Summertime means recruiting time for college sports, and Marquette women’s basketball is no exception. New head coach Megan Duffy and her staff are apparently hard at work on the recruiting trails, and we’ve got two new scholarship offers to prove it. We’ve got one new offer for the Class of 2020 and one for the Class of 2021, and both are from the state of Illinois.

Before we dive in, let’s insert the scholarship chart right here. We’ve got two different recruiting classes in play here, so now we’re all on the same page as to what the Golden Eagles are up to. MU currently projects to have two scholarships open for the fall of 2020 after the commitments of Rose Nkumu and Liza Karlen, while fall of 2021 shows three more spots coming available with the pending departures of Selena Lott, Tori McCoy, and Lauren Van Kleunen.

Capria Brown

Can I interest you in the #76 player in the country? Oh, I can? Excellent.

Capria Brown hails from Danville, Illinois, which is right on the Illinois/Indiana border straight east from Champaign. She attends Schlarman High School there where the Hilltoppers went 33-2 in 2018-19 and thumped Eastland in the Class 1A state title game. Brown averaged 19.1 points and 3.4 assists as a junior as her squad made their way to the title.

The weirdest part about Brown picking up the offer from Marquette at this juncture — let’s be clear, it’s really late in the recruiting cycle for 2020, especially for a top 100 prospect — is that she wasn’t even available when Megan Duffy took the Marquette job. In fact, Brown was committed to Xavier right up until Brian Neal quit his job in early March. Now, instead of planning on heading to Cincinnati for a struggling Musketeer program, Brown is looking at heading to Milwaukee and one of the top programs over the past few seasons. Of course, she’s also getting offers from Michigan, Illinois, and Penn State at this point.

As you can see, Example Sports AAU is Brown’s current club team, and that’s kind of notable here, especially since that’s a change from last year. Taylor Valladay and Camryn Taylor, both of whom will be freshmen at Marquette this fall, played for Example. On top of that, Marquette already has scholarship offers out to Example 2020 prospects Grace Hall and Annaliese Griffin. Valladay and Taylor originally committed to Carolyn Kieger and elected to stick with Duffy. Hall and Griffin both had offers from Kieger and Duffy re-upped those once she came on board. I’m not saying that gives the Golden Eagles any kind of inside track on Brown, but it’s definitely not going to hurt.

Here’s a two minute highlight package of Brown that was posted in November 2018. A tip to any mixtape compilers out there: Filters on footage is bad. Please do not use them.

Sydney Affolter

All due respect to Sydney here because I feel confident in saying that she can beat me in a game of one-on-one, but someone needs to teach her how to either 1) save images to her phone or 2) crop screencaps on her phone.

Affolter is a 5’11” wing hailing from Chicago where she attends Marist High School. She averaged 17 points, 6.9 rebounds, 2.5 steals, 1.2 assists and a block per game this past season as a sophomore, helping her RedHawks team to a 22-9 record. Affolter got a chance to follow that up at the USA Basketball U16 team trials in May. She made it through cutdowns from 152 to 68, but ended up not getting any further than that. While it’s a bummer to not get a chance to represent the USA in the FIBA Americas tournament, it has to still be a pretty big honor to be recognized as one of the top 70 players in the country in your age group.

That’s the closest I can come to giving you an actual national ranking on Affolter, and it’s admittedly imprecise. What I can tell you is that PrepGirlsHoops.com has state by state rankings available. While they’re mostly behind a paywall, the top five in the Class of 2021 is not, and Affolter is ranked #2 in Illinois. Combine that with her showing at Team USA trials and the fact that Capria Brown is also #2 in Illinois for 2020, and I think we’re getting a solid picture of where Affolter sits as a college prospect.

I’ve got two highlight reels for you, with both coming in around three minutes and both coming from a year ago.

She also has a Hudl page to give you some clips of her playing for Marist, but it hasn’t been updated since April 2018.