Marquette Women’s Basketball Keeps Handing Out Scholarship Offers

We already had one Marquette women’s basketball recruiting update this week, but the offers keep popping up out of the woodwork. There’s only so many things you can include in one update before things just get way too long and unreadable, so let’s knock another one out.

We’ve got three young women to talk about here today, so we’ll check in on the lone Class of 2020 offer before dealing with the two Class of 2021 offers out there now from new head coach Megan Duffy.

Taylor Lauterbach

Lauterbach checks off two boxes that you love to see in a basketball recruit: In-state and very tall. The Class of 2020 prospect checks in at 6’6” tall and attends Appleton West High School. According to WisSports.net, she averaged 12.2 points while shooting 50.7% from the field in 2018-19, along with 8.6 rebounds, 1.0 assists, and 2.6 blocks.

She has a Hudl page loaded up with videos from her club games with Wisconsin Blaze, and there’s also this two minute clip from various games that appear to be from Appleton West games.

Makiyah Williams

Williams is a 6’0” guard/wing in the Class of 2021. She attends Trinity High School in River Forest, Illinois, which is a west side suburb of Chicago right over near O’Hare Airport.

She has just wrapped up her sophomore year of high school, and while I can’t find any full season stats for her, I did find this Chicago Tribune article from early January 2018. It says that she was leading the team in scoring and blocks at that point. That was during her freshman year on a team that was returning four starters. Here’s what her coach said about her at the time:

“(Williams) hasn’t even scratched the surface of her potential,” Valente said. “She’s loaded with talent. She’s a quiet girl — I think she said five sentences total over the summer to me, no joke — and just getting her legs under her. When she starts figuring all of this out, she’s going to be something very special.”

Seems good.

If anyone can track down any video of her, that would be great, because I can’t seem to find it.

Morasha Wiggins

That’s from Wiggins’ very own Twitter account, and this is her current pinned tweet:

Look, I can’t do that, and I couldn’t even do that when I was a sophomore in high school like Wiggins is at the time of this video. That seems pretty good for the 6’1” Wiggins and her future as a Division 1 prospect.

I can’t find any sophomore year stats for Wiggins, but Prep Girls Hoops has this article from May 2018 that says she averaged 14 points, nine rebounds, 5.5 assists, and 2.5 blocks per game as a freshman. Again, that seems pretty good as a base level performance for her prep career. The 2021 prospect attends Kalamazoo Central High School in Michigan, and her coach had this to say about her following a 26 point performance in a 54-48 victory back in December:

“When she puts pressure on the ball, she’s got those long arms and is able to get those deflections, and then she has the speed so that when she gets those deflections, she’s able to go get the ball, and that usually turns into a layup at the other end.

”I haven’t coached somebody that fast at that size.”

“There is so much that she’s yet to improve on,” Plunkett said of Wiggins, who is currently averaging 26.3 points per game. “She’s doing this based off great ball-handling skills and the ability to get to the basket, but people haven’t seen her ability to hit the outside shot.

”That’s still a work in progress, but she’s improved it dramatically. Once she gets that down, I don’t know what other teams are going to do; I really don’t. She can do it, she just hasn’t had the confidence to really turn it loose yet.

Marquette recently plucked Erika Davenport out of Michigan, and all she did in her injury shortened four seasons was become one of the most prolific rebounders in program history. It seems like Wiggins could improve on that if she were to end up at Marquette.

Wiggins has a Hudl page that has eight new videos that just went up this week. Here’s a 90 second video clip that was put up on YouTube in August 2018.

Here’s what the Marquette scholarship situation looks like right now, kind of.

For now, I can’t tell whether or not any of the expected freshmen for next year are officially gone. Jordan King has made her recommitment to Duffy official, but Shemera Williams and Destiny Strother are officially released and still considering Marquette. We’ll see what happens with everyone else, I guess. No matter what does or does not happen with the 2019 freshmen, Duffy is looking at three spots opening up for 2020 and another three spots opening up in 2021. Those six women, whomever they end up becoming, will be major components of what Marquette basketball will become under Duffy’s guidance. As such, they’re going to be pretty big recruiting classes for her.