A graduate of Kettle Moraine High School, and a former member of the Kettle Moraine Lasers women’s basketball team, Frede’s path was far from concentrated and focused, taking her first to Valparaiso before landing at a university less than 30 minutes from her home.

But Frede doesn’t feel frustrated by the roundabout path she had to take to get where she is.

“I don’t look at it as a mistake going (to Valparaiso),” she said. “I think where I was at when I graduated high school, I do think that’s where God wanted me to go to school,”

Frede, who sat out last year because of NCAA regulations governing intercollegiate transfers, is considered a junior eligibility-wise and will play the next two seasons for Marquette.

Frede will see most of her minutes rotating in as a member of head coach Terri Mitchell’s “post-by-committee,” along with freshman Christina Quaye and sophomore Sarah Shouse. At 6-foot-1, she is undersized for the post, but she can hit shots from the perimeter.

“There are three of us at center, and we kind of each have our own individual goals,” Frede said. “I like to shoot outside and drive and stuff like that.”

After a successful high school career at Kettle Moraine, which included a Division I state championship during her junior year, Frede was recruited by several schools, including Northern Michigan, Northern Illinois, Ball State and Wright State. But the school that she ultimately decided on was Valparaiso.

Over the next two years, however, she would discover that she was not happy there. After her sophomore year, she said, she decided to transfer out.

“Valparaiso was a little over three hours away, so that was hard, and I didn’t get to see my family very much,” she said. “It was hard there. It was hard between me and the coaches, and then being so far from home, so it was just a combination of things. I wasn’t very happy, basically, so that’s how I knew that I wanted to leave.”

That’s when she began talking with her old Kettle Moraine teammate, Kelly Schwerman, about joining Schwerman at her school and becoming a fellow Marquette Golden Eagle.

“I knew that if that program was a good fit for Kelly, then I knew it would be good for me too,” Frede said.

Working with her parents, who live in Delafield, Frede began the transfer process. After considering a couple of smaller programs, such as Grace College in Indiana, Frede decided that she wanted to stick with competitive Division I basketball and settled on Marquette.

“It was a very, very hard decision to tell the coaches at Valpo that I wasn’t going to come back,” she said. “But I spent a lot of time in prayer over it, and I felt very confident that God wanted me to leave, and after meeting the coaches here at Marquette, I felt very confident that this is where He wanted me to be as well.”