The recruiting engines are still firing out there as the 2021-22 school year inches closer and closer. We have three new scholarship offers from Marquette women’s basketball and head coach Megan Duffy to talk about here today. Two of them are for the Class of 2022, which is the biggest priority at the moment since those prospects can sign letters of intent in three months. The other is a much more long terms offer in the Class of 2024, but you could definitely argue it’s a higher profile offer. We’ll get to it in a minute, but first, let’s talk about the more timely offers.

Class of 2022

Charia Smith

I found a Max Preps page for Charia Smith, which does give us some nice basic info on her. She’s a 6’1” forward, and she hails from Westerville, Ohio. Smith attends North High School right there in town, which is on the north side of Columbus.

I tracked this down from The Columbus Dispatch to let me know that 1) Smith might actually be 6’2” and 2) she averaged 12.0 points per game for Westerville North and that was good enough to get her onto the Third Team for the All-Central District squad. That’s one step up from getting an Honorable Mention as a sophomore in 2019-20.

According to her tweets, she recently snagged an offer from Austin Peay. A couple of recent tweets show her going on visits — it’s unclear if they’re official or unofficial — to Western Michigan, Buffalo, and Ohio State.

And that’s it! I’m out of useful information about Smith, and I kind of feel bad about it.

This is the part of the show where I tell Smith and her family that I appreciate them hitting up the anon.eagle GMail inbox with a 90 second clip of her playing at the Sandusky Shootout about 30 minutes after I quote tweeted the scholarship offer tweet. It is also the part of the show where I have to sadly say that I can’t plug that video clip into this article because that’s how the SB Nation content manager works. Send me YouTube links in the future, everyone!

Smith does have a Hudl page which was last updated in March of this year, so there’s lots of good clips over there. Her pinned tweet is a link to a Junior Year highlight reel that runs just over four minutes long, so check that out, too.

Aizahanique Mayo

As you can see from the tweet, Aizhanique Mayo is a 5’9” guard hailing from Connecticut. She attends Notre Dame High School in Fairfield. Due to Mayo’s outstanding achievements in the field of excellence (more on that in a second), we know that she averaged 20.4 points, 6.8 rebounds, 7.0 assists, and 5.0 steals per game as a junior last season for the Lancers. That’s pretty good, and so was the team as they went 12-1 to win their second straight conference title.

Back to the achievements. I tracked down all those stats — and the fact that she shot 47% from behind the three-point line — in this press release article from MaxPreps. It exists because MaxPreps named Mayo their Connecticut High School Girls Basketball Player of the Year. As a junior. That’s damned impressive.

You can tell how much her opponents respect her from this article relating to a game this past February. #1 ranked Notre Dame was facing the #10 team, and the #10 team elected to face guard Mayo for most of the contest, attempting to completely take her out of the contest and force the other Lancers to beat them. Two things happened: 1) Mayo still scored 18 points, and 2) Notre Dame ripped off a 21-0 run in the first quarter and ended up winning by 32. The #10 team thought they could stop Mayo’s squad by taking her out of the picture... except they didn’t and they couldn’t.

I can’t find any information about where Mayo might be ranked on any platform, because it appears that she just doesn’t exist to either ESPN or Prospect Nation. The closest I can come to this is Prep Girls Hoops declaring Mayo to be the #6 prospect in the New England area and the #1 combo guard prospect in the region. I’m not sure how she can be the best player in the state of Connecticut as a junior but not have more national recognition at this point.

From a scroll through Mayo’s tweets, it seems that she’s not snagging much in the way of scholarship offers, which again, is bonkers. St. John’s made an offer in April, and I have to go back to August 2020 to find Houston, Seton Hall, and Delaware making offers. A Twitter search shows that Temple made an offer on the same day as the Golden Eagles. Is this a “5’9” isn’t tall enough to make an impact in Division 1” thing or something? I’m very confused.

The best I can do for embeddable video for you is 44 seconds from April of 2019. Yeah.

She does have a Hudl page, though, and that was last updated in March of this year.

Class of 2024

Chloe Spreen

Well, we may as well start with the big news: ESPN ranks Chloe Spreen as the #21 prospect in the Class of 2024. The 5’9” guard from Bedford, Indiana (just a bit south of Bloomington) is the third prospect in ESPN’s top 25 to pick up an offer from Marquette recently, coming along behind Blanca Thomas and Britt Prince. Just to drive the point home: Spreen was one of 34 young women to participate in the Team USA U16 trials earlier this summer to set the roster for the FIBA Americas Championship that will start in the middle of August.

Both the USA Basketball site and MaxPreps tell us all about Spreen’s freshman year of high school basketball at Bedford North Lawrence High School. In 25 games, she averaged 14.8 points, 5.5 rebounds, 1.4 assists, and 1.8 steals per game as the squad went 22-3. It seems she was pretty consistent in her production with just four games of 20 points and a season high 21 points on one occasion. This article from WBIW.com in Indiana notes that Spreen was playing out of position at the 5 for her team, which is fascinating given that she’s only 5’9”. Then again, I’m looking at it from a college perspective where 5’9” means she’s definitely a guard, and that’s not necessarily the case for high school girls’ basketball.

In a story from Fox 59 from last August, we know that Spreen got her first scholarship offer during her eighth grade season, and it came from Indiana. Over the summer, teams just kept on coming through as seven more offers came in, including one from Big East rival Butler. The recruiting has just kept on going, with Oregon State, Georgia, North Carolina, and Iowa joining the Golden Eagles in the last five programs to offer Spreen a scholarship according to her tweets.

Here’s a 60 second scouting report video on Spreen from last September:

And that’s all I’ve got for you, because it will be a cold day in hell before I put up a two minute video of Spreen from 2017. Yes, someone made a highlight video of Spreen from the summer between fifth and sixth grade and expects me to think of them as a Very Serious Person. You can go watch it if you want, but there is absolutely nothing useful to see from a four year old video.

Spreen does have a Hudl page, which was last updated in mid-February of this year.

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Scholarship chart time!

As far as Spreen and 2024 goes, yeah, I dunno, and neither do you. At that point, we’re looking at the possibility that Makiyah Williams, who won’t suit up for MU until November, will be a senior on that roster. The less we worry about how Spreen fits in as a freshman that year, the better.

For the fall of 2022, though, well, Marquette doesn’t really have any definitive holes in their roster. They will lose Lauren Van Kleunen and Karissa McLaughlin after their COVID-bonus seasons, and it’s possible that Chloe Marotta may wrap up her collegiate career as well. With Emily La Chapell already committed to MU, Megan Duffy still has as many as four open scholarships to work with, although if Marotta sticks around, she will have to occupy one of them. MU will have enough guards and bigs to assemble a rotation for that year, but dealing with the potential departure of the 2022-23 seniors the next year is where having freshmen getting used to things might come in handy.

In any case, these new offers are one guard and one forward, so that’s a nice dispersal of talent around the roster if nothing else.