11 teams in the Big East, in women’s soccer, you play everyone once, 10 game league schedule, five games is the midway point.
Marquette is at the midway point with five matches played and five to go.
Marquette is unbeaten in league play at 3-0-2 and tied with Villanova for second place with 11 points, one point behind league leader Xavier.
Marquette is 11 seconds away from being 4-0-1 and thus sitting in first place in the Big East with 13 points.
Marquette was picked to finish seventh in the Big East
this season, and they weren’t close to sixth and they were nearly eighth.
Jocelyn Leigh was Marquette’s only preseason all-conference honoree, but she has just one goal and one assist this season while only playing about half of the possible minutes of MU’s 14 games.
Marquette’s top two goal scorers this season are tied for the ninth most goals in the Big East this year.
Marquette’s four-way tie for the most assists on the team this year are tied for the 7th most assists in the Big East.
Megan Murray missed four games while on a national team call-up, but she’s still 10th in the Big East in total points this season.
Freshman goalkeeper Mia Hurd is second in the conference in goals-against average, second in save percentage, and tied for the most shutouts in the Big East. She’s recorded a clean sheet in half of Marquette’s games this season, and needs just one more shutout to move into the top 10 in a single season in Marquette history. At 0.44 right now, Hurd has a chance to break Marquette’s all time single season goals-against average record, set at 0.42 by Amanda Engel in 2012.
I’m saying there’s a lot going on this season, and we’re quickly rocketing towards the conclusion.
Big East Match #6: vs Xavier Musketeers (9-2-3, 3-0-3 Big East)
Date: Wednesday, October 21, 2026
Time: 6pm Central
Location: Valley Fields, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Streaming: ESPN+
Live Stats: Stat Broadcast
Marquette is 9-6-1 all time against Xavier. The all time series has essentially been one way or another since Day One, which was a neutral site contest back in 2005. Marquette won the first seven meetings, Xavier took two, MU took two, and now Xavier has gone 4-0-1 in the last five, including 7-1 in Ohio last season.
It’s not just that Xavier’s undefeated in Big East play just like Marquette, it’s that they’re 7-0-3 in their last 10. On top of that, the two losses on the ledger were against teams that were ranked in the top 10 at the time and are both in the top five as of last week’s United Soccer Coaches top 25 poll. Xavier is shockingly nowhere to be seen in that poll, even in the receiving votes department, but the fact of the matter is that they haven’t been given another chance to knock off a ranked opponent since falling to Michigan State and Vanderbilt early on this season.
Beating Creighton last time out back on Saturday might have been a letting some steam off moment for Xavier. They were coming off back to back draws, including getting blanked by Hannah Dickinson and Villanova, a result that’s slightly responsible for the one point differential between the Musketeers in first with 12 points and the Wildcats being tied with the Golden Eagles in second at 11 points. Their followup to that was hosting UConn and giving up a goal less than six minutes in. As luck would have it, the Musketeers got a goal from Peyton Kohls about 90 seconds later and another right before halftime. However, the Huskies equalized in the second half and none of XU’s three shots in the final 25 minutes found their way home for a winner.
So, yeah, I suspect Xavier rather enjoyed pumping in two first half goals against the Bluejays and then tacking on three more in the second half as they outshot Creighton 12-3 after intermission and 18-5 overall in a 5-0 shutout win. Whether they vented everything out of their system is the question perhaps.
The aforementioned Peyton Kohls is the points leader here, putting up 17 on six goals and five assists. The goals leads Xavier as well, but Kohls has to settle for second best in assists to the six helpers from Frances Reuland. The Musketeers have also gotten five goals from Brooklyn O’Brien, and Regan Dancer scored twice against Creighton after missing a couple of weeks of action to bring her to four on the year.
It appears that Taylor Thomas has retaken the starting goalie job. She got the nod for three of XU’s first four contests, including both the Michigan State and Vanderbilt games, but she left after a collision that led to a red card on an XU defender and a PK for the Commodores, and after landing on the shoulder that she landed on in the collision, Thomas subbed out and then missed a month. She returned against Seton Hall four matches ago, played every minute of the next three contests, then started and left the Creighton game at halftime while up 2-0. I presume she’s still okay, and so Marquette will see her and her .767 save percentage on Wednesday night. Sami Lipcon was the one who subbed in at halftime versus the Jays, and she has a slightly better goals-against average, 1.02 to Thomas’ 1.18.
Big East Match #7: vs Connecticut Huskies (3-3-7, 1-1-3 Big East)
Date: Saturday, October 24, 2026
Time: 1pm Central
Location: Valley Fields, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Streaming: ESPN+
Live Stats: Stat Broadcast
Marquette is 6-5-3 all time against UConn. The two teams never met until the Golden Eagles joined the Big East for the 2005 season. The series went towards Marquette originally, even if UConn won the first meeting 1-2, with the Golden Eagles starting out 5-2-0. MU is winless in the last five meetings with a record of 0-3-2 after a 2-2 draw in Storrs last season.
While Xavier has been on a heater as of late, UConn is going in the other direction. They are winless in their last three, although drawing with the Musketeers isn’t a bad result, and they have just one win in their last eight matches. Going to a scoreless draw with Seton Hall three matches back isn’t an awful result given where the two teams are in the Big East standings at the moment, but it is an awful result when you discover that UConn outshot Seton Hall 28-2. UConn had more shots in the final five minutes — which also included three corner kicks! — than SHU had in the entire match.
Then came the draw with Xavier that we discussed in the Musketeer section of this preview, and since they equalized and held it, that’s not awful. Giving up a 70th minute goal in a 1-0 loss to DePaul as a follow up…. yeah, that’s not fun.
UConn’s also going to be coming in to Saturday afternoon on a hell of a travel schedule. They’re facing Creighton in Omaha on Wednesday night, then they’ll in theory be in Milwaukee on Friday night to wake up and get ready for a 1pm local time start on Saturday. Are the Huskies going to go back to Storrs in the meantime? Unless they’re chartering a plane back and forth, I really don’t think they can make that work. It seems unlikely there’s a commercial flight at 10pm out of Omaha for them, so that’s probably a wake up Thursday morning and travel thing…. to just turn around and fly out to Milwaukee on Friday again? This feels like a “UConn doesn’t go home until Saturday night” situation, and it might be interesting to see how the Huskies handle that.
Maeve Staunton is UConn’s top scorer this year with seven points on three goals and an assist. However, she did miss a couple of weeks of action before returning for a total of 142 minutes across the Huskies’ last three matches. Staunton also doesn’t have a point in any of those three contests. Se-hanna Mars is UConn’s focal point on offense, leading the team with 39 shots on the year. That’s only turned into two goals, and Chloe Shimkin is second in shots with 21…. but she has just one goal.
Ava Yamas has taken over the starting spot in net for the Huskies after not starting for the first six matches of the year. The change has paid off, as she’s allowing just 0.78 goals per 90 minutes of action, a marked improvement on the 1.12 that Lily Onorato was putting together through her 480 minutes of action. Yamas is also stopping nearly 77% of shots on frame, which is also better than Onorato’s .700 save percentage. It hasn’t turned into wins for Yamas, as she’s just 1-2-5 on the year, but sometimes the first step is merely becoming a stout defense and everything else can flow from there.
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