At this point of the season, all Marquette volleyball can do is play the schedule in front of them and keep putting one win after another.
They weren’t as 100% crisp as you would like across the entirety of six sets against Providence and Connecticut last weekend. Perhaps that can just be chalked up to this team still coming together with so many freshmen playing such heavy roles nearly right out of the gate. Marquette isn’t even supported by what should have been their top two returning players from
last season, as Keira Schmidt and Emma Parks are dealing with some nagging injuries of late.
But even while not perfectly crisp, Marquette still got the 3-0 sweep against both the Friars and the Huskies, and now they’re in first place in the Big East as long as they can hold onto it. That hold might be ending this weekend — go ahead and peek at the schedule if you need to — but you can’t play future matches, only the one in the present. Wednesday’s match down in Chicago provides Marquette a chance to break a team out of the five-way tie for first place in the Big East at 2-0, as both the Golden Eagles and the Blue Demons won their first two matches of conference play. Sometimes the opportunities to stay on top aren’t quite so literal as this, so coming out ahead on the road in a showdown between two unbeatens, even 2-0 unbeaten, is still something important to strive for.
We don’t have an RPI for women’s volleyball quite yet as I write this on Sunday evening — I wouldn’t be surprised by Monday, but we’ll see — but there’s only three opponents in the Big East that offer up the chance to beat a top 100 team in the Evollve rankings right now. DePaul is one of them. Heck, DePaul is one of only three opponents in the top 115, so it’s absolutely in the best interest of Marquette’s NCAA tournament hopes to secure this road win and keep pushing towards an at-large bid.
Get through Wednesday in Lincoln Park with a win, and then we can start talking about what’s on the line coming up on Sunday….
Big East Match #3: at DePaul Blue Demons (10-3, 2-0 Big East)
Date: Wednesday, September 30, 2026
Time: 7pm Central
Location: McGrath-Phillips Arena, Chicago, Illinois
Streaming: ESPN+
Live Stats: Stat Broadcast
Bluesky Updates: @AnonymousEagle
Marquette is 47-29 all time against DePaul, but that’s a little misleading. MU went 2-4 against the Blue Demons before officially becoming a Division 1 program in 1986. So it’s 45-25 in Division 1 since 1986, and even that’s misleading. Marquette is currently on a 30 match winning streak against DePaul dating all the way back to the 2009 season. In fairness to DePaul, things are getting closer, and by closer, I mean the Blue Demons have won at least one set in five of the last eight meetings.
As is usually the case, DePaul is running around out there in Big East play doing the exact same things as Marquette, merely in the opposite order. The one catch is that while they did sweep Providence on Friday, the same way MU did on Saturday, UConn did add an extra set to the proceedings on Saturday. Actually, they did more than that. The set that UConn won off of DePaul? 40-38! 30 extra points that didn’t have to be played, and that’s on top of sets 1 and 3 going to 26-24. DePaul played an extra set and a half than Marquette did over the weekend: The extra set that UConn won PLUS all the extra points. Goodness gracious. UConn fended off set point FOURTEEN TIMES in the second set as the two sides just traded points forever and then won the last three to take the set.
I’ve been in the building as Marquette has had sets roll past 30 before. This sounds like it was zero fun to watch based on my experience with those.
Anywho, Kendall Timme is DePaul’s top attacker. She leads in kills at 3.76 per set, and she’s the only Blue Demon north of 400 attempts on the season and she’ll click past 500 during this match. Timme is only hitting .217 on the season though, and the UConn match (.236) actually helped pick her back up a bit. That makes 6’0” sophomore Isabela Tavares Salomon a particularly important second option, since she’s hitting .271. DePaul might want to think about throwing a few more swings at Jade Dudley-Epps as well, as the middle blocker from California is hitting .288 on 222 attempts.
Leonor Polezzi is the setter here, but she’s only averaging 8.67 assists per set. The UConn match did her no favors in that regard, as she only had 28 assists, well short of the 40 that would be 10 per set, even with all the extra points going around. Amanda Saeger saw action in all four sets against the Huskies and added 20 assists, so that kind of indicates that there’s a substitution pattern going on here. However, Saeger had only played 10 sets all season up til that point, so I don’t know for sure what the Blue Demons are doing here, or what they’ll do against Marquette.
Libero Nora Mannion occasionally adds an assist to the proceedings, but if you knew that Polezzi is averaging 2.51 digs per set, you could have guessed that. Mannion is the only player with a better digs average than Polezzi, coming in at 3.66/set. Jade Dudley-Epps is averaging over a block per set, which is good, but at the moment, she’s not even top 10 in the Big East.
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