Marquette Women’s Basketball Gets A 2019 Commitment From Jordan King

We took another step on the road to figuring out the future of Marquette women’s basketball on Saturday night when Jordan King made her verbal commitment to play for Carolyn Kieger and the Golden Eagles.

MaxPreps lists King as a 5’11” shooting guard/point guard. She attends Hononegah High School which is less than four miles from the Wisconsin state line south of Beloit in Rockton, Illinois. This past season, Hononegah reached the Illinois Class 4A Sectional Finals before getting clipped by conference rival Boylan Catholic and finished the season with a 27-5 record.

King averaged 21.1 points per game as a junior this season, which was best in her conference by a full five points, 7.3 rebounds, 2.6 assists, and conference highs in both steals (4.0) and blocked shots (1.3). I can’t give you shooting percentage numbers from this season, but I can tell you that King finished second in her conference with 82 made three-pointers, missing the top spot by just one. That’s more than 2.5 per game, and she also had 30 more made threes than the next best player in the NIC-10. Not surprisingly, King was voted NIC-10 MVP by the league’s coaches, and earned one of the 10 spots on the all-conference First Team. She also earned AP All-State Second Team honors in Class 4A.

Hononegah head coach had this to say about King heading into her sophomore season:

“Once she becomes a more consistent 3-point shooter, her game is going to blow up and she will be a high Division I player,” Hononegah coach Randy Weibel said. “When all is said and done, she will be the best player I’ve ever coached.”

You can check out a local news video profile on King from January 2017 here, and if you want a real hoot, you can watch one of the anchors from that profile say “The University of Marquette” on live television whilst reporting on King’s commitment.

Here’s a 6+ minute long highlight clip of King from the 2016-17 season, and you can check out more current highlights on her Hudl page. I would embed them here, but Hudl doesn’t play well with Apple News.

King is the second verbal commitment in the Class of 2019 for Marquette, following along after Michigan native Destiny Strother in November. Kieger and her staff are presumably nowhere near finished recruiting for their next recruiting class, as King and Strother are merely occupying the two scholarships that are currently sitting open for 2018-19. That’s kind of a problem, as Marquette will lose six seniors to graduation following the season. I don’t expect all six of those scholarships to get filled by freshmen in order to help balance out recruiting in the future, but as for right now, Marquette wouldn’t even be able to play 5-on-5 in the first practice for 2019-20.

That’s just dealing with the pure roster numbers issue. The other side of that coin is how does Kieger follow up the departure of five of the 25 most prolific scorers in program history? That’s what’s going to happen after 2018-19 with Allazia Blockton and crew headed out the door. When you have players as capable as Erika Davenport and Amani Wilborn and so on, yes, you absolutely depend on them to get the job done. However, 2019-20 will be the program’s first year without that class, and someone, really multiple someones are going to have to step up.

Here’s what the recruiting picture looks like now after King’s commitment.

(h/t @MarkKahnWI)