The Marquette Women’s Lacrosse All-Time Assists Chart

By now, you should be more than familiar with our series of regularly updating leaderboards for various Marquette Golden Eagles sports accomplishments. Keep checking back to that link in the previous sentence for our charts as the seasons continue to churn through history and MU’s various teams continue to create new memories and accomplishments.

This time around, we’re looking at the women’s lacrosse all-time assists chart.

Assists are a weird stat for women’s lacrosse, or at least they have been under the guidance of head coach Meredith Black. Claire Costanza has the career record with 100, while Cate Soccodato and Amanda Bochniak are #2 and #3 at 89 and 78 respectively. Riley Hill’s 67 career helpers occupy fourth place all time in the Marquette record book, and Megan Menzuber got all the way up to 51 at the end of her career to round out the top five.

There have been 10 seasons of lacrosse at Marquette, and that’s it for women with 50 career assists. Five. In 10 years. Five women averaging better than 12 assists a season for their collegiate career. That’s it. It seems weird, right?

Anyway, that’s going to change in 2023.

Mary Schumar tied Cate Soccodato’s single season record for assists last year, putting up 43 all in one campaign. On their own, those 43 assists would be the sixth best career total at Marquette, and Schumar had three in 15 appearances as a sophomore, so she sits on 46 heading into her senior season. Here are the things that are possible, listed in order of probability:

• Schumar becomes the sixth woman with 50 career assists (UPDATE: happened in Game #2)
• Schumar passes Menzuber (UPDATE: happened in Game #3), Hill (UPDATE: happened in Game #6), and Bochniak (UPDATE: happened in Game #9)
• Schumar passes Soccodato (UPDATE: happened in Game #12)
• Schumar becomes the second 100 assist player in Marquette history (UPDATE: happened in Game #15)
• Schumar breaks Costanza’s record (UPDATE: also happened in Game #15)

It seems unlikely that she’s going to put up 55 assists this season. (UPDATE: She has 61 with two regular season games to go.) But then again, before last year, Soccodato was the only person to ever record more than 35 assists in a season, and she did that twice. Why can’t Schumar be the first to post 40 and the first to 50 and the first to 55? Even if she doesn’t do it this season, there’s a chance that she returns for a bonus season in 2024 and just absolutely destroys the record.

Shouts to Shea Garcia, who will likely just chug along and have another great season and maybe not make it into the top five all time because that #5 spot is just going to keep getting further away from her as the season goes along. Lydia Foust is at #9 all time, which is awesome. She had 18 helpers last season, and if she just gets a little bit past that career best, she’ll get to 50 career assists, perhaps as the eighth MU player to ever do it.

If you thought there was a steep drop from Costanza’s record to #6 all time, it just keeps getting steeper. Madison Kane is 10th with 30 assists and Hayley Baas is 15th with 15. That’s why we will watch Emma Soccodato (13), Leigh Steiner (11), and Meg Bireley (8) this season. Bireley is the most interesting participant in this race as she was a freshman last season and can only get better from here.

UPDATE (4/19/23): Mary Schumar posted a Marquette and Big East record NINE assists against Butler. She started the game with 98 career assists, so the second one of the game tied Claire Costanza and the third one officially broke the program record!

Here’s how the all-time chart looks at the end of the history 2023 season.