The Marquette Women’s Lacrosse All-Time Ground Balls Chart

By now, you should be more than familiar with our series of regularly updating leaderboards for various Marquette Golden Eagles sports accomplishments. Keep checking back to that link in the previous sentence for our charts as the seasons continue to churn through history and MU’s various teams continue to create new memories and accomplishments.

This time around, we’re going to look at the career ground balls top 10 for women’s lacrosse.

For now, Sarah Priem’s career ground balls record is safe. Marquette’s first ever starting goalie racked up 157 ground balls in her time patrolling the crease, and no one is coming anywhere near her this season. Fellow netminder Julianna Horning is the closest active player to Priem, and she had 37 in 2019 and a team high 22 in 2020. After two more against Cincinnati to start the season, she’s 25 away from Priem. However, it looks like Horning is going to continue to split time with Sophia Leva in net. That’s going to limit her ability grab ground balls. Still, if she can get two a game for the next 14 games, even if she only plays one half of every game, that’s enough to catch Priem.

That’s it for active players in the top 10, but we have three more current Golden Eagles to watch as the season progresses. Senior defender Jocelyn Miller sits at 75, just two short of the top 10 after only recording four in six games a year ago. She had 37 back in 2019, and she started against Cincinnati. If she’s back to form, then she could take a run at becoming the seventh Golden Eagle with 100 career ground balls. Erin Dowdle recorded 21 ground balls in 2020 to finish first amongst field players on the roster and jump herself up to 62 in her career. Just over two a game would send her past #10 Julianna Shearer, but Shearer won’t be #10 for much longer if Miller has anything to say about it. Megan Menzuber can pick up a loose ball almost as well as she can put one in the net, and she has 60 career ground balls as a result. She averaged one per game last year, so she might be able to chase down Shearer’s total of 77.... but whether that’s 10th or 11th or 12th when she gets there.... well, we’ll have to wait and see.

Here’s what the chart looks like at the start of the 2022 season.