Lots of familiar names on this year’s non-conference slate.
Back on the 16th, Marquette women’s lacrosse announced their schedule for the upcoming 2022 season. Here’s what head coach Meredith Black had to say about her campaign in the press release:
“We are very excited for the 2022 season,” Black said. “It’s great to be back to our normal non-conference and BIG EAST schedule format. As always, we have some great competition out of conference to help us prepare for our extremely competitive league season.”
As you can see from Black’s quote there, the Big East has moved off of the double round robin schedule that they used last year. That left the Golden Eagles with just six non-conference games against 10 league games. This year, it will be 12 non-conference games for Marquette and a five game Big East slate.
This year’s non-conference schedule poses an interesting set of circumstances for the Golden Eagles. First of all, there’s the note that Marquette will face two NCAA tournament teams from the spring in both Northwestern and Notre Dame. If you’ve been paying attention to MU lacrosse since the inception of the program, then you know that both of these are ongoing near-yearly rivalries for Coach Black and her team. However, things have not gone well for Marquette in those games, as they are a combined 0-14 against the Wildcats and the Irish.
Then, the other part of the challenge is the number of road games involved. After Marquette opens up the season at home on February 12th against Cincinnati, they will play the next six games on the road over the next three weeks. The first game is at Northwestern, and that’s followed up the next weekend with a two-fer at Louisville and Ohio State. MU is 1-9 all time against the Cards and 0-2 against the Buckeyes. The next weekend has just one game, which is a visit to Detroit Mercy in Michigan. Marquette is 6-0 against the Titans with the most recent game coming back in 2020 right before the season got shut down. The stretch of road games wraps up in the first weekend in March out in New York State as MU will visit both Canisius and Niagara. Marquette is undefeated in five tries against both of those two teams combined.
Finally, on March 12th, MU will be back at Valley Fields to face Kent State. The two teams met for the first time ever back in February of this year, although that has more to do with this past spring being in the third years of KSU’s program than anything else. After that, Marquette will head out west for Spring Break with a Tuesday game against San Diego State and a Sunday contest up at Oregon. That Spring Break trip provides a weird little bookend type situation for Marquette, as their only meeting against SDSU came back in Season #1 (a 19-5 loss) and the only contest against the Ducks was at Valley Fields in the 2021 campaign. That one ended in a 16-4 Marquette victory.
After that, Marquette will take a week off before hosting Central Michigan for one final tuneup before Big East play starts. The home date with the Chippewas on March 27th is now, however, the final non-conference game of the season. MU and CMU have split the last four meetings straight down the middle with each team winning at home.
Finally, the first Saturday in April brings the first Big East contest of the season, and each league game comes on each weekend of the month. The first one comes in the form of a road trip to visit Connecticut. As luck would have it, Marquette gets to open and close conference play with a road trip, but then they play three home dates in the middle on three consecutive weekends. The final road trip of the season comes in the form of a visit to Denver out in Colorado on April 30th after Senior Day against Georgetown on the 24th.
Just past the midway point of league play, Marquette will fit in one final home non-conference game, and it’s one that’s near and dear to Coach Black’s heart. Her alma mater, Notre Dame, will roll into Valley Fields on Monday, April 18th. MU is 0-8 all time against the Irish, and a 15-10 loss in 2018 is the closest that MU has ever come to defeating ND.
We’ll have to wait and see what happens with Marquette and the Big East tournament. I’m curious as to whether or not Marquette will plan to stay in Denver until the semifinals on May 5th if they qualify. It does seem a little silly to trek back from Colorado after the game on the 30th just to go back some time on the 4th, but I’m not the one making the decisions here. That, of course, requires Marquette to qualify for the tournament, and perhaps for them to know that they have already clinched a spot by the time they leave for the game on the 30th.
Here’s the whole schedule! For whatever weird reason, we have times here while we did not for the men’s team.