Marquette Women’s Basketball Gets A 2020 Commitment From Julianna Okosun

Here at Anonymous Eagle, we pride ourselves on our ability to rummage up news, sometimes seemingly out of thin air. While we’re always on the search for Marquette news to pass along to you, our loyal and devoted readers, sometimes it’s actually you that does the detective work for us.

Case in point:

Dedicated reader @Bizzie_Smalls popped up in the Twitter mentions last Wednesday to ask a question about something that I hadn’t seen.

It would seem that these two tweets are the items that raised Bizzie’s eyebrow:

Assistant coach Scott Merritt’s tweet could be about anything, honestly. However, when paired with assistant coach Justine Raterman’s tweet, particularly with the phrasing of “find some more Golden Eagles,” it would seem that Megan Duffy’s staff has a new commitment.

But who? I ran all the usual searches that I usually do to check to see if there’s recruiting news, but nothing turned up. Looks like I have a new trick to add to the book, as Bizzie was able to uncover an Instagram post and a tweet that would have slipped through my searches.

That’s Julianna Okosun. Here’s the text from her Instagram post:

I am ready to leave my MARQ!! #commited @marquettewbb

A huge thank you to everyone who helped me in this process and to all the schools that have been recruiting me! Next year I will be attending Marquette University.

This leads to the obvious question: Who is Julianna Okosun?

Well, details on her are a little bit sparse. This has to do with the fact that she’s from Denmark. According to her Eurobasket profile page, she’s 6’5” tall, which seems very good. She’s been playing for Vaerlose, which is a club on the northwest side of Copenhagen. Okosun appeared in 17 games for them last season, averaging 13.9 points and 8.6 rebounds per game while playing a little over 23 minutes per outing.

Seems good.

Okosun also played for the Danish national team in the 2018 FIBA U18 Women’s European Division B Championship, where the teams were competing for promotion to Division A for the next time around. Denmark went 3-2 in group play, which put them in a tie for second place and a spot in the quarterfinals. They missed out on tiebreakers, though, thus ending their tournament run there. They still played three more games in the event, although I’m not entirely clear exactly how those games were determined.

The point of this is that Okosun had a great tournament, averaging 9.4 points and 9.9 rebounds in their eight games. That rebounding average was the fifth best in the entire tournament, and her scoring mark was second best on her team. Okosun had three double-doubles, all in group play.

As mentioned earlier, seems good.

If you’re so inclined, you can wander over to FIBA’s website and watch all eight of Denmark’s games for free on YouTube. Neat, huh?

If you’d prefer highlights, check out this Vimeo video, which appears to be from the 2018 FIBA event. It’s only 90 seconds long.

Thanks to The Boneyard, everyone’s favorite Connecticut message board, I ended up tracking down a five minute highlight reel for Okosun that appears to have been published on her own account. Heads up, though: It’s about a year old at this point, and it appears that all of the footage is shot from one endline.

Did I just imply that Marquette and Megan Duffy beat out Geno Auriemma and Connecticut for a recruit? Well, all I’m saying is that The Boneyard is paying careful attention to who their assistants are following and being followed by on social media. So yes, I’m implying that Duffy beat out the Huskies.

That also seems good, especially with Connecticut coming back to the Big East starting in 2020.

Okosun joins Liza Karlen and Rose Nkumu in Megan Duffy’s first official recruiting class as Marquette head coach. With two scholarships currently sitting open and two seniors on the 2019-20 roster, that leaves Duffy with one scholarship spot projected to be available.

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