Okay, let’s cover the basics here: Lili Berg is Marquette’s new assistant coach for women’s soccer.
Here’s head coach Chris Allen on his new staffer:
“We’re thrilled to welcome Lili Berg back home to Marquette,” Allen said. “As a Milwaukee native, this is a special moment for her and for our program. She has competed at the highest levels of the game, both collegiately and professionally, and knows what it takes to win. She’s lifted trophies throughout her career, and that championship experience will
be invaluable to our program. She’ll be an outstanding mentor for our goalkeepers, bringing a wealth of knowledge, energy, and a passion for developing student-athletes.”
And here’s Berg on her new job:
“I’m incredibly grateful for the opportunity to join the Marquette Women’s Soccer staff,” Berg said. “I want to thank Coach Allen for believing in my ability to contribute to this program. As both a former collegiate and professional athlete, I’m excited to bring that perspective and experience to our team. I’m passionate about helping student-athletes reach their full potential both on and off the field, and I look forward to building meaningful relationships with our players while pursuing championships together.”
Berg appeared in 66 matches for Bowling Green from 2020 through 2023, posting a career goals-against average of 0.96 and a save percentage of .794. The Falcons won the MAC regular season and conference tournaments in her freshman and sophomore campaigns, putting them in the NCAA tournament in both years. That makes Berg the second most recent NCAA tournament participant on the roster, behind Allen himself who was an assistant on the Saint Louis team that went to the Sweet 16 in 2023. She has international professional experience in Iceland and Australia as well. This will be her first experience in coaching at the Division 1 level, as the New Berlin native was still playing professionally a year ago.
With that out of the way, we have to play Fun With Timelines.
June 9, 2026: Marquette and Chris Allen announce that Calum Mallace is the new associate head coach of the women’s soccer program. I blogged that hire that day, and at the time, I noted that Mallace was replacing Jennifer Wandt on the coaching staff — she took an assistant’s job at South Florida — and would now be working alongside Allen and assistant coach Jacqueline Baetz. I said that because that’s what the roster page on GoMarquette.com looked like at the time.
Today is July 8, 2026, almost but not quite one month later. Baetz is gone, and Berg is taking her place on the staff, with MU’s preseason exhibition match for 2026 precisely one month away. We can safely say that Allen did not find out about Baetz’s departure on July 8th and announced Berg’s hire the same day. I don’t know where Baetz has disappeared off to, or at the very least, Google isn’t as helpful at figuring that out as it was in the case of Wandt’s departure. She’s just not on the official team roster any more.
I don’t know what did or did not happen, and I am not accusing anyone of anything here. Things Happen, and sometimes it’s about how you respond to adversity, etc., etc. What I am saying is that head coach Chris Allen is 13-18-7 overall and 6-10-4 in Big East play in two seasons. He inherited a team that hadn’t even appeared in the conference tournament in six seasons and tacked on two more misses to that stretch. 2026 marks the 10 year anniversary of Marquette’s last NCAA tournament appearance, and the squad has had just two winning seasons since then and none since 2021. The last thing that this program needs right now is cartoonish levels of instability, but that is certainly what “changing both assistants since the first of June” looks like.
Luckily — and we’ll dig into this more when we get to preseason previewing in a couple of weeks — the Big East looks very wide open based on how most of the top performers from last season have departed. There’s a big chance for Allen and his charges to shift things in a positive direction this fall. If that happens, it’s not really going to matter how the coaching staff came together, is it?
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