HOLY CRAP, THERE IS ACTUAL REAL COMPETITIVE SOCCER TOMORROW.
Well, tomorrow from where you’re reading this, it’s further off from where I’m writing it… you know what, this is getting complicated. Let’s move on.
ON WEDNESDAY, Marquette women’s soccer starts off the 2026 season, kicking things off (soccer term!) with the first leg of a two-match road trip. It’s the start of head coach Chris Allen’s third season in charge, and he’s looking to have a year better than his 6-11-3 first season or his 7-7-4
second season. The Golden Eagles were right on the edge of qualifying for the Big East tournament for the first time since 2017 last year, but ended up falling short. It feels like that should be a big goal for the Golden Eagles this fall, but they’re going to have to figure out some things before we get anywhere close to that.
Can they get some offensive consistency going? Jocelyn Leigh is MU’s only Big East preseason all-conference honoree after leading the team in goals last season, but she only played about half the minutes of the season in 2025. That kind of thing was all over the roster, or at least all over the returning players from last year, and part of the puzzle for Allen has to be figuring out how to get his team’s best foot forward going night in and night out.
Of course, if you break things down far enough, you could easily make the argument that fixing Marquette’s defense from last season is a much bigger priority. From there, you have to figure out whether MU needs better field defense or better goalkeeping, and there’s probably a certain amount of overlap on how all of that works together to try to reverse the Golden Eagles’ back end issues from 2025. Clare Shea and Meg Decker played big minutes in the back end as freshmen last season, are they just better defenders as sophomores? Does someone else need to step up and take a bigger role? Is Hailey Wade going to start in net again, or is freshman Mia Hurd — who enrolled early in the spring! — going to be part of the conversation to generate a winning record this fall?
And so on, and so on….
Thankfully, we’re going to get a much better idea of how Allen is attacking this season after 90 minutes in Minnesota on Wednesday afternoon, and then we can adjust the thinking from there. For now, we wait for first kick…..
Match #1: at St. Thomas Tommies (0-0-0)
Date: Wednesday, August 12, 2026
Time: 3pm Central
Location: South Field, St. Paul, Minnesota
Streaming: TommieSports.com, but also maybe MidcoSportsPlus.com, which is apparently going to cost you $15 for a month’s worth of access to Summit League Network.
Live Stats: Sidearm Stats
Marquette is 4-0-1 all time against St. Thomas. The series started in the 2021 season and has been renewed every year since. The Tommies have scored just three goals all time against the Golden Eagles and never more than one in any match. This is the second straight season with the two sides facing off in Minnesota, with Marquette winning 4-1 last year.
Since this is the first game preview of the season, all I really have to go on to preview these matches is what I can kind of drag out of the preseason league awards for the conference in question. BAD NEWS: It’s Monday morning before the season opens on Wednesday afternoon and the Summit League — unfortunately the home for BOTH of Marquette’s first two opponents! — hasn’t released their preseason poll yet. WORSE NEWS: I want this post up 24 hours before first kick, which is Tuesday at 3pm. ERGO: I want to prewrite the preview, but my usual main source of information here is NOWHERE TO BE SEEN in the appropriate time window to actually do that.
Rude!
So I’m stuck stapling this preview together with what I can glean from parsing their website. 2026 will be the first season in charge for head coach Gretta Macdonald, who went 105-72-36 at St. Cloud State University in Division 2. That’s 12 seasons worth, and she went out on a high note, reaching the NCAA tournament in each of the past three seasons. Macdonald is taking over a St. Thomas program that went just 3-9-4 last season and went winless in Summit League action at 0-5-3. However, Macdonald won’t be with the squad this season, as the university announced at the end of July that she’s taking a leave of absence for a family health issue — not hers — and is expected to return to the program in November….. which is presumably after the season ends.
With all of that in mind, does it matter that UST lost two of their top three scorers? Melina Knowles returns after finishing tied for second with seven points and tying for the team lead in goals at three with three other women. Emily McCarthy was the fourth in that group, and she returns as well after coming in fourth in points at six on her three strikes.
St. Thomas is going to have a new starting goalie from last season. Olivia Rowe played every minute for the Tommies last year, but she was a graduate student and so there’s not much of a surprise that she’s not back. Rowe stopped 75% of shots on goal last season, which kind of tells you that her 2.13 goals-against average wasn’t her fault. UST has two goalkeepers on the roster. One is Ayden Gagner, a junior with two appearance in two seasons at Duquesne…. and her only appearance last year was to defend penalty kicks against Fordham in the Atlantic 10 tournament last season after overtime ended with the score knotted at one each. That is WILD. The other goalie is freshman Sophia Alvarez. Someone’s starting this match, and your guess is as good as anyone’s.
Match #2: at North Dakota State Bison (0-0-0)
Date: Sunday, August 16, 2026
Time: 1pm Central
Location: Dacotah Field, Fargo, North Dakota
Streaming: MidcoSportsPlus.com, which is apparently going to cost you $15 for a month’s worth of access to Summit League Network.
Live Stats: Stat Broadcast
Marquette is 2-0-0 all time against North Dakota State. Both meetings have been in the 2020’s, but this is MU’s first trip to Fargo. The Golden Eagles have won both of the previous two meetings by way of shutout, including 2-0 last year in Milwaukee.
As mentioned, NDSU is in the same conference as St. Thomas, so I’ve got nothing for you in terms of preseason honors or predictions. What I do have is a note that North Dakota State went 5-12-1 last season with a 1-6-1 mark in Summit League action, so they were vaguely better than St. Thomas, depending on how you weight conference play and non-conference play as well as their 1-1 draw with the Tommies last season.
The Bison return six of their top seven scorers from last season, and that’s six of the nine women who scored a goal. That includes leading scorer Morgan Russmann, who had six goals and six assists to lead NDSU in both columns. She had 51 shots last season, more than twice as many as anyone else on the roster and close to a quarter of their shots for the entire season. In short: Deny her the ball and things get a lot easier for you on the defensive end. Isabel Garcia scored four goals last season, making her the only other returning player with more than two goals a year ago.
Payton Mulberry would seem to have the inside track on starting in net for North Dakota State. She played over 640 minutes a year ago, which is a little surprising since she was the Summit League Goalkeeper of the Year in 2024. She missed NDSU’s first seven matches of the season, then played in just eight of the remaining 11. Not sure what’s going on there, but she did start the final six games of the season and played all 90 minutes in each one. Mulberry finished the year with a goals-against average of 2.09 and a save percentage of just .615, a far cry from the 0.90 and .797 she had when she was the best netminder in the conference. If she can return to that form, that’s good news for the Bison, but we’ll have to wait to see if she can do that right out of the gate this season.
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