By now, you should be more than familiar with our series of regularly updating leaderboards
for various Marquette Golden Eagles sports accomplishments. Keep checking back to that link in the previous sentence for our charts as the seasons continue to churn through history and MU’s various teams continue to create new memories and accomplishments.This time around, we’re going to look at the top kills totals in Marquette volleyball history.
Back before the turn of the century, Chris Curtin put up a kills
total that probably felt untouchable. Before she got started for Marquette in 1996, the program had posted just seven winning seasons dating back to the start of things in 1975, and all seven took place while MU was still an NAIA team up through the 1985 season. Curtin finished her four years with Marquette with 1,280 kills. She broke Martha Meyer’s record of 1,140 that was set just two years earlier with Curtin there in person for it, and Meyer had broken Kristin Patterson’s record of 1,038 set back in the NAIA era.
1,038 in 1985, 1,140 in 1997, 1,280 in 1999. Megan Devine and Vesna Grbavac took runs at Curtin, but couldn’t even get to 1,200 in 2001. One year later, Theresa Coughlin — no word as to any connection to Coughlin Hall on campus — suited up for Marquette for the first time, and it was the beginning of the end for Chris Curtin’s record.
Powered by a sophomore year total of 488 kills — that’s the only one of her years that’s in the current MU top 10 here in 2026 — Coughlin took down Curtin’s record with ease. By the time she was done in 2005, Coughlin had flown past Curtin and landed on 1,733 career kills. That’s an entire season’s worth of kills in between the two women, and you would think that meant Coughlin’s new record was pretty safe. And yet, right there on the roster in 2005 was Kimberly Todd, and after two seasons, she had 691 kills. Clearly it was possible to have better seasons than Coughlin did, MU’s single season record was 520 by Grbavac in 1999, if Todd could shoot at that, she could have a chance at passing Coughlin.
And so she had 544 kills in 2006, and now she was less than 500 away from Coughlin’s record. She didn’t get there, finishing the 2007 season at 1,719 in her career. 15 away from a new record, but still just the second woman to ever get 1,700 kills in a Marquette uniform.
This is all a very long way of saying that it was clear that Coughlin’s record was not safe. If Ashley Beyer had played four seasons at Marquette instead of starting her career in the junior college ranks for one season, she could have shot closer to Coughlin. Beyer finished with 1,214 kills in three seasons, maybe not on pace for Coughlin, but at least within shouting distance. It was a matter of time before someone came for Coughlin.
That time started in 2016 when Allie Barber started her career with a seemingly less than memorable 219 kills.
Her next three seasons? Three of the seven best single season kill totals in Marquette history: 546 in 2017, 537 in 2018, and 569 in 2019. Those three alone would have been the third best career total in MU history, but she had that extra 219 from freshman year, and so with MU’s second point of the night as the Golden Eagles picked up a 3-1 win over Georgetown in November 2019, Barber was Marquette’s new all-time kills leader.
No one has cleared 1,300 kills for Marquette since. Hope Werch got an extra year of eligibility and only get to 1,229 before a season ending injury stopped her short. Aubrey Hamilton got the closest, recording 1,261 kills in her three seasons with the Golden Eagles after transferring in from Notre Dame. She was leading the way for some of the best Marquette volleyball ever — Big East regular season co-champions in all three seasons and two of Marquette’s three Sweet 16 appearances ever — but Hamilton never cleared even 440 kills in a season and so it’s maybe hard to say she could have taken a run at Barber if she had an extra season in blue and gold.
Someone will come for Barber one day. Breaking her record averages out to four campaigns of kills that wouldn’t even rank in the top 10 all time in MU history. Three 500 kills seasons and a 400 would barely dent the top 10 rankings, but it would be enough to take down Barber’s record. Mix in the seemingly inevitable 5 seasons of eligibility in 5 years rules, and that’s just extra time to find a path to 1,900.
Here’s what the chart looks like at the conclusion of the 2025 season.
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