Fifth-year midfielder Sophia Minnite leads Cal Poly women’s soccer through her strong relationships, selfless mentality and determination on and off the field. Her teammates and coaches say she embodies the program’s values and sets the standard for the Mustangs.
Entering her fifth and final season as a part of Cal Poly Women’s Soccer, midfielder Sophia Minnite has officially been designated by coaches and teammates alike as the “heart of the team.”
Having redshirted her freshman year in 2022, Minnite has since become a staple of the program’s roster, having appeared and played in 65 of 68 total regular season and postseason matches since gaining eligibility after her redshirt season.
The “heart of the team” designation is, in part, a nod to Minnite’s role on the pitch. As a midfielder, Minnite is consistently in the heart of the action, which requires her to communicate and connect with both the front line and the back line throughout the match.
Minnite’s role as a midfielder requires her to act as a vessel between both lines in order to maintain the flow of the game by establishing the key principles of the match while also dictating when to attack and when to defend.
But her role as the heart of the team goes beyond just positioning, and instead is due to how her individual traits act as an embodiment of what the team represents.
Relationship-Driven:
Head coach Bernardo Silva says that Minnite is the centerpiece that the program was built around, partially due to her being a relationship-driven individual. This trait allows Minnite the opportunity to effectively lead the Mustangs, and also aligns with the program’s overall goal of being a relationship-driven team.
“As a program, we pride ourselves in being very relationship-driven, and Sophia is an exact example of what being relationship-driven means,” Silva said. “We always talk about accountability being a sign of love, and so when the time comes to figure out how to bring the team from ‘Point A’ to ‘Point B’, she already has the relationship and trust established.”
Building and maintaining good relationships with her teammates is a large priority for Minnite both on and off the field, primarily due to how forming close relationships with teammates often yields new, more effective ways of communicating and playing with each other in real matches.
“I start by building close friendships with them off-the-field in order to gain that trust and respect, and then the connections I make with them off-the-field can be taken onto the field to hold them accountable and keep them constantly improving,” Minnite said. “Having soccer conversations with your teammates is really important because little things can come from that, like what type of ball they want on the field or how they want to be encouraged or held accountable”
The Mustangs’ relationship-driven approach is seemingly beginning to blossom into improvement for Cal Poly, especially on the offensive end – a frontier in which the Mustangs have shown early-season struggles. After scoring more than one goal in a single match just once over the course of their first six matches, the Mustangs recorded an offensive explosion in their most recent match against Pacific University, which they won 4-1.
Cal Poly’s four goals in a single match were the most since the Mustangs’ 5-1 win against the University of Nevada on Sept. 22, 2024.
A Warrior’s Mentality:
In addition to being a relationship-driven program, Silva underlined the need for the program to adopt a warrior’s mentality at its core, emphasizing the urgency of centering the team around individuals possessing mental and physical grit, alongside a team-first mindset.
As one of the veteran-most players on the squad, Minnite has grown to be one of the grittiest and most selfless players on the team, according to Silva.
Minnite’s warrior-like mentality was put on full display in the match against then-No. 1-ranked Stanford at the beginning of the season. Halfway through the match, one of Minnite’s shoulders popped out of its socket. Rather than quit on the game, the fifth-year had it popped back into place before continuing to play the rest of the match.
The well-being of the team was on her mind the entire time.
“It was about that I want to be a leader on the team and don’t want to be taken off the field in such an important game, and I can put the team above my individual needs,” Minnite said. “I think pain is just a mental thing, and so I think being able to focus on the collective in that moment was what made me make that decision.”
The Stanford match was not the first time Minnite’s shoulder had popped out. Due to her hyperlaxity, a genetic condition that means Minnite’s joints are looser than the average individual’s, it is easier for injuries such as dislocations to take place.
Surgery was considered during the off-season to amend the issue and help keep the joints in place, but upon learning the recovery time, Minnite declined the surgery and insisted she’d play through the issue.
“We talked about the surgery over the offseason, but the problem was that it would keep her out for a lot of the offseason,” Silva said. “And so Sophia made the call to deal with it on her own and strengthen her body on her own by putting in extra workouts and doing PT when needed to make it as good as possible – that’s exactly the role model that you want to model your team after.”
Embodying the Mottos:
What sets Minnite apart the most, according to Silva, is the way in which the midfielder is able to embody the program’s two mottos of the season – “have an empty stomach” and “we here”.
“Have an empty stomach” ensures the Mustangs remain hungry after coming off one of their most successful seasons in program history that saw Cal Poly win the Big West and play in the NCAA postseason tournament.
“We here” is built off of last year’s motto, “we coming”, and describes the responsibility that Cal Poly has as the reigning Big West Champions to embrace and overcome every challenge the season has to offer.
“It’s fascinating because as a 5th-year senior, she is still excited to come to a training session to get better and level up her own game in a way that is like she’s a 13-year-old that is trying to figure out how to play the game,” Silva said. “And it’s how she’s framing it. She’s like, ‘coach, I’m just so excited about training because I get to work on something that I’m not good at.’”
One of the ways in which Minnite has sought to improve her game was on the offensive frontier, especially after seeing the ways in which the program was struggling to get its wheels off the ground in terms of scoring.
“She’s taken it upon herself over the course of the last week and a half to really level up in how she contributes to the team in an offensive manner, and that’s the hunger that I’m talking about,” Silva said.
Minnite’s efforts and status as the “heart of the team” do not go unnoticed by others within the program, with her efforts remaining the standard for what others in the program should work to achieve.
Minnite’s ability to act as a role model for what the team represents, according to senior forward and co-captain Annika Smith, is a large factor that drives the rest of the team to seek to improve as a unit.
“She’s all of our identity and all of our core values; like, that’s just her as a person,” Smith said. “So, we just kind of try to take little pieces of her into our team because she just has so much to offer that we want everyone on our team to kind of be like her; she’s just so well connected that she can sprinkle herself into other people.”