Marquette Women’s Lacrosse Picked To Finish Fourth In Big East Preseason Poll

And now we play a little catch-up.

Back on Friday morning, the Big East league office released the results of the women’s lacrosse preseason poll. YOUR Marquette Golden Eagles earned 14 points in the team polling and thus are picked to finish fourth in the league this season. They trailed behind Denver, the unanimous preseason favorite with 25 points, Georgetown (21 points), and Villanova (16 points). There’s a big drop off between Marquette and Old Dominion (9 points) and Butler (5 points), so it seems that the league’s coaches are of a similar mind about which four teams they expect to make the Big East tournament at the end of the season.

In addition to Marquette’s 4th place finish as a team, three players were included on the preseason all-conference team. The Golden Eagles are represented on the 17 woman team by junior defender Jocelyn Miller, junior midfielder Madison Kane, and sophomore attacker Shea Garcia. Here’s how the official MU press release wrote about the trio:

A junior from Manorville, N.Y., Jocelyn Miller has started in all 36 games for MU in the past two seasons. She earned first team All-BIG EAST honors last season for her stellar play on the back end. Miller finished the season with 37 ground balls, 25 caused turnovers and one draw control in 2019.

Kane, who started 17 of her team’s 18 games at midfield last season, netted 14 goals and tallied nine assists on the year. Perhaps the best game of her career came against Louisville on Feb. 10 when she posted her first career hat trick in a 15-12 win. She’s also a two-time Academic All-BIG EAST honoree.

Garcia became the first Golden Eagle in program history to take home BIG EAST Freshman of the Year honors last season. The sophomore attacker from Manhasset, N.Y., scored 29 goals to go along with eight assists. She led the team (minimum 30 shots) with an .859 shots on goal percentage.

Garcia and Kane making their way onto the list is fascinating, as neither of them are MU’s leading returning scorer. That honor goes to Megan Menzuber, who tallied 32 goals and 12 assists a year ago.

11 of the women I had on my 12 woman all-conference team were given spots on the official team, so that’s a pretty good success rate. Of course, the league going out to 17 spots made that a lot easier. I don’t really understand why, in a sport without noted specialists, the league has 17 women on the squad when 12 is the number that starts a game. I get that there were ties somewhere in the voting that led to the number, but I still feel that the league got a little out of pocket here. My lone miss wasn’t even much of a miss. I went with Georgetown’s Noelle Peragine at defense, and the Big East coaches ended up voting for GU’s Mollie Miller instead. Oh well. I was still cutting a fine line between the two if you read my reasoning, so sometimes you miss by a little.

In terms of individual awards, the coaches as a whole agreed with my picks of Denver’s Quintin Hoch-Bullen as Offensive Player of the Year and Georgetown’s Katie Hudson as Defensive Player of the Year. As far as I’m concerned, the surprise here is that neither one was a unanimous choice for that award.

Marquette kicks off the 2020 campaign on Friday morning when they visit Notre Dame for the lidlifter for both squads. The Fighting Irish start the season as the #7 team in the country in the Inside Lacrosse media top 20 poll.

You can read the entire Big East press release here and the entire Marquette press release here.