The former Rutgers star joined the Marquette coaching room a year ago and will stay on for 2024-25.
Cara Consuegra’s first coaching staff at Marquette continues to take shape. On Monday, Consuegra announced that she would be retaining assistant coach Khadijah Rushdan from Megan Duffy’s 2023-24 women’s basketball staff in the same role.
First, Rushdan on sticking around at Marquette:
“I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity and trust by Cara to stay on here at Marquette,” Rushdan said. “I believe in her wholeheartedly, for not only who she is as a coach and her vision, but even more as a person. She’s a proven winner with contagious energy and I couldn’t be more thrilled to continue a winning tradition alongside of her.”
And Consuegra on her decision to retain Rushdan as an assistant coach:
“I am very excited to have Khadijah on my staff here at Marquette,” Consuegra said. “Khadijah had an incredible playing career and her passion for game will help elevate our program. She has the energy needed to continue the winning tradition at Marquette and her ability to lead and connect with student-athletes will have a tremendous impact on our program.”
This announcement came almost exactly one year to the day that Marquette and Duffy announced Rushdan’s hiring during last offseason. Rushdan had been at North Florida for five seasons as well as one year at La Salle before that. She also had an outstanding playing career at Rutgers from 2007 through 2012, earning all-Big East First Team honors as a senior and ending up as a WNBA draft pick.
There are a few ways to read Consuegra and Rushdan coming to an agreement to keep her employed in Milwaukee. The first is that Consuegra appreciates the continuity from the previous season, even if she has just six returning players. Heck, given that she only has two rotation players coming back from last year and can’t really rely on stats and video to learn about her new team, Consuegra could easily see Rushdan as a wealth of knowledge about Halle Vice, Charia Smith, and so on. The next is a multiple possibility situation, where we don’t quite know about 1) how much Megan Duffy did or did not want to bring Rushdan with her to Virginia Tech after one season together as well as 2) how much Rushdan did or did not want to uproot her life again this quickly after moving to Wisconsin following five years in Jacksonville. There’s a continuum of those two things pushing and pulling on each other, where Duffy’s interest in keeping Rushdan as an assistant plays a part in determining how much Rushdan may or may not want to leave.
The big question for me is how much input did Rushdan have on Marquette last season, and then how much will she have on the Golden Eagles next season? My opinions about the direction of the program under Duffy’s guidance have been documented in this space before, and given that the team generally speaking looked and played in 2023-24 like it did in 2022-23, I can easily say “Well, that’s Duffy and to a certain extent Justine Raterman making the calls with two first year assistants on the bench next to them.” If what we saw last year had very little to do with what Rushdan thinks about basketball, then I’m intrigued to see how her influence could shape the Golden Eagles under Consuegra’s direction. I pointed out when Marquette pulled the trigger on hiring her away from Charlotte that Consuegra’s 49ers teams didn’t have a true year-to-year identity, which can be seen as a strength if that’s more of a focus on using what you have on any given roster. If that’s Consuegra’s mindset, then having input and viewpoints from her assistants, especially one that she didn’t work with last year, could be incredibly useful for a first season in a new job.