Marquette Women’s Soccer Announces 2017 Schedule

We took another step closer to the 2017-18 school year when Marquette women’s soccer announced their 2017 schedule on Friday afternoon.

Head coach Markus Roeders has scheduled two non-conference games against NCAA tournament teams from a year ago, and his squad will jump right into the mix when they start the season on August 18th when they host Stanford. The Cardinal are a perennial national title contender and were one of the four #1 seeds in last year’s NCAA tournament. The other tourney team is Illinois State, and the Redbirds will also be coming to Valley Fields on September 14th.

In between those two games, MU will host Kentucky and Drake, as well as the 2017 Marquette Invitational. The traditional home field tournament features Central Michigan and Mercer this year, with Loyola-Chicago making the trip up I-94 to provide the opponent on the other half of the doubleheader on both days. The Golden Eagles will play four road games in non-conference play, as they head to Louisville, Boston University, and Rhode Island along with a cross-town trip to play UWM in the final non-conference game of the season.

Big East play starts on September 28th when Villanova comes to Milwaukee. The league has made an adjustment to the scheduling this season to prevent teams from playing consecutive road games in one weekend. Marquette will still play two straight road games this season, but apparently it’s okay because they’re at St. John’s on a Sunday and at DePaul on a Thursday. On a related note, Marquette has two of the sillier games on the league slate, as they will play on Thursday afternoons at DePaul and at Georgetown. Neither facility has lights for whatever ridiculous reason, so I don’t get why these two teams are allowed to host mid-week games at all.

Senior Day will be on Sunday, October 22nd, when Creighton comes to Valley Fields, and MU will wrap up league play with a visit to Seton Hall on the following Thursday.

The Big East tournament has undergone a slight change in format for 2017, but only in venue. It’s still a six-team tournament, but instead of one school hosting the semifinals and finals, each round will be played at separate campus sites. The quarterfinals will still be hosted by the higher seeded teams on Sunday, October 29th, and the winners will go on the road to play the #1 and #2 seeds five days later on Thursday, November 2nd. Whichever semifinal victor has the better seed will then host the Big East championship game on Sunday, November 5th.

Marquette was the #1 seed in the Big East tournament a year ago as they shared the regular season title with DePaul. With a little bit of luck, we’ll get two more chances to watch the Golden Eagles at Valley Fields this season.

Here’s the full schedule with dates and times.