2019 Top 60 Prospect Sydnee Roby Includes Marquette Women’s Basketball In Her Final Seven

Today’s big time Marquette women’s basketball recruiting news comes to us by way of Mark Stewart and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Stewart is reporting that Milwaukee native and Class of 2019 prospect Sydnee Roby has included the Golden Eagles in her final seven schools. Joining the Golden Eagles are California, Louisville, Miami, Michigan State, Texas A&M, and last but not least, Notre Dame, the reigning national champions.

Roby is a 6’3” center who attends Rufus King High School right here in Milwaukee. She averaged 17.0 points, 11.1 rebounds, 1.7 assists, and 2.7 blocks for the Generals as they went 20-5 and reached the Wisconsin Division 1 tournament quarterfinals before falling. Roby is ranked #57 in the country by ESPN and they have her as the #10 post player in the class. Prospects Nation is just about on the same page as ESPN, ranking Roby at #59 nationally and #12 at her position.

Roby represents the one thing that Marquette has been missing over the past three seasons as head coach Carolyn Kieger has guided the Golden Eagles to the top of the Big East: A major presence on the inside. While Erika Davenport is rapidly becoming one of the best interior players in MU history, the fact of the matter is that she’s “only” 5’11”. The Golden Eagles have been repeatedly victimized by physical interior players, and bringing in Roby on the heels of Davenport’s departure would be an upgrade in terms of size on the defensive end. She’d also fit in with Kieger’s up-tempo attack. Two different ESPN scouting reports make mention of this fact, calling her “agile in transition game” and “mobile in uptempo game.”

Of course, this is all dependent on Roby not listening to the lure of leaving the state for college. If that’s what she chooses, you can’t blame her. Muffet McGraw has put Notre Dame in the Final Four six times this decade alone, while Jeff Walz has guided Louisville to three Final Fours and two championship games since 2009. Roby’s other finalists don’t have that kind of high end results to brag about, but they’ve all been consistent winners over the last 10 years or so.

Roby is the second top 2019 prospect to include the Golden Eagles in a cutdown this week. Kaelynn Satterfield made her cut on July 21st, and I’d say that the competitors for Satterfield’s attention are a little less imposing than for Roby. Satterfield and Roby are joined in including MU in a trimmed list by Shemera Williams, another Milwaukee product who ranks amongst the top 75 prospects in the country. In other 2019 news, Marquette offered a scholarship to Kaye Clark back in early June, which is particularly relevant here because Clark attends Rufus King with Roby.

I can’t embed any videos of Roby here for you, but I can point you towards her Hudl page, which has a nice assemblage of clips, including one celebrating Roby being named the 2017-18 Gatorade Player of the Year for the state of Wisconsin. Yes, she won that as a junior.

As I alluded to earlier, 2019 is a big recruiting class for Carolyn Kieger and the Golden Eagles. While they already have two verbal commitments in hand, MU will be losing all five of the juniors that started in 2017-18 after their senior seasons in 2018-19. Marquette needs to make a major impact on the recruiting trail just in terms of putting bodies on the court and that’s without even taking into account the impact of losing some of the program’s all-time best players.

Here’s what the scholarship situation looks like right now.

(h/t @MarkKahnWI)