We knew that new Marquette women’s basketball coach Megan Duffy was going to hit the ground running in terms of recruiting. That’s what always happens with college basketball coaching changes. Given the recruiting live period schedules, a new coach always has to get right out after it, both in terms of literally when things are happening as well as getting the message about your new job out to prospects.

What I didn’t particularly expect is for Duffy to be striking out after long term prospects. We’ve got two new scholarship offers to talk about in this article, with one for the Class of 2021 and the other for 2022. Let’s go in chronological order, shall we?

Aubryanna Hall

I don’t want to be telling anyone how to use their social media platform, but I had to do a few minutes of detective work in order to figure out Hall’s full name before writing this. Thankfully, her abilities as a top national level prospect paid off for me here. Thanks to an invite to the USA Basketball U16 tryouts, everything got cleared up pretty quickly.

Hall is a 5’11” guard, and as a Class of 2021 prospect, she is currently wrapping up her sophomore year of high school. She attends Wayne High School in Huber Heights, Ohio, which is a suburb of Dayton if you think of Dayton as somewhere big enough to have suburbs. As you might expect for someone who is being invited to a USA Basketball U16 tryout, she already has an ESPN recruiting profile page which has four scouting reports from the last 20 months written up. That’s a pretty strong sign, even though ESPN’s 2021 recruiting rankings only go out to #25 right now. They do mark Hall as the 9th best player in her positional group..... but..... that might just be a default setting. There’s only eight “guards” in the top 25, so it’s possible, perhaps even likely, that anyone outside the top 25 is automatically just tied for ninth right now.

Here’s the most recent evaluation of Hall, from April of this year:

Athletic big-guard rises on jumper in mid-range game and delivers; defends, traps in pressure, converts plays from turnovers; emerging offensive game to the arc is key to next level impact; back court size, versatility brings power-5 interest.

Duffy has talked about creating a continuation of the style of play that Carolyn Kieger used at Marquette. If that’s the case, then that eval definitely would fit the style that Kieger was running.

I don’t have much in way of stats on Hall for you, but a Dayton Daily News end of season all-area listing has her at 12.5 points per game as a sophomore. It also lists her at six-feet tall while putting her at Second Team All-Area. When you consider the fact that she was playing with DDN’s area Player of the Year, Destiny Bohanon, 12.5 per outing is pretty great for a sophomore.

Here’s a four minute highlight reel for her, but please note that it was posted in June 2017. It also appears to be posted by Hall herself, so please take that into account as well.

Ruby Whitehorn

Whitehorn is a 5’10” point guard in the Class of 2022. She hails from Michigan, where she attends Detroit Edison Public Academy and is currently finishing up her freshman year of high school. If Detroit Edison sounds familiar to you, the discerning Marquette women’s basketball fan, that’s because Gabrielle Elliott is a junior there and picked up a Marquette offer from Carolyn Kieger back in 2017.

She already has an ESPN recruiting profile page, which is exactly as impressive as it sounds. Whitehorn is currently one of 28 girls listed on ESPN’s 2022 Watch List. There’s no ranking there, in fact, they’re in alphabetical order. However, she is the only player from the state of Michigan listed.

There’s a reason why Whitehorn is already getting so much attention, even as just a freshman. Edison won their third consecutive state title in 2018-19 behind the superstar talents of Rickea Jackson, who will be playing for Mississippi State next season. Whitehorn came off the bench in the state title game for 17 minutes of action, the most of any bench player, and finished with nine points, four rebounds, an assist, and three steals. Edison will return Whitehorn and Elliott alongside Damiya Hagemann, a 5’7” point guard, so they’ll presumably be the favorite to win a fourth straight title. As such, there will probably be no shortage of high end college coaches wandering around over the next two years of prep action for Whitehorn. She already has scholarship offers from Michigan, Michigan State, and DePaul.

The best I can do for you in terms of video of Whitehorn is this 2:30 long highlight reel:

And this 90 second reel:

Both of them, however, are from April 2018, so they’re a year old at this point.

Here’s what the scholarship situation looks like for Duffy and her staff right now. Well, mostly. Shemera Williams and Destiny Strother both asked for and received their release from Marquette after Carolyn Kieger’s departure, but as far as I can tell, neither one has ended up anywhere else, either. Jordan King affirmed her commitment to Marquette, but I haven’t heard anything about the other four signed prospects. Sharna Ayres, who signed in November and then joined Marquette in January and redshirted for the 2018-19 season, is no longer listed on the roster page for 2019-20. Given her status as an international student from Australia, it’s not terribly surprising to see her opt to depart from MU.

As you can see from the chart, there’s an awful lot of space being created between now and 2021 when Hall will be headed to college, and even more so by 2022. It’s a long way off in any case, so we’ll see where Duffy takes things between now and then.