Danyel Middleton Takes An Official Visit To Marquette

Sometimes you find the Marquette women’s basketball recruiting news, sometimes the recruiting news finds you.

The second one was the case on Monday evening, when dedicated reader @MarkKahnWI put this tweet into the AE notifications:

Now, as you can see, there’s not an official name anywhere in that Twitter username or profile, but there are some clues. Specifically: the Mac Irvin Fire name, as well as BHS. After some Googling around, I managed to find out that Danyel Middleton plays for the Mac Irvin Fire club team in the Chicago area and she attends Bolingbrook High School in the southwest Chicago suburbs.

Feels like we’ve got a match there.

This tweet, dug up by willing research volunteer @77ncaachamps, locks us all into place:

Got the name and the Twitter username in there. Perfect.

Go ahead and add this tweet from early September to “useful information” pile, too:

So, let’s go over what we can find out about Danyel Middleton, shall we?

Her MaxPreps page and her Hudl page are in agreement: Middleton is a 5’10” high school senior, making her a Class of 2020 prospect and she easily moves between shooting guard and small forward. Her Raiders team went 18-12 last season, and advanced the IHSA sectional semifinals before being bounced from the Class 4A state tournament.

That’s, uh, about it.

It looks like there would be a lot more information about her to dig up, except Bugle Newspapers, a repeated Google Search hit for her, appears to have gone offline for whatever reason. That’s a bummer.

I guess we have to rely on more tweets to put together a picture here.

How about this, which says that Middleton is just barely inside the top 150 prospects in the country?

High energy? Contributes in so many ways? If Megan Duffy is intending on playing a style similar to Carolyn Kieger’s, then Middleton fits right in.

There’s nothing particularly useful on YouTube for Middleton, but the aforementioned Hudl page is stacked up with videos from March 2017 all the way up to the end of the 2018-19 season.

What we do know for sure is that if Marquette is hosting Middleton at this point, then they’re very serious about adding her to the roster for the 2020-21 season. With Liza Karlen, Rose Nkumu, and Julianna Okosun all on board, then Marquette is projected to have just one scholarship spot available for next year. With 14 players on board (or 13, I suppose, depending on Tori McCoy’s long term health issues still up in the air), that’s a lot of playing time covered. Marquette doesn’t particularly need to add a fourth freshman to the recruiting class, especially with a seven woman class right in front of them. If Duffy’s rolling out the blue and gold carpet for Middleton, then there’s something about her that the coaching staff particularly likes.

We’ll see what happens, and if she ends up at Illinois or Miami, best wishes to her.

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