Marquette Women's Soccer Preview: vs Xavier

Here's some good news for fans of Marquette women's soccer.  Today's match against Xavier was slotted as the only conference match that wasn't going to be broadcast on the Big East Digital Network.  Because the league passed on the game for whatever reason, Marquette got Time Warner Cable Sportschannel here in Milwaukee to carry the game!

On second thought, this actually means that the game has a more limited viewership.  If it wasn't for TWC Sports stepping in, Marquette would be streaming the game through GoMarquette.com, so anyone with an internet cable could watch.  Now it's only TWC subscribers.  Well, I guess that's not actually fantastic news.  Still, local media paying attention to women's college soccer is pretty cool.

In other not fantastic news, Marquette is 1-3-3 in their last seven matches.  If you want to find a silver lining there, at least the win came in Big East play.  Through three matches of conference action, the Golden Eagles find themselves at 1-2-0 and sitting in a four way tie for fifth place.  I should point out that only six teams make the Big East tournament, and as of right now, the Big East is slotting Marquette in seventh place via tiebreakers.  It's about like that.

Big East Match #4: vs Xavier (4-5-1, 0-2-0 Big East)

When: Thursday, October 8, 2015, at 7pm Central
Where: Valley Fields
Audio/Visual: Time Warner Cable Sportschannel is going to carry this one LIVE, plus there's live stats.
Special Promotions: FREE admission for faculty & staff, plus $2 hot dogs and $1 sodas.
Twitter Updates: @MUWomensSoccer

The Musketeers are claiming that they're 5-5-1 on the season, but I'm not counting their 5-0 win over NAIA Marian University.  Ain't happening.

Xavier is winless in their last four matches, and they haven't scored a goal in just barely short of 300 straight minutes.  That, kids, is not great, and that's coming from a guy that's paying attention to a team that hasn't scored a goal in more than 185 minutes.  With that said, the results haven't been all that terrible during this streak.  They went to a scoreless draw against Cincinnati, and dropped a 1-0 result to Providence on a goal that the Friars scored in the 10th minute.  In the middle of that, they did have a 4-0 loss to DePaul, but hey, it's DePaul and the Blue Demons are a high quality side.

Samantha Dewey leads XU in goals with five on the season, but three of them were against Marian.  That leaves Kenadie Carlson with the team lead with four goals, since we still have to retract one of them from the Marian match.  They do have 22 assists on their 21 goals on the season, so they do have a willingness to share the ball a bit.

Rachel Piccus has started all 11 matches this season for the Musketeers, and has played all but 53 minutes.  The junior from Solon, Ohio, has recorded two non-Marian shutouts this season, but it hasn't really helped her stats all that much.  She's got a goals-against average of 1.41 even with that Marian shutout in there, although she is stopping 82% of shots on goal.  She's second in the Big East in total saves and leads the Big East's active starters with 6.09 saves per game.  If that's the case, I'm guessing that Marquette is going to get their chances at firing away at Piccus, and it will just be matter of whether they can bury their shots in the back of the net.