If all goes according to plan, you’re seeing this article for the first time on Tuesday, August 4th. That’s four days before YOUR Marquette Golden Eagles women’s soccer team plays an exhibition game at home against Illinois and eight days before the Golden Eagles open up the season for real on the road against St. Thomas. With that in mind, we should probably get moving on doing some actual season previewing, huh?
Our preseason picks for Big East women’s soccer went up on the site last week, so check
that out in case you haven’t. Today, we’re going to take a look around at the returning players on the roster for head coach Chris Allen’s third season in charge of the Golden Eagles. Be sure to stop on back to read our rundown on the newcomers and a few big questions facing the squad this year.
Alrighty, let’s get into it, starting with the forwards and working our way down the field to MU’s returning goalkeepers…..
FORWARDS
The list clearly starts with Jocelyn Leigh, who is the Big East’s leading returning goal scorer, believe it or not. She had seven last season, while only playing in 16 of Marquette’s 18 matches and only starting six of them. Five of her goals were scored in relief appearances, and when the season came to an end, Leigh had never played more than the 61 minutes she logged in a start that turned into a 5-0 loss to Providence. This is the part of the show where I say that Marquette was third in the Big East in goals scored last season, trailing only the two teams that finished a combined 18-1-1 in league play. You have to wonder what could have happened if Leigh was given more playing time, and her team high shooting percentage of .304 (minimum 10 shots) makes that case as well. Are there things on the board other than purely tactical choices that kept Leigh from playing another 300 minutes? Sure, like I said, she missed two matches completely. It’s also possible it was just a hot streak, as Leigh had two goals on 25 shots as a freshman at Loyola Chicago…. but sometimes you have to lean into who’s creating goals for your squad, y’know?
That brings us around to Megan Murray and Haley Christianson. Murray started in all 17 of her appearances last season, and logged over 1,200 minutes. She is tops amongst returning MU players in shots from last season at 25, but that turned into only three goals to go with five assists. That makes her MU’s second best point producer behind Leigh. Christianson? 15 starts while appearing in all 18 matches, one of just five returning field players with more than 1,000 minutes played, tied for third overall and second most shots amongst returning players with 23….. and she generated just one assist last season. Ultimately, I think that’s good results from Murray, but a bit of a let down from Christianson, who had a goal and five assists as a sophomore in just 756 minutes. The clash between playing time and production relative to Leigh and Christianson is a little bit wonky, but there’s more that goes into assigning playing time than just “the ball went in the net,” so I don’t want to judge anyone too harshly here.
I do have questions as to how Emily Fix was used last season. She ended up matching her sophomore year production, finishing with seven points on three goals and an assist for the second straight season. However, she went from starting 19 times in 20 appearances to starting 10 times in 18 matches. Fix’s minutes went from nearly 1,400 to just 868 last season. She never played more than 63 minutes in any match, and that came in one of her appearances off the bench. Fix didn’t start back to back matches for Marquette last season until the seventh match of the year. It seems pretty clear that she wasn’t injured since she played in all 18 games, but there’s a difference between playing hurt and playing injured, I suppose. Still, her 2025 campaign goes in the books as “she’s producing at a high rate” because she had those three goals on just 17 shots, and that leaves questions as to why she wasn’t playing more.
We’ve got Things To Say about four of Marquette’s five returning forwards, so that leaves us with Cecilia Favret to round out the position group. She’s up to 27 career appearances through two seasons, but is still chasing her first career point with just six career shots so far.
MIDFIELDERS
If you thought the “man, this is all wonky” conversation about playing time and production was wild for the forwards, let me introduce you to Coco Dorfman. She transferred over from Pitt after not playing for the Panthers in 2024, scored in her first career start, and then finished the year with six starts in 16 appearances and producing three goals and four assists. “Oh, well, clearly she played a bunch for Marquette with all those points and all those appearances,” you say. Nope. 514 minutes. At some point, you have to just give up trying to make sense of it all.
Ella McAleenan and Olivia Hernandez are the other two midfielders of note here, although one is much more of note than the other. McAleenan was one of the more trusted players on the roster last season, logging over 1,100 minutes while starting 15 times in 18 appearances. Since she had just 10 shots on her way to finishing with a goal and two assists, we’re not going to make any notable comments about her production because sometimes it’s hard to make serious statements about midfielders in that regard. Hernandez had a pretty solid freshman year for Marquette, appearing in 17 matches while earning over 500 minutes of playing time. She snagged her first career point with an assist against St. Thomas.
Mary Margaret Fligg, Paige Dziedzic, and Capri Oliviero all fall into a category of “I don’t know what to do with this information.” Oliviero made her first career appearance in three seasons in late September, and then made eight more. That includes scoring her first career goal in her third ever appearance. Dziedzic was a transfer from Pittsburgh last year where she didn’t play much as a freshman and sat out in her second season. She made her MU debut off the bench in the season opener, but that ended up being the first of just eight appearances as well as her season high in minutes. Fligg played in 10 contests as a freshman, which is fine as is her 159 minutes in Year 1. We should probably also put Kiley McMinn in here, who missed all of last season after putting up just under 1,000 minutes across her first two seasons in Milwaukee. Is she back up and ready to go here?
DEFENDERS
It seems clear that this position group is going to be anchored by Clare Shea and Meg Decker. Shea was one of four women to start all 18 contests last season, and she’s the only one of the group to return in 2025. She was also MU’s minutes leader at 1,609, and it would have been higher if she wasn’t subbed off after 79 minutes in the one match she didn’t play all 90 last season. She also added two goals and an assist, and by the way? Shea did all of this as a freshman. Decker was also a freshman last year, ending up starting 16 times in 18 appearances. That led her to finish second behind Shea in minutes played amongst Marquette’s field players as the pair were the only two to clear the 1,300 minute barrier in 2025. Decker also had two assists last season to chip in on the offensive end of the field, and as you can probably guess, it certainly looks like these two are going to be institutions on the field for Marquette over the next three seasons.
After those two? Well, it would seem that Chris Allen likes Ida Marhaug and Carly Christopher a little bit. Christopher missed a month in the middle of the season last year, but ended up with 13 matches played and three starts along the way. If it weren’t for that missed month, she probably would have been right on target for matching or bettering her 734 minutes played from sophomore year. Marhaug started out looking like she was going to be a big contributor after transferring in, going the full 90 in Marquette’s 1-0 win over Milwaukee. However, she ended up starting just four more times the rest of the year and only playing 647 minutes in total. That includes going the full 90 in one of those four starts, but also having two single digit appearances as well. One of the two probably has an inside shot at being Marquette’s #3 most reliable defender right now, although it’s impossible to say who has the inside track.
Of course, it’s possible that Lilly Coats could be in that discussion as well. She had three starts in Marquette’s first five matches as a freshman last season, then suffered a season ending injury. Exactly what kind of injury is important here. “You can’t play soccer for three months” is an injury that has Coats back in the thick of things right now. “Your knee is shredded and it will take 12 months to get you back on the field” means she won’t be 100% back until September. If she can go right now, then you can see how Allen might stick with Coats alongside Shea and Decker, since that appears to have been the plan at the start of the 2025 season. If not… maybe there’s a midfielder that can fall backwards into a defending role?
GOALKEEPER
Last season’s netminding responsibilities mostly landed at the feet of Hailey Wade. The Valparaiso transfer started all but one match a year ago, and ended up with over 1,400 minutes played. There’s no other way to say this: She did not have a good year. Wade ranked 9th in the Big East in saves, saves per game, save percentage, and goals against average. Now, there’s a world where the underlying numbers tell us things that say this was not 100% Wade’s problems. However, Marquette outshot their opponents last season by about one shot per game overall and were only getting outshot by 0.6 attempts per game in Big East play. Throw out an awful 18-3 disparity against Xavier, and that 0.6 tilts back in Marquette’s favor. In short: Wade wasn’t struggling to keep the ball out of the net because the 10 women in front of her weren’t protecting her enough by keeping the ball on the other end of the field. You can argue that playing two freshmen for over 1,400 minutes each last season went a long way towards generating Wade’s problems, sure. However, at some point, you gotta make saves, and that didn’t really happen for her in 2025.
Elise Krone was Wade’s backup last year, but there’s nothing about her 194 minutes of action that tells you that Chris Allen was making the wrong choice in playing Wade instead. She allowed eight goals in that playing time, which gives her a very bad goals-against average of 3.71. In Krone’s defense, she didn’t allow a goal at all through her first 100 minutes of action last year, and then gave up two in relief in a 5-0 loss at Providence and then six in over an hour in a 7-1 loss to Xavier. Even after the PC goals, her goals-against for the season was 1.36, which is not great but at least better than her 2024 season, which was 1.70 across 900 minutes in 11 appearances.
Follow Anonymous Eagle on social media
Facebook: AnonymousEagle
Instagram: AnonymousEagleSBN
Bluesky: AnonymousEagle
