Marquette Women’s Lacrosse Announced The 2017 Schedule

Back on November 15th, Marquette women’s lacrosse announced the 2017 schedule. We’re bringing this up now because, as it turns out, we had a lot going on in the middle of November! Men’s and women’s basketball had just gotten started, women’s soccer had just wrapped up, and women’s volleyball was still going on. So, sadly, we hit the “delay” button on the women’s lacrosse schedule.

Here’s the big news for the schedule this year: Marquette will debut the new bubble facility at Valley Fields with their season opener against Louisville. According to the MU press release about the schedule, only the Louisville game and the game against Johns Hopkins eight days later will be in the bubble. I presume that means that the bubble will be retracted for the year by the time the Golden Eagles return home on April 1st, but we’ll wait to see how that plays out.

The other big news for the year is that the Big East has two new teams for 2017. Denver joins the league, mirroring the Pioneers’ participation in the league for men’s lacrosse. There’s been women’s lacrosse in the Mile High City since the 1999 season, though, which can’t be said for the other program in the league. Butler joins the Big East this year as well, and this will be the first season of competition in program history.

The addition of those two squads expands the league from eight teams to 10, and gives Marquette two more chances at finishing with a better record in Big East play than the 4-3 mark they posted in 2016. That put MU into a tie for third place, but they lost a three-way tiebreaker to Temple and Georgetown to prevent the Golden Eagles from qualifying for the Big East tournament for the first time in program history.

The Golden Eagles will be a battle tested squad when they kick off conference action with a road trip to Cincinnati on March 19th. They’ll face four teams that made the NCAA tournament last season in the non-conference section, including in each of the first three games of the season: Louisville, at Notre Dame, and Johns Hopkins. A few games later, Marquette makes the short trip down I-94 to face Northwestern as well. Florida, last year’s Big East champion and #2 seed in the NCAA tournament, looms in league play as well.

You can check out the whole schedule right here.