Marquette Women’s Lacrosse Announces Their 2019 Schedule

Hey, if it’s almost basketball season, that means it’s almost almost lacrosse season! February will be here before you know it.

Anyway, if you’re going to have a lacrosse season, then you better have a schedule. We got the Marquette women’s lacrosse schedule on Monday, and there’s a lot in it to dissect.

First, we have to point out that this is the first year of the reconstituted Big East. With East Carolina adding women’s lacrosse starting this season, Cincinnati, Connecticut Huskies, and Temple have left the Big East to form up a WLAX league in the American Athletic Conference, their native home conference. Florida and Vanderbilt elected to go along with them, as the two erstwhile SEC programs don’t have anywhere else to go and the league needs a quorum of members in order to get an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament.

With those five gone, the Big East added Old Dominion as an affiliate member to bring the league up to six members with Marquette, Georgetown, Villanova, Butler, and Denver. Five Big East games instead of nine left four holes in the calendar for head coach Meredith Black to fill, and she went with some first time opponents to fill three of the spots.

For the first time in program history, Marquette will play Ohio State, Canisius, and High Point this season. In a weird turn of events, all three of those matches will comes at the start of March, with just a road trip to Stetson stopping all three from coming right in a row. All three will be part of a seven match stretch of nothing but road games, leaving MU without a home game between hosting Detroit on February 17 and hosting Northwestern on March 23.

Speaking of the Wildcats, they’re one of four 2018 NCAA tournament teams on the Marquette schedule. Northwestern and High Point are both in the non-conference portion of the schedule, while Denver and Georgetown await the Golden Eagles when conference play rolls around.

Marquette will open the season with two home games, with the opener coming against Notre Dame. The Irish did not qualify for last year’s NCAA tournament, but they still finished the year at #25 in the IWLCA coaches’ poll. Louisville is the other home game in the first weekend of the season, and the aforementioned game against Detroit rounds out the home schedule for February. The late March game against Northwestern will kick off three straight home games for MU, including the first two games of Big East play. The final game of the year will be at home as well, as Georgetown will come to Milwaukee for Senior Day.

Hopefully, that won’t be the last home game of the year. Last season, Marquette qualified for the Big East tournament for the first time in program history. The Golden Eagles will be looking to repeat that feat in 2019, not just for the goal of team success and so forth, but because MU will be hosting the tournament at Valley Fields. The top four Big East teams will qualify, with the semifinals being played on Thursday, May 2nd, followed by the championship game on Saturday, May 4.

Here’s the whole schedule all in order for you.