no grade or age,” Gutheil said. “We gave her the opportunity to impact the game in the way that we believed that she could.”

Through three years with the Golden Knights, Mia started 59 of her 60 appearances. She netted double-digit goals in all three seasons — and assisted 38 more. She earned Northeast-10 Rookie of the Year honors, All-American honors, Player of the Year honors and collected a laundry list of other accolades.

Opposing teams caught on, defending her more aggressively to limit her offensive output. It never seemed to work.

“Whenever you have a player with that superstar talent and ability, some are going to try to just disrupt by physical dismantling,” Gutheil said. “You’ve seen it with (WNBA guard) Caitlin Clark.”

Entering the Sweet 16, the Golden Knights hadn’t lost a game in 2023. They were a sterling 20-0-1, having already defeated Adelphi twice in the past month in dominant 3-1 and 4-1 victories. Their impending matchup should’ve been a mere formality, an unstoppable force meeting a moveable object.

That was until Gutheil pulled the team into her suite.

“That definitely had an effect on how we were playing,” Mia said. “It was just heartbreaking to find out that way. Especially when you find out that the news was leaked.”

Joe Zhao | Senior Staff Photographer

Every Saint Rose player was entered into the transfer portal. Brandon DeNoyer — Syracuse’s assistant coach — immediately recognized the opportunity before him.

The reigning D-II Player of the Year was without a team for her final year of eligibility. And she was dead set on remaining in New York, wanting to be as close to family as possible.

“I don’t wanna say she fell into our laps, but we had everything marked up to be correct,” Syracuse assistant coach Alex Zaroyan said. “I think there was a bit of luck.”

That luck evaporated as soon as Mia touched the pitch. The duo of Erin Flurey — now at Auburn — and Mia, expected to provide the Orange with the offensive firepower they needed to compete in the Atlantic Coast Conference, lasted one exhibition game.

On Aug. 8, 2024, a UAlbany defender sidelined Mia with a tackle. The official diagnosis was an MCL sprain. If all went well, she might’ve had a chance to return in two weeks.

Two weeks turned into three. Three turned into four. It was Sept. 8 — exactly a month since the injury — and SU was set to host St. Bonaventure for its Senior Night. The Klammers sat down with Syracuse head coach Nicky Thrasher Adams.

“Her rehab wasn’t where it should have been, and they were (playing) some of the best teams in the country,” Peter said. “We figured, ‘You know what? Why not redshirt and try to come back as a healthy player for the next season?’”

Over the next months, Mia became especially familiar with Corey Parker — Syracuse’s strength and conditioning coach — and then-assistant athletic trainer Meagan Bevins. Her days were filled with physical therapy and light load-bearing exercises, progressively rebuilding her knee to full strength. When Mia wasn’t working with SU’s training staff, she was studying film religiously and asking questions about the team’s play style to make a seamless return.

“It’s almost as if she’s had another season under her belt playing when she hasn’t,” Zaroyan said.

Peter contends that no athlete — even Mia — can ever return from an injury at 100% of their previous strength. He ballparks his daughter’s knee at around 99% of where it was before. If there is a difference, it’s so minute that no one could notice it.

In training, Zaroyan takes into account a variety of statistics — such as distance traveled and top speed — to quantify athletic performance, setting a baseline that aligns with professional leagues to account for the competitive demands of the ACC. He said Mia’s metrics are “off the charts.” He often finds himself telling her to ease her intensity during practice to ensure she remains healthy.

“She works hard, which is a good problem to have,” Zaroyan said. “You’re pulling the reins back on an athlete, rather than telling an athlete, ‘Hey, you need to work harder.’”

Mia was the lone scorer in Syracuse’s first setback of the season — a 2-1 defeat to Niagara on Aug. 17. The goal wasn’t enough for her. A loss is a loss.

For years now, Mia has asked Peter for critiques after every game. Sometimes, she listens, like in 2023, when she scored four goals against Saint Anselm after Peter told her to shoot from farther out. Sometimes, she doesn’t, like in her freshman year at Saint Rose, when she opted to score with a header instead of corralling the ball with her feet like he suggested.

The day following SU’s defeat to Niagara, Mia called her father. His notes were mostly positive, especially with how she’d adjusted to her new team, but there was always room for improvement. In the not-so-distant future, there might come a day when Peter doesn’t have any critiques on his daughter’s performance.

It’s only then that the clock will strike midnight on her soccer career, and Mia can walk away knowing how it felt to achieve perfection.

Published on August 27, 2025 at 10:37 pm
Contact Mauricio: mjpalmar@syr.edu | @mpalmarDO