The 2026 Marquette Volleyball Season Preview: Three Questions
· Yahoo Sports
#1 — Who’s doing what around here, anyway?
With Keira Schmidt turning up in a walking boot back at the Blue & Gold Scrimmage, I think we can officially push the entire starting lineup on opening night against #2 Texas over to “shoot, I don’t know?”
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Yes, if that boot was preventative more than anything else — and she was moving just fine and not on crutches, I’m not that worried about it — then Schmidt is starting at middle blocker. She started for nearly all of her freshman year, and I don’t know why things would be any different one year later.
Other than Schmidt…. I can be convinced that all of the other six starting lineup spots are open competitions. Do I feel comfortable guessing that Brazilian junior national team star Luanna Markus will get the nod at setter over Lauren Young’s track record of being a bench option for three seasons at Jacksonville and UNC Wilmington? Sure, but nothing’s a guarantee. Does it feel pretty likely that Emma Parks can just slip back into the starting lineup spot that she had for the second half of last season? Sure, but if you told me that the coaching staff is a little bit worried about her .146 hitting percentage overall last season that was just .147 in Big East action and they wanted to go in a new direction, I wouldn’t be surprised. I don’t think the coaches brought Carson Tyler in to let her sit on the bench a whole lot after her 2025 MAC Player of the Year season, but it’s Tom Mendoza’s job to win volleyball matches, no matter how he gets there. There’s hitting options on this roster, it’s just that they’re all freshmen and that’s up to Mendoza to decide if he wants to turn things over to them.
The other middle blocker next to Schmidt? Julia Stanev has the experience advantage, especially since she was around for spring season and neither Molly Welge or Berrak Sporeli were. Heck, Sporeli was a late arrival to campus, so unless she’s a knock your socks off addition, I don’t know how she jumps past Stanev or Welge. No matter what, Marquette probably has to find a way to replace production lost by the shift of Hatie Bray from Active Player to Director of Player Development. Libero’s up for grabs as well, as Avery Helms has a year of Division 1 play under her belt, but Annika Kowalski did some neat stuff in her prep career and Emi Juric has a long list of international appearances for the Slovenian national teams, both junior and senior.
#2 — How do we use 2025 to judge where things go from here?
Marquette’s 2025 season saw the team finish with a record of 18-11, which is their lowest win total in a normal fall season since Bond Shymansky put together an 18-12 season in his first year in charge back in 2009. That was also the last time that Marquette didn’t win at least 21 matches in a normal fall season, and the squad’s .621 winning percentage was the program’s worst since Shymansky’s team was at .600 in his first season. Even the weird spring 2021 COVID season ended up at .714 in 14 matches.
The Golden Eagles went 11-5 in Big East play, which is their highest loss total in the conference since Ryan Theis went 13-5 in 2016. At .688, Marquette had their worst winning percentage in conference play in a regular fall season since Theis went 12-6 in 2015 for a mark of .667.
It still meant an NCAA tournament appearance for Marquette when it came down to brass tacks, so it’s far from a disaster. It’s just merely the least successful MU season in a while, even if we did see the Golden Eagles win an NCAA tournament match for just the 9th time in program history. It was the fourth straight NCAA event with a Marquette win, which extends a program record.
Tom Mendoza did all that, the highs and the lows, while coaching a team — at least the players that saw the majority of the time on the floor — that he had nothing to do with recruiting. He took Ryan Theis’ returning players, Ryan Theis’ committed transfers, and Ryan Theis’ signed freshmen, and built an NCAA tournament profile team out of what he had in front of him, one that still ended up with the fewest wins in over a decade. With multiple players transferring out when the season was over, it’s a safe bet to guess that Mendoza’s views on how they fit in with how he wants to coach and how he wants his team to play weren’t in line with how they wanted to go about their collegiate career going foward.
That’s fine! That leaves us with the question: Now that Mendoza’s roster is 100% players who have actively decided to play for him, how does that affect their buy in to his system, and how does that affect how much he can get out of them? Is 2025 undershooting Mendoza’s ceiling because he was stuck with players that don’t fit his style very well, and should we expect notable growth now that the team is modeled the way he would like it to be?
#3 — Is this an NCAA tournament team?
The questions swirling around our #1 question on this list means we can’t really say emphatically what this team should be or could be in 2026.
What we can say is that Marquette is absolutely going to have their chances to make their case as a tournament team for the 15th consecutive year of full field 64 team tournaments.
Non-conference play is going to give the Golden Eagles three cracks at teams in the AVCA preseason top six. Win or lose — and lose is probably the most likely outcome on all three — MU will come out of that with a strong base for their non-conference strength of schedule. They’re going to get chances to snag wins against teams right on the edge of a ranking on three different occasions in non-conference play, including a pair of contests against an Illinois team that’s actually starting the year behind Marquette in the eyes of the AVCA voters.
Big East play might have one of the stronger sets of games that we’ve seen in a long time. Creighton starts the year at #13, and Villanova is earning preseason top 25 votes. If the Wildcats can pay off that potential, that’s going to help raise the floor for Marquette. We can’t forget about Xavier, which is coming off a #8 seed in the NCAA tournament last fall, which was the third tourney appearance in program history and first since 2007. I would presume that the Musketeers would like to compete for the program’s first ever back-to-back appearances in the field.
Multiple tippy-top non-conference games, plus winnable non-conference games against teams that should compete for NCAA berths, plus maybe the strongest Big East in a long time? If Marquette can hold serve (volleyball term) and take care of business against the teams they need to beat along with snagging a few notable wins? Could be an easy sail through to the tournament… but that’s going to require Tom Mendoza to get this squad pulling in the same direction straight out of the gate.
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