Marquette Women’s Basketball Offers A Class Of 2021 Scholarship To Annaliese Griffin

With three commitments for 2019 already in hand, it looks like the Marquette women’s basketball coaching staff is hard at work on the long term future of the program. Recently, they offered a scholarship to Class of 2021 forward Annaliese Griffin.

Generally speaking, you’re going to end up doing pretty well when you’re recruiting 6’1” girls who have just started their sophomore years of high school. Generally speaking.

According to this tweet and this MaxPreps page, Griffin attends Plainfield Central High School in .... wait for it... Plainfield, Illinois. Depending on your definition of “suburbs,” then Plainfield is in the far southwest suburbs of Chicago. It’s about as far west as Naperville, but not quite as south as Joliet. I’m not the official arbiter of what is and is not a suburb, so your milage may vary.

ANYWHO

MaxPreps isn’t super helpful in terms of stats for Griffin, as they have just two PCHS games logged. At least for those two contests, Griffin was third on the team in average scoring and second in average rebounding. Perhaps this doesn’t sound that impressive for someone who just picked up a high major scholarship offer, but remember: she was doing this as a freshman on the varsity. By chance, Griffin also averaged 4.5 steals in those two games, which is crazy impressive. Again: no clue if that’s something she can do on a regular basis, but racking up nine steals in any two games ever is very impressive.

I dug up this scouting report from a U.S. Junior Nationals qualifier in April of 2017 — meaning it’s from when Griffin was finishing up eighth grade — which does sound fairly impressive:

Impressive low post threat…Showed advanced understanding of leverage on the block…Strong dribble drop step over right shoulder…Has turnaround over left…Powered up through contact for and-one finishes…Impressive performance

Again, I want to make this clear: six-foot tall eighth grade girl playing against other eighth graders, and I have absolutely zero idea of the caliber of competition. It was a USJN qualifying event, though, so at the very least, Griffin was playing against other girls of the same age who at least wanted to be very good at basketball.

A poke around Twitter does reveal a couple of more recent scouting reports/evaluations.

It’s hard to make any definitive statements about the Class of 2021 for Marquette and head coach Carolyn Kieger. There is just one current player — freshman Chloe Marotta — who will be on the roster then. Marotta will be a senior that fall, and she has yet to play a single official minute for the Golden Eagles. As you might expect, things can change greatly between now and then.

Here’s the scholarship table as it stands right now.