Back early April, we highlighted a new scholarship offer coming from Marquette women’s basketball head coach Megan Duffy. As it turns out, Duffy and her assistant coaches stayed pretty busy for the rest of the month, so we’ve got three new scholarship offers from April to talk about. Two of them are for the Class of 2023, aka the class after the one that will sign national letters of intent this coming fall, aka current high school sophomores....... and one of them is from the Class of 2025..... as in a current eighth grader.

No, really. We’ll get to her down the line. For now, let’s look at the two 2023 prospects.

Katy Eidle

Between Max Preps and Prep Girls Hoops, we can figure out that Eidle is a 5’11” sophomore at Hersey High School in Arlington Heights, Illinois. She was already breaking out as a star as a freshman, earning this profile in the Chicago Tribune back in February of 2020. At that point of that season, Eidle was averaging 14.7 points, 4.6 rebounds, and 2.9 assists while shooting 42.7% from behind the three-point line. According to this page, which appears to be for her club team and managed by Eidle herself perhaps, she finished freshman season averaging 15.3 points per game and set a team record for three-point shooting percentage at 42.6%.

For her sophomore year at Hersey, Max Preps shows 17 games worth of stats for Eidle. 18.8 points, 3.4 rebounds, 2.6 assists, and 2.7 steals per game is a pretty good way to go through life, especially as MP shows Hersey was undefeated in those games. I’m also seeing that Eidle shot 43% from behind the three-point line as a sophomore, so her hot shooting wasn’t just a one year hot streak.

Offers have been coming in fast and furious for Eidle since MU made their pitch in mid-April. Providence has also issued an offer, as has Michigan State, Minnesota, and Princeton. The Princeton one stands out a little bit to me, as Ivy League schools don’t really bother making scholarship offers to prospects unless that they are relatively confident that the player in question can hack it academically.

Here’s just over two minutes of highlights of Eidle from April 2020, so I presume this is all freshman year stuff:

And two minutes of highlights from an event just a few weeks ago:

You’ll notice that came straight from Eidle and that she tagged coaches from Michigan, Iowa, Nebraska, Michigan State, Providence, Yale, Minnesota, Davidson, North Carolina, Louisville, Northwestern, Belmont, and South Dakota in addition to MU’s very own Megan Duffy.

Eidle also has a Hudl page, and right at the top at the moment is a nearly six minute long highlight reel from her sophomore year.

Alyssa Latham

This Chicago Tribune profile from early March of this year mentions that Latham is a 6’1” forward and that she attends Homewood-Flossmoor High School in the south Chicago suburbs.

And, uh, somehow that’s all I can pull up on her. That’s weird. I mean, I can find articles that will tell you how many points and rebounds that she had in a particular game or pair of games, maybe, but that’s not a season long average. Part of this might be because LSU commit Grace Hall plays for Homewood Flossmoor, so Latham didn’t have to be the featured player. Still, due to knee injuries for Hall, Latham has had to step up for her prep team and everything I can dial up about that seems to indicate that she’s been more than ready to do that.

So that’s good.

Marquette is Latham’s most recent scholarship offer according to her Twitter page, and the first in over six months. Or, rather, at least the first that she has tweeted about. The most recent one before the Golden Eagles was Northwestern, and Loyola came before them. Back last summer, Latham mentioned offers from DePaul, Illinois, Niagara, Pittsburgh, and Western Michigan.

It seems like the best I can do for you in terms of highlight footage is this minute long clip from May 2020.

This feels very sparse, but I am confined by what I can find via Google searches. If anyone out there has more on Alyssa Latham, fire it off in the comments section.

Kira Reynolds

And now we move on to the Class of 2025 prospect. Ready?

Kira Reynolds lists herself in her own Twitter bio as standing 6’3” tall. And again, she is in eighth grade right now. I am not kidding. If you do some Googling, you’ll find more than a few mentions of her, which really has more to do with her older sister being good enough to commit to Maryland in the summer of 2020. The Reynolds are a big family, and they’re nuts about basketball, so it’s an easy story to keep writing about. Big sis Mila attends Washington High School in South Bend, Indiana, so we’ll presume that Kira is attending middle school/junior high in the area as well.

The back end of April was a busy time for Reynolds. She picked up scholarship offers from Maryland (duh), along with Pitt, West Virginia, and Purdue in addition to the call from Megan Duffy and Marquette. With a sister who is a top 50 prospect and the fact that Reynolds is already well north of six feet tall, I think we can go ahead and guarantee that these won’t be the last scholarship offers that she gets.

Given how far off Reynolds is from high school basketball much less college, I’m not going to even try to dive in too deep on anything here. I will point out this page, though, which seems to indicate that she’s playing on a 15U club team. That means she’s playing two years up, which makes an awful lot of sense just purely from a physical challenge for her.

EXAMPLE: Here’s some highlights that she posted on her Twitter of playing with said 15U team, and remember: She’s two years younger than everyone else on the court.

And now, the Marquette scholarship chart.

Well, I have to admit, with Camryn Taylor and Taylor Valladay transferring out of the program, things have actually gotten a bit easier for Megan Duffy when it comes to 2023 recruiting. While Jordan King will be a senior the previous season, Claire Kaifes and Antwainette Walker haven’t been more than role players for the Golden Eagles so far and we don’t know exactly what Kennedi Myles will turn into over the next two seasons. For the time being, Duffy isn’t looking at needing to replace a gigantic impact class, which is good news. We also don’t know how many freshmen that Duffy is looking to bring in for the fall of 2023, as she could add anywhere from one to three women to go alongside Emily La Chapell in 2022 first. Still, MU projects to have four open scholarships, presuming no one takes a COVID bonus season at that point, and thus the team is going to need contributors at the very least.

As far as the Class of 2025 and Reynolds is concerned, that’s so far down the road that Emily La Chapell will be a senior that season. Who knows what will or will not happen with the roster between now and then?