Marquette Women’s Basketball Makes An Offer To Margo Mattes

We haven’t gotten a chance to talk about Marquette women’s basketball recruiting in a while! It’s been over a month since we had any known movement on new recruiting offers or commitments (actually much longer since a commitment), but now we’ve got something new to talk about. Back on Saturday, Class of 2023 guard Margo Mattes announced that she has picked up an offer from head coach Megan Duffy and her staff.

From a variety of sources, I’ve managed to track down that Mattes is a 5’11” guard hailing from Mason, Ohio, where she attends — WAIT FOR IT — Mason High School. If that sounds familiar to you, there’s a reason. Current Golden Eagle Lauren Van Kleunen is a Mason grad. I don’t know about you, but I’m totally find with noted Ohio native Megan Duffy starting pipelines to southwest Ohio. Not only would it be great for Marquette, but pulling good/great recruits from Xavier’s backyard is always a solid way to run a program.

In terms of scholarship offers already on the table for her, I had to do a little detective work. Mattes hasn’t tweeted about any offers other than the one from Marquette. That’s either good news for Marquette or just a weird circumstantial thing. If we wander over to the Twitter for her club team, we find that she has offers from (in reverse chronological order because I’m lazy) Akron, Saint Louis, Miami-Ohio, Evansville, and, finally, Xavier. I don’t think that I’m out on a limb here saying that Marquette is her best offer so far, even if the Golden Eagles are the second offer from the Big East. Still, that’s three regional offers, a mid-major in-state offer, and also SLU getting involved. Marquette’s a step up in terms of national profile and distance from home here, but since Mattes is a 2023 prospect, this could just be the start of bigger and better things for her.

As you can tell from the “Class of 2023” aspect of things, Mattes is just starting her sophomore year of high school right now. Mason plays in the Greater Miami Conference, which is pretty good news for us, as GMC keeps stats on their own website! Nice going, high school sports conference. Anyway, from that site, we see that Mattes averaged 14.9 points, 4.6 rebounds, 2.1 assists, 1.6 steals, and 1.6 blocks in 23 minutes per game as a freshmen. That’s pretty great! That’s in the 20 games that they list, and those numbers mostly track along side the 17/5/3 that this article from mid-December 2019 states as her averages at the time. That was just seven games into the season, so you can see how a freshman might have exploded onto the scene and then teams started realizing that they had to guard her a bit more. I will note that she shot just 16% from long range on more than two attempts per game according to the GMC’s website, but then point out that she’s still a long ways off from stepping onto a college court, so that’s okay for now.

This seems like a good spot to throw in this scouting report from what appears to be Prep Girls Hoops. I’m guessing that the tweet itself is from Margo’s mother. The most notable part in it is PGH installing Mattes as the second best player in her class in the state of Ohio.

I don’t know how seriously you want to take highlights of grassroots teams from before a player’s freshman year of high school. If you want to take it seriously, keeping in mind that Mattes is playing against only age-similar players here, then I’ve got three-plus minutes for you.

If you’d like some high school game highlights, which means Mattes is amongst if not the youngest player on the court, then check out her Hudl page. It has a four-plus minute clip titled “Freshman Year Highlights” near the top.

Let’s go to the scholarship chart!

Mattes is a 2023 prospect, so it’s hard to get a handle on exactly where the Marquette roster is going between now and then. If she were to end up as a Golden Eagle, she would be sharing the court with women who have yet to suit up in a college game. The 2023-24 seniors are the 2020-21 freshmen if that lets you know how far off in the future we’re talking. In any case, if Duffy and her staff have identified Mattes as a player who will fit in her system and keep developing while at Marquette, then you can never have too many guards on the roster. When it comes to women’s hoops, you can never have too many guards at six feet tall as well, and Mattes is already 5’11”.