HELLO!
It’s time for more Marquette volleyball season previewing! We’ve already talked about the returning players on the Marquette roster. If you haven’t taken a peek at that yet, please do so. It’s not very long, but knowing what head coach Tom Mendoza does have coming back from his first season in charge is useful to understanding how Mendoza has to get quality performances from several of the newcomers in order to keep MU’s NCAA tournament streak running.
For the returning players, we kind of just
went in order of importance to the Golden Eagles a year ago because we only had five women to talk about. We have twice as many newcomers, heck, there’s four new outside hitters alone. So: We’ll go outside hitter, then setter, then middle blocker, and then wrap up with defensive specialist. Sound good? Let’s go!
OUTSIDE HITTER
Let’s start things off with one of Marquette’s transfers, because Carson Tyler (#20, 5’10” junior, Pavilion, New York) is arguably MU’s top attacker right now. Hey, all I’m saying is I don’t see anyone else on the roster holding a 2024 Freshman of the Year trophy next to their 2025 Player of the Year trophy. That’s what Tyler did at Ball State the past two seasons, earning both of those awards in the MAC and getting First Team All-Conference honors both years as well. She averaged a team best 4.18 kills per set last season while hitting .234, and she also added 2.65 digs (#2 on the team) and 0.42 blocks (#4) per set. Tyler also had 43 aces a year ago in Ball State’s 31 matches, but she also misfired on 43 serves, too. Because you’re wondering: Natalie Ring hit .274 last year as Marquette’s #1 attacker. Elena Radeff was at .248, so at the very least, Marquette is going to have to find a way to make Tyler more efficient.
It’s possible that one of the three freshmen hitters overtakes both Tyler and Emma Parks as Marquette’s top attacker at some point along the way this season. Caydence Doolan (#4, 5’11” freshman, Hagerstown, Maryland) certainly looks like she has the high school career to step right in and take some swings in her first year. What else would you say about a three-time Maryland state champ who was also the Gatorade Player of the Year for Maryland in 2025 AND the AVCA Region 2 Player of the Year AND an AVCA Second Team All-American? Feels like she should be a core component of the team out of the gate, even if Marquette didn’t need players taking swings, right? That point holds, but it’s worth mentioning that Doolan was not participating in the Blue & Gold Scrimmage last weekend, and in fact, it appeared that she wasn’t even on the sideline.
The fact that Allie Beers (#6, 6’0” freshman, Slinger, Wisconsin) missed most of her senior season with shoulder surgery should hint that maybe she isn’t going to be ready to go one year later. She earned First Team all-state honors as a junior, so clearly she can play a little bit of volleyball, but shoulders are kind of important for a hitter. Still, there she is, all over the place in photos from Marquette’s spring matches since she enrolled early like both Tyler and Doolan did as well.
See?
Doesn’t look like she’s taking it easy on the shoulder, does it? Oh, and yes: Allie Beers is wearing #6. Yes, you can go buy “6 Beers” shirts from the NIL store right now.
There are two more freshmen in the position group that weren’t with the program for spring action. Tani Juric (#11, 6’5” freshman, Ankaran, Slovenia) signed on with Marquette back in early March, so obviously not in enough time to get to Milwaukee to start classes in January. She has a long history of playing for the Slovenian junior national team, landing on the roster for their U17, U18, and U20 teams in the past, and as far as that last part goes: It’s worth noting that both she and her twin sister Emi — we’ll get to her — only turned 19 in April. Juric has also played with the Slovenian senior national team, including as a part of their qualifying run for the European championships. In terms of lower level competition, her official team bio is littered with “best” this and “best” that for various national level competitions. It’s hard to ignore her height here as well, as she’s the tallest player on the roster by two inches. Tallest player + years of international competition experience…. She’s only just been with the team since practices spooled up for camp to start the year, but you can see how she might jump to the front of the line since Marquette needs a tippy top attacker, right?
That leaves us with Aubrey Hicks (#12, 6’0” freshman, Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin), and it’s time for some full transparency here. My process for these previews is to create a list of the newcomers at each position on a notepad and then handwrite notes about what I want to mention about each one. That allows me to look at the notepad and figure out what order to go in. The reason why I mention this is because on my notepad, I have Aubrey Hicks as a Middle Blocker, but because I’ve been writing these previews in bits and pieces over the span of a few days, as I have the Marquette roster sitting open on Monday, August 10, Hicks is listed an Opposite Hitter. That’s interesting. Hicks won a 2025 Division 1 state title in and I do mean that she won it, to a certain extent, because she had 13 kills and eight digs in Hamilton’s 3-0 sweep of defending champion Divine Savior Holy Angels. Her career stats do not bear out that she projects as a workhorse of a hitter immediately: 1.8 kills/set, .219 career hitting. However, no one was really tearing it up for Hamilton last year either in terms of kills average or hitting percentage, so I don’t know how to assess that.
SETTER
Based purely on “who’s on the roster,” then Marquette’s season is going to be dictated by how fast Luanna Markus (#3, 5’11” freshman, Chopinzinho, Brazil) acclimates to Division 1 volleyball. She’s one of just two setters on the roster, and as we’ll explain in a second, I don’t think that Tom Mendoza is going to be depending on the other one to win matches for the Golden Eagles this fall. Part of that is because Markus has been the setter on the Brazilian U19 team, playing in both the World Championships (they finished 8th) and the South American Championships (they won). I’m not saying that Brazil won that U19 South American title because of Markus, but I am saying that she was named the best setter of the entire tournament. She enrolled early for spring semester, so she’s already had a lot of time to work on her passing timing with three of the four new hitters as well as with Emma Parks and Keira Schmidt.
All due respect to the work that Lauren Young (#9, 5’11” 5th year, Delaware, Ohio) has put in to the sport of volleyball over the years, but I just don’t see how the UNC Wilmington grad transfer is going to jump past Luanna Markus on the depth chart. At the end of the day “best setter at the U19 South American Championships” seems like it’s a better situation than “2.20 assists per set for UNC Wilmington last year.” She has two years of action at Jacksonville after a redshirt season and then a year at UNCW. She recorded just 86 assists across 42 sets in two seasons with the Dolphins before playing a much bigger but still not primary role with the Seahawks. Obviously going in either direction with either setter has a certain amount of risk because neither one has been a setter on a Division 1 team with an eye on an NCAA tournament berth…. but it feels like there’s a higher floor and a higher ceiling with Markus, right?
MIDDLE BLOCKER
If whatever it is that had Keira Schmidt in a walking boot isn’t going to stop her from playing on opening day against Texas or at all this season, then Marquette needs someone to jump forward and grab onto the spot left open by the end of Hattie Bray’s eligibility. That’s either going to be Julia Stanev, who returns from a deep bench role last year, or one of the two freshmen. That asks a question as to whether Tom Mendoza is looking for someone to replicate Bray’s 2.68 kills per set on .376 hitting or if that Schmidt’s job now and the new starting MB just has match Schmidt’s 0.91 kills/set and .312 hitting a year ago.
If it’s not Stanev, then it’s likely that Molly Welge (#15, 6’3” freshman, Naperville, Illinois) has the inside track to grabbing the other spot. She comes to Marquette after chipping in to three runner up appearances in the IHSA 4A state tournament during her high school career. Welge’s also presumably very familiar with how things go at Marquette, as her club coach is former Ryan Theis assistant Meghan Keck.
One of the reasons that Welge has the inside track to the competition for playing time is that it is my understanding that Berrak Sporeli (#21, 6’2” freshman, Istanbul, Turkiye) wasn’t even on campus yet as of last Saturday’s Blue & Gold Scrimmage. Marquette’s not even really hiding that part of things, as this Instagram post from Sunday, August 9th says “excited for you to join us next week,” emphasis mine. Hey, look, it’s neat that she played on a team that finished second in the Istanbul championships in 2023 and second in the Turkish championships in 2024. Hooray, etc. This is also the same player that Marquette published a press release for back in mid-July — it’s still in my email inbox! — but by the end of the business day, they had deleted the press release off GoMarquette.com and deleted the Instagram post about her signing as well. As I go look on Monday, August 10, both of these things have been MAGICALLY re-added to (unhidden from??) the internet, like they never wandered off. In the meantime, Sporeli has been listed on the roster the whole time. No, I don’t have any idea as to what’s going on here, but it can’t be a good thing for her immediate playing time to miss the start of preseason camp, right?
And if Marquette needs two out of their three non-Schmidt middle blockers to play notable rotations because Schmidt is going to be out for a stretch….. well, things get very interesting very fast, right?
DEFENSIVE SPECIALIST
Based on how Marquette came out to start the scrimmage last weekend, it would appear that Emi Juric (#2, 5’9” freshman, Ankaran, Slovenia) is neck and neck with Avery Helms for the libero job. Both women came out in the alternate white jersey marking them as the libero on the squad, while Annika Kowalski wore the standard blue jersey. Now, none of this really mattered because Marquette had precisely 12 women available to play so there wasn’t any subbing in and out like you’d see for normal libero play. Still, that was a conscious choice by Mendoza and his staff to put both women in the white shirt. Juric — I told you we’d get to Tani’s sister eventually! — has had a run of playing with the Slovenian junior national teams, earning roster spots at various competitions at the U16, U18, and U20 levels. She has also made her debut with the senior national team, including ending up on the roster for the 2025 World Championships. I don’t know if that means she’s ready to play major rotations for a Division 1 team, but it’s also clearly not a bad thing to have one of the defensive specialists that Slovenia decided they needed on their roster, right?
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