With the season previews for men’s and women’s soccer in our rear view (and the women’s soccer season already underway!), it’s time to turn our attention to previewing the 2025 Marquette volleyball season. It’s been a long offseason for the Golden Eagles, or at the very least an eventful one. The most notable change is who’s calling the shots on the sideline, as Tom Mendoza has taken over as head coach after Ryan Theis left to take over the Florida program back in February.
To be honest, that changeover
didn’t alter much about what we were going to write in this article taking a look at the players returning from the 2024 campaign. Two freshmen — Meghan Clifford and Malayah Long — elected to transfer in the wake of Theis’ departure, but both of them redshirted last season and thus would not have been a factor in Marquette’s returning production. MU did lose one player to the transfer portal from last year’s active roster, but Molly Berezowitz transferred to Kentucky before Theis left for Florida, so she was always going to not be wearing blue and gold this fall no matter who was the coach. Berezowitz does leave a little bit of a hole to fill after appearing in 117 of Marquette’s 119 sets last season as a defensive specialist and finishing fifth on the team in digs at 2.15 per set. Her transfer leaves Marquette without a single player that averaged more than a dig per set last season, so keep that in mind once we work our way around to talking about who might play libero for the Golden Eagles this fall.
Alrighty, let’s get started, shall we? We have seven women to talk about, with only one of them playing a major role last season.
Outside Hitter
There’s only one place to start the discussion in this position group, and that’s Natalie Ring. The 6’1” junior is coming off what was easily a career best season for her after a bit part in 2022 and a redshirt year in 2023. Ring played in 93 sets across 31 of Marquette’s 34 matches, and ended up averaging 2.62 kills and 2.80 points per set. She also hit .290 on over 600 swings, and going by the idea that volleyball hitting percentage is not too different than baseball batting average, you’ll take .290 from anyone at the position. It’s worth noting that Ring really came on as the season went along, getting just over 500 of her attempts after the calendar switched to October. She hit .308 from there on out and averaged 2.86 kills per set. The thing to remember about all of this is that she wasn’t Marquette’s top attacker at any point, and given the talents of another player we’ll talk about in a minute, you could argue that Ring wasn’t even MU’s #2 offensive option. We’ll have to see what direction Tom Mendoza takes the team in, but for the moment, Ring is the closest thing the Golden Eagles have to a proven top attacking option at outside hitter.
Ring is not the only returning outside hitter. Sienna Ifill mostly speaking replicated her sophomore season as a junior last year, which isn’t surprising seeing as MU’s roster mostly stayed the same between the two campaigns. She ended up averaging 0.45 kills per set and hitting .214, and the hitting percentage is the thing to take note of. Ifill was going to be a backup option at best anyway, but when her success rate dropped from .311 as a sophomore to just a bit above .200, you can see how last year’s coaching staff wasn’t in a gigantic hurry to push her into a bigger role. If she can get back to performing at least in the neighborhood of .300 if not actually over it, then there’s a spot for her in the rotation. Ella Holmstrom spent most of last season on a medical redshirt after appearing in two sets early in the season. There’s nothing particularly outstanding about her performance as a reserve in 2022 or 2023, as she’s hitting just a bit under .200 for her career at this point. With that said, there was that 17 kill/4 block performance against Loyola Chicago back in September 2022 that never paid off into a notable role for the rest of that year or for any of 2023. Is that something that can be replicated for a full season now, three years later and after an injury?
MIDDLE BLOCKERS
Honestly, I could have started the whole article off here, as it’s clear that Hattie Bray is Marquette’s top returning player. She’s been an all-Big East performer for each of her three years at Marquette, including preseason honors in each of the past two campaigns. You could make the argument that 2024 was her best season, as she kept her activity level from her sophomore season, but brought her hitting percentage back up to well north of .300 after ending up at .272 the year before. She also posted a career high in blocks at 0.84 per set and got there in digs/set, too. Hey, look, 0.51 digs/set is a career best for her! Fact of the matter is that no one was asking her to do a lot of digging, that’s all. There is a decent to good chance that Bray is going to have to close out her collegiate career with a new best season if the Golden Eagles are going to have a lot of team success in 2025, but MU’s hopes aren’t completely pinned to Bray either, if that makes sense. If not, well, it’ll make more sense when we get to the newcomers discussion next time.
Morgan Daugherty is Marquette’s other returning middle, and she’s experiencing a pretty straight forward collegiate progression so far. Redshirt year, sparse playing time, occasional appearances. Part of that is the fact that Daugherty was blocked in the lineup by Bray and Carsen Murray for the past three seasons when it comes to depth at middle blocker, but it’s (hopefully?) given her a chance to develop as a player. In limited playing time for the past two seasons, Daugherty is hitting .340 on 53 swings. If she can keep doing that, that swing number could jump ten-fold this season alone. She’s probably going to need to get more involved on the blocking end of things — 0.13 per set last year — but that’s at least a little bit dependent on how the coaching staff subbed her in and out of the lineup.
DEFENSIVE SPECIALIST/LIBERO
I’m going here next and leaving setter for last if only because Marquette’s only returning DS had a bigger role in 2024 than the woman that registers as MU’s only returning setter. The lone returner here is Adriana Studer, who has slowly seen her role on the team get bigger and bigger, going from 18 sets as a freshman to 36 and then to 66 in 2024. She was ultimately third in the DS/L rotation behind Molly Berezowitz and Samantha Naber last year, with both of those women appearing in more than 100 sets and in all 34 contests. Studer only played in 27 matches, so she wasn’t quite a full time rotation player last year. It’s something of an open competition as to who’s going to play the defensive roles for Marquette this season, although we have to note that Ryan Theis went out of his way to recruit a transfer even after already recruiting two freshmen who could play there. That’s how Theis looked at his roster though, so we’ll have to see how Tom Mendoza assesses the position group.
SETTER
I thiiiiiiiiink setter the most logical place to put Calli Kenny? Maybe? She’s listed as “setter/defensive specialist/right side hitter” on the roster, so it’s hard to say. She played in 37 sets across 17 matches as a freshman last season, and ended up with five assists, no kills on one attack, and 15 digs. Kenny also had two service aces against 10 service errors, which is probably more of an issue of Kenny being brought in as a service specialist in rotations than it is about anything else. It’s hard to say seeing as the standard stat sheets don’t tell you how many service attempts anyone has. The point here is that I don’t know where Kenny fits in the rotation right now other than to say that I don’t think she’s going to be the starting setter, not when Tom Mendoza brought in a transfer after he was hired. Can Kenny get on the floor in some other fashion this year?
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