The Wildcats pulled the upset on #3 UConn to get to the semifinals and a third go-round with the Golden Eagles this season.
2024 Big East Volleyball Tournament
Semifinals
#2 Marquette Golden Eagles (22-7, 16-2 Big East) vs #6 Villanova Wildcats (17-13, 9-9 Big East)
Date: Friday, November 29, 2024
Time: 5pm Central
Location: DJ Sokol Arena, Omaha, Nebraska
Streaming: FloSports, probably with Jon Schriner and Shannon Smolinski on the call
Live Stats: Stat Broadcast
Twitter Updates: @MarquetteVB
Bluesky Updates: @AnonymousEagle
All Time Series: Marquette leads, 26-4, and they have a 13 match winning streak against Villanova.
Season Series: Marquette won 2-0 on a pair of sweeps.
I wonder what head coach Ryan Theis’ motivational tactic for Friday’s Big East semifinal match against Villanova is. The fact of the matter is that Marquette lost their semifinal match a year ago, with that one coming at the McGuire Center in Milwaukee. A very real chance to win a tournament title — they had beaten Creighton in that building earlier in the regular season — went by the wayside because the Golden Eagles couldn’t capitalize on a 1-0 and 2-1 lead in a match against a St. John’s team that had beaten MU in New York.
That was last year and this is this year, where Marquette 1) has to play the Big East tournament in Creighton’s building and 2) the Bluejays are a legitimate national championship contender as they are currently #5 in the AVCA top 25 poll and #6 in the RPI. The chances of finding a way to beat the Bluejays after two losses in the regular season seems slim, but Marquette’s only way of finding out if they can do it is to get through Friday’s match. That’s something that they couldn’t do last year, so there is a certain amount of “we can’t let that happen again” going on here.
I don’t want to say Marquette caught a break with #6 seeded Villanova knocking off #3 seeded UConn in the first round of the tournament on Wednesday evening. There’s a couple of reasons why. First, that’s mean to Villanova. Second, Marquette held UConn to .115 hitting when the two sides met at the McGuire Center back in late September, while VU hit .126 and .068 in the two matches against Marquette. The fact of the matter is that there’s a reason why Marquette finished four games ahead of Connecticut in the standings, so I don’t really think that, on paper, it really mattered which team got through to the Golden Eagles.
Since no one had a good time against Marquette this season, we’re probably better off looking at how Villanova beat UConn in five sets on Wednesday when it comes to previewing Friday’s contest. The Wildcats drove their offense through Cat Young, as she had the majority of attacks, but the 5’11” freshman ended up second on the team in kills on the night behind Campbell McKinnon. Young had 14 while hitting .137, but McKinnon, a 5’10” middle blocker, had 15 kills and hit .324. She also had 11 assisted blocks on the night plus two service aces for a team high total of 22.5 points.
At the end of the day though, Villanova won because UConn’s Emma Werkmeister didn’t have it and the Huskies kept going to her. She took 60 swings in the match and finished with seven kills and 13 errors. That’s a sub-zero hitting percentage from a player averaging 3.63 kills/set and hitting .223 on the year after that disaster. As long as Marquette doesn’t let the Wildcats do that to Aubrey Hamilton and/or Ryan Theis is alert enough to just send the offense to someone else, then the Golden Eagles should be able to stick to their game plans from the first two meetings and advance to Saturday’s championship match.