Women’s soccer match opens 2017-’18 athletics season

After more than two months away from the field, court and track, Marquette Athletics will formally return to at least the field this week when women’s soccer faces No. 2 Stanford in its season-opener Friday night at Valley Fields.

The match is part of a home-and-home series with the Cardinal, who were a No. 1 seed in last year’s NCAA Tournament before being upset by Santa Clara. Last year’s match in Palo Alto, California was hardly a contest. Stanford beat Marquette 3-0 and outshot them by a gargantuan 31-2 margin. Marquette also lost to Stanford 5-0 in 2004, the only other time the two teams played.

“Stanford is a very special team,” head coach Markus Roeders told GoMarquette.com after the Golden Eagles’ loss last year. “They have a lot of great players, they do some things extremely well and they play their system extremely well.”

Marquette is coming off a season in which they won a share of the BIG EAST title and made an NCAA Tournament appearance, the 13th in program history.

Kickoff time for the match is 7:30 p.m. CT. Marquette’s athletics website is hosting the game’s video broadcast.

Women’s soccer selected third in preseason poll

The women’s soccer team found themselves in the same preseason poll slot as the volleyball team: third out of 10.

That’s the opinion of the BIG EAST head coaches, which put the DePaul Blue Demons three points ahead of Marquette for second place in the annual poll. Georgetown, which split last year’s regular season title with Marquette and beat the Golden Eagles in the conference championship match, took first place in the poll.

Carrie Madden is the lone Marquette representative on the preseason All-BIG EAST team. The redshirt junior forward netted six goals and added five assists last season. She’s perhaps best known for her bicycle kick goal against St. John’s in the semifinals of the BIG EAST Tournament.

Men’s and women’s tennis announce schedule

It will be a long time before either men’s or women’s tennis enjoys the familiar ground of Helfaer Recreation Center.

There is not a single home match in the fall semester on either tennis team’s schedule, both of which were released last week. The closest thing would be the Milwaukee Tennis Classic in Fox Point, Wisconsin, which lasts from Sept. 20-24. That tournament is returning to its original structure as an at-large individual tournament instead of a team competition, though, which means the first true Marquette home match won’t be until the men play Wisconsin in late January.

Men’s tennis in particular showed promise last year after making a surprise run all the way to the BIG EAST title match. The Golden Eagles led Butler 3-1 in total matches won, but fell 4-3 en route to their third consecutive runner-up performance in the conference tournament.

The women did not get nearly as close to the BIG EAST crown, dropping a 4-1 decision to Xavier in the tournament’s first round. This year’s team will have to replace graduated senior Diana Tokar, who partnered with sophomore Fleur Eggink to form one of Marquette’s most effective doubles pairs.

Quick shots

• Marquette basketball ranked among the top 25 schools in college basketball attendance for the 16th-straight year, coming in 19th according to the NCAA’s latest attendance figures. Average attendance rose roughly three percent over 2015-’16, but is still roughly 2,000 fans short of the average attendance from previous head coach Buzz Williams’s tenure.
• Volleyball added Sandy Mohr, a 6-foot-4 sophomore middle blocker, to the roster this week. Mohr, a top 40 recruit in the class of 2016, originally committed to Marquette in 2013 according to the Milwaukee Sting website. She was next spotted on a list of University of Iowa commits in 2015, but does not appear on any stat sheets. Her bio on the athletics website says her last stop was at NAIA school Evangel.
• Women’s soccer fell hard on its opening week scrimmage against Wisconsin, losing 4-1 in Madison last Thursday. Junior Jamie Kutey scored Marquette’s only goal. For the complete breakdown, read Wire reporter John Steppe’s recap.