There’s 12 new faces on the Marquette women’s lacrosse roster for the 2026 season. All 12 are freshmen, and some are going to have a better shot than others to pop up in head coach Meredith Black’s regular rotation this season. Let’s take a minute or two (or nine?) to see what the Golden Eagles are adding to the mix this season. It may help to take a spin through our look at the returning players before you read this, as that obviously provides important context as to how the freshmen may or may not
fit in right away.
Okay, let’s go! We’ll start with the attackers, drop back to midfield, then defense, and wrap up with the new freshman goalie on the roster!
ATTACK
There are two new attackers on the roster here, and if this was high school debate team, I could easily take up either side as the candidate to take up a spot in the offensive machine right away. Dani Serrano (5’6”, Boyds, Maryland, #4) set a school record of 106 assists during her junior year of high school as the squad went 22-0 that year. Senior year saw Our Lady of Good Counsel ranked as high as second nationally, and along the way, Serrano was a two-time USA Lacrosse All-American. Ella Mautz (5’4”, Delafield, Wisconsin, #12) was a three-time team captain at Kettle Moraine High School and left KMHS with the team’s career record for both points and goals. If Max Preps has it right, that means she had 264 goals and 426 points including 92 goals and 42 assists as a senior.
Marquette needs to replace Tessa Boehm’s team high 23 assists from last season as she’s no longer on the team as well as Meg Bireley’s 16 helpers, which was third most on the roster for her senior season. If Serrano can build the rapport with Marquette’s shooters right away, the ability to rack up 106 assists in a season is immediately helpful. Mautz had 117 assists in her final two years of high school, according to Max Preps, so it’s not like she’s coming up short on that department either. The passing seems to be the obvious void that needs to be replaced, but if either woman can put up goals, that helps Marquette replace Bireley’s 63 after she put up the only two 60+ goal seasons in MU history back-to-back.
MIDFIELD
There are four midfielders and one player labeled midfield/attack on the roster in the freshman class. Given what was missing on last year’s team, I like the possibilities for both Megan Hansen (5’6”, Chicago, Illinois, #29) and Gabby Windesheim (5’5”, Parkland, Florida, #33) to find a way onto the field right away. Marquette had won the draw control battle for the season in every campaign from 2017 through 2024. Sometimes it was a lot, sometimes it was just barely, but the Golden Eagles won more draws than they lost for eight straight seasons. That wasn’t the case last year, coming up short at 218 for and 266 against. Winning draws is no guarantee of success as Marquette’s win-loss records will show you, but getting the ball immediately after a goal, no matter who scored it, is going to at least point you in a positive direction.
The point here is that Hansen set Marist’s school record for draw controls (and ground balls, too), and Windesheim had a 73% draw control rate as a senior at American Heritage School. Now, there’s no number attached to Windesheim there, which does activate the ol’ Spidey-Sense a little bit, but think about it this way: If Marquette had won 73% of their draws last season, that would have been 353 for and just 131 against. MU didn’t have a dominant draw control specialist last year, and Lorelai VanGuilder is out of eligibility after leading MU with 58 last season anyway. If either Hansen or Windesheim has a skill that translates to winning Division 1 draw controls, then they need to be on the field at Noon Central on February 6th against Eastern Michigan.
If the odds on favorites for Marquette’s three regular midfielders are Hanna Bodner, Lauren Grady, and Sarah Beth Burns, there might be something on a hard cap on any of the freshmen fighting their way onto the field. Without much in the way of stats attached to any of the other three women here, it’s hard to make a case for them to get onto the field, unless the lack of stats means that they excelled in a defensive midfielder role at the high school or club level. Still, it’s hard to argue about the kinds of experiences that these three bring with them. Emily Couri (5’3”, Wilmette, Illinois, #34) won state titles in 2023 and 2024 at Loyola Academy and was 2nd Team All-Illinois as a junior and as a senior. Gabby Perino (midfield/attack, 5’9”, Issaquah, Washington, #43) went to at least the state semifinals all four years with Issaquah High School, including appearing in the state title game (but coming up short) in 2022, her freshman year. Mia Oh (5’6”, Lutherville-Timonium, Maryland, #45) was a part of a McDonogh School program that was ranked in the top 10 by USA Lacrosse for the entirety of her four years there. Do we necessarily know how much they did or did not cause all of that success to happen? Not really (kind of with Couri, given her all-state honors) but being in the room while it happens means something, too.
DEFENSE
Marquette scored more goals than they allowed last season, so by default, defense is not the highest priority for Meredith Black to solve, not with four seemingly obvious returning starters on that end of the field. However, Brynna Nixon, last year’s primary goalie, had a goals-against average of north of 14 per 60 minutes of action, and on top of that, Marquette was outscored and outshot in the fourth quarters of the 2025 season. If someone in this freshman group seems to provide Marquette with a better option than the four returning starters, it would seem to be a pretty smart idea to run with it.
Annabel Carlin (5’8”, Raleigh, North Carolina, #42) might be the most likely option to seize a role. She was a part of four straight state title teams at Cardinal Gibbons High School and earned all-NC Third Team honors as a junior and First Team as a senior. It’s hard to argue with “one of the best high school defenders in the state of North Carolina who was backstopping state title teams” as a possible option to improve MU’s defense right away.
We’ll see if Haley Brown (5’5”, Mickleton, New Jersey, #6) or Finley Breen (5’2”, Glenview, Illinois, #38) are ready for an impact role at the Division 1 level right away. Brown was a two time conference defensive player of the year at Kingsway Regional High School and played soccer and ran track as well. That’s a certain amount of multi-sport athleticism involved there that maybe helps her out in Milwaukee. Breen was on those same state title teams as Emily Couri, and she was a team captain with Couri for their senior year.
The biggest question mark in this group is Eliza Agate (5’6”, Mahomet, Illinois, #35), but it would appear that the questions aren’t really her fault. In two years at Lone Peak High School in Utah (it’s in between Salt Lake City and Provo), Agate had 68 goals, 22 assists, 72 ground balls, 50 caused turnovers, and 155 draw controls. “Oh, but how good could the team have been if she was doing that as a freshman or sophomore?” Good enough to win a Utah 6A state title in her sophomore year at the very least, and she was good enough to be First Team all-state. Why am I pointing out her two years there? Well, look at where I just said her home town is. Agate’s second two years of high school were at Mahomet-Seymour High School in Illinois, which is about 15 miles away from the University of Illinois, and MSHS didn’t have a girls lacrosse program. She had club experience after the move to the midwest, but there’s obviously a limit on precisely how much lacrosse she was playing between June 2023 and now.
GOALIE
It could be a good thing or it could be a bad thing if Jillian Howell (5’7”, Cicero, New York, #27) is the one trotting out onto the field for the first draw against Eastern Michigan. Howell had 273 career saves for Cicero North High School during her prep career, which included the squad winning a state title in her junior year and a regional title one year later. It’s not a one-to-one comparison obviously, but the fact of the matter is that 273 saves would be the fourth most in Marquette history if Howell had done that in blue and gold in Milwaukee. We also can’t ignore the fact that Mikayla Yang has 48 saves in 393 minutes across two seasons at Marquette. If Meredith Black thought that Yang was an obviously better option than Brynna Nixon for the past two seasons as Marquette went 12-22, then Yang would have been playing more. That didn’t happen, and that at least has to open the door to the possibility that Howell can win this job out of the gate.
If that happens, that could be a good thing. That could mean that Howell is definitely a better option than Yang, even with a lack of experience at the college level, and that means that she has a shot of improving on the numbers that Nixon was putting up. It could also be a bad thing, because that means that Howell is better than Yang but not an improvement on Nixon. That’s a net negative for the Golden Eagles, even with four tested field defenders in front of her.
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