Marquette Women's Lacrosse Setting New Standards in 2023

After beating Georgetown 14-12 for its first Big East win of the season on April 1, Marquette learned its flight from Washington, D.C., back to Milwaukee had been canceled. The Golden Eagles would take a 16-hour bus ride home, where they’d square off with the Big Ten’s Ohio State, a team they’d never beaten.

It wasn’t an April Fools’ Day joke, nor was it new.

“We haven’t had a single flight that hadn’t been delayed,” said senior midfielder Lydia Foust, who leads the 15-1 Golden Eagles with 54 goals.

The details are murky about who got to Milwaukee first: Ohio State or Marquette. But we know this: The Golden Eagles won 13-12, and Foust led the way with four goals.

As a Midwest team playing a sport primarily dominated by East Coast programs (though that’s changing), the Golden Eagles have racked up frequent flyer miles. Conference realignment and their position in the Big East is another. This year’s 15-1 record involved its own journey, full of fits and stops of its own, partly because of the location.

“Most of the people who visit us have never been to Wisconsin,” said Meredith Black, who became the program’s first head coach in 2012.

Black was used to it. A product of Hunterdon Central High School in New Jersey, Black took a chance herself when she went to Notre Dame before it was Notre Dame. She set new standards there, helping the Irish to their first two NCAA tournament appearances in 2002 and 2004 and becoming the program’s first IWLCA first-team All-American.

“I understand the idea of leaving home and a place that is familiar to you … having to take a flight,” Black said. “I can sell that because I understand what that’s all about.”

Black leaves no stone unturned, though. Mary Schumar, who leads Marquette with 66 assists and 85 points, is from Grand Rapids (MI) High School. Foust is from California and had initially committed to West Point. During the spring of her senior year, she learned she couldn’t get a medical waiver for her high-pitch hearing loss, ending her dreams of playing for the upstart program. Black learned about it through the grapevine and called Foust right away.

“Within a day of finding out about West Point, she had found out and was motivated and seemed to want me,” Black said. “It felt genuine.”

Black has had to keep her ear to the ground, search high and low and recruit out of high school. In the last two years, newcomer programs like Pitt and Clemson have raided the transfer portal.

The inaugural Marquette roster included one senior, one junior, two sophomores and 27 freshmen. The Golden Eagles won two games. They cheered a ton anyway.

“We celebrated everything as a victory,” Black said. “Did we hold a team to a certain number of goals? Did we have less turnovers than we did last game? Did we share the ball well? We really focused on those being big wins for us so we can feel that success and see that we were getting better.”

Two years later, a player from the East Coast showed up in Wisconsin and began to change the program’s trajectory. Grace Gabriel, an All-American out of Lancaster, N.Y., helped the Golden Eagles win seven games her freshman year, at the time a program record. She’d go on to win a pair of Big East Co-Midfielder of the Year Awards. But it was more than that. During her senior year, she crossed paths with players like Schumar and Foust. The Golden Eagles advanced to the semifinals of the Big East tournament for the second straight year.

“Those things turn everyone’s head to, ‘This is what it can be. Let’s do this every year. Let’s make this a standard,’” Black said.

To make it a standard, the Golden Eagles would have to fill the cleats of their three leading scorers from 2019 in Gabriel, Cate Soccodato and Charlotte McGuire. There was some level of re-building in 2021, the next full season. The Golden Eagles went 7-9. But it was what was happening when no one was watching that set the stage for the last two years — and Foust was setting a different kind of standard.

“I’m internally motivated to do things outside of practice,” Foust said. “My coaches would tell me, ‘Try to bring one person with you.’ I would bring one person with me … Then, maybe that person would bring one person along. Slowly taking it piece by piece to bring those people along with you. Now, everyone is doing it.”

The travel this year may have presented some adversity. Leigh Steiner, a starter who had posted 27 points during her redshirt-reshman season, went down with an injury in the second game of the season. More than a dozen players got the flu during the team’s spring break road trip. The Golden Eagles still pieced together a 3-2 conference record, securing the No. 2 seed for the Big East championship. But Georgetown sent them packing in the semifinals 17-13.

“They left that game the hungriest I’ve ever seen them,” Black said. “This team did not stop talking about it all summer. It was, ‘This will not be repeated.’ There was so much confidence and energy to turn this around.”

The commitment was there, as was the confidence they could do well in the Big East. But 15-1? That wasn’t on anyone’s radar.

“We continuously look at each other like, ‘If you would’ve asked me if we would be 15-1, I’d say you’re crazy,’” Foust said. “I think we’re all like, ‘How the heck have we put together all these wins?’ We’re a little mind blown. We knew we’d do well in the Big East, but we never could’ve expected the [non-conference record] we had.”

The lone loss to date came on Feb. 23 to newly minted No. 1 Northwestern. But the Golden Eagles haven’t let the name on the front of a team’s jersey — or the conference patch — impact them. Black noticed that less than a month later in a 15-11 win against Louisville on March 19.

“They are ACC, and that is the strongest conference,” Black said. “It was like, ’This an intimidation game’ in a lot of ways, but they were never intimidated.”

A revenge match against Georgetown didn’t startle the Golden Eagles, either, nor did a 6-1 first-quarter deficit. The 16-hour bus ride home was made sweeter by a 14-12 win, and it was in the rearview mirror after beating Ohio State three days later. Still, no one was satisfied.

“The biggest phrase we use is, ‘What’s our standard?’” Black said. “We haven’t hit that standard yet. There’s not the history. Someone hasn’t already done it. They have the opportunity to do it first.”

But the Golden Eagles have set plenty of new standards this season. The 15 wins are a program record, topping the 2018 mark of 10. They’ve won 12 straight games, another record.

More importantly, Marquette has beaten UConn and Villanova over the last two weekends, setting up a clash with another team having a historic 2023 for the regular-season conference crown: No. 3 Denver. The Pios are not only undefeated in conference play. They are Division I’s only team without a loss this year.

Denver’s defense ranks first nationally at 5.81 goals allowed per game and hasn’t given up double-digit goals all season. It presents a test for the high-flying Marquette offense, which is third in Division I in goals per game (17.12).

“We know what they’re about,” Foust said. “They’re fast. They have a defense that is suffocating. They thrive on the chaos and pressure.”

But so do the Golden Eagles — on and off the field — and they have an eye on another program first.

“We haven’t beat them in program history,” Black said. “That’s definitely on our list. Their defense is incredible. Their defense is the identity of that team. Offense is our identity. It’s like, ‘Alright, let’s put the two against each other.’”

The kicker? The two teams could do it all over again in next weekend’s Big East championship. Should Marquette make it (another first), it would set the program up for a chance to claim a conference tournament crown (first) and an automatic qualifier into its — you guessed it, first — NCAA tournament. Black hopes the Golden Eagles will be considered for an at-large if that doesn’t happen.

“I think we’re in the mix, which is really, really fun,” Black said. “Likely, we’d go up against Northwestern. To us, they’re incredible … but we’ll take the challenge. We’re ready for anything. That’s the cool thing about this team. ‘OK, we’ll take a 16-hour bus ride because our flight was canceled,’ and they were like, ‘Whatever it takes. We’ll get it done.”

It’s an attitude Black hopes gets passed down through generations of Golden Eagles.

“This has been a standard-setting season,” Black said. “Realistically, going 15-1 every single year is probably not a possibility. But having this under our belt, especially with freshmen and sophomores on our team, they can repeat it. Rewarded behavior is repeated behavior. If we make this the standard, we can keep this train rolling.”

Even if their flights are delayed.