Ohio State Transfer Tori McCoy Appears To Be Considering Marquette Women’s Basketball

On Saturday, this tweet about Ohio State women’s basketball forward Tori McCoy popped up into my mentions.

Tori McCoy just finished her freshman year at Ohio State after finishing high school as a top 10 recruit and playing in the McDonald’s All American Game. The 6’4” forward appeared in all 35 games for the Buckeyes with 10 starts. She averaged 8.1 points and 4.9 rebounds in a shade under 17 minutes per game for an OSU team that reached the Sweet 16, but she’s transferring after a first year of college where her father says “she was miserable every day.”

In that interview that I just linked to, the Champaign News-Gazette (McCoy is a native of Champaign, Illinois) reports that Tim McCoy, Tori’s father, received “correspondence” from Marquette during the interview. The Golden Eagles were a finalist for McCoy during her recruiting process, so it’s not surprising that MU is back in the picture again.

There is one slight hitch in the program when it comes to adding McCoy to the Marquette roster. Head coach Carolyn Kieger doesn’t have a scholarship spot available for her. Not this fall, and not next fall when McCoy would be a redshirt sophomore after sitting out a year.

Here’s the current scholarship table for this fall and beyond, updated with Lauren Van Kleunan in with the freshmen since she did not even dress for a game last season. As you can see, Marquette is expected to have all 15 scholarship spots filled in the fall of 2017 and the fall of 2018. With confirmation that Marquette reached out to Tim McCoy, then it seems clear that Kieger and her staff have a solution in mind. The most likely solution is that Olivia Moskari is not going to return to the roster after the ACL injury that ended her sophomore season. That would open up a scholarship spot in both seasons and obviously MU’s roster is wide open past that.

There is another potential catch, although if McCoy was visiting Milwaukee, it may not be that big of a catch. According to Tim McCoy’s interview, Tori wants the chance to play with her younger sister Madison, who is currently a senior at St. Thomas More in Champaign. It seems that Marquette definitely does not have space to add a second player at this point since even adding the elder McCoy is going to take some rearranging. Again, though, if McCoy went so far as to visit MU, perhaps that doesn’t matter. After all, the other priority for McCoy is to find a landing spot where she can play “a versatile role,” and I think that Carolyn Kieger’s up and down style would work very well in that regard.

In addition to that, McCoy should not have trouble fitting in on the Marquette roster. Joining the Golden Eagles would mean a Mac Irvin Fire reunion of sorts, as Danielle King and Isabelle Spingola both played for that club with McCoy.

We’ll close this out with a highlight package of McCoy, but be advised: You have to skip to the 1:30 mark before the actual highlights start. Editing, people.

(h/t @MarkKahnWI)