Marquette had two unanimous picks for the completely bonkers 18 woman all-league team.
With the 2024 Big East tournament spooling up on Wednesday in Omaha, the league announced the postseason honors for volleyball on Tuesday afternoon. Much like the Golden Eagles fell short of winning a fourth straight regular season conference title, Marquette fell short on picking up any of the five individual honors this season. However, three Golden Eagles did get named to the Big East’s all-conference team with two of them getting a unanimous vote from the league’s coaches.
Before we dive into the three Marquette women who were honored here, can we chat about the size of the All-Big East team? Or, maybe more accurately, the fact that there is just one 18 woman all-Big East team and not a second or a third team at all? What are we doing here? Six women on the floor at a time, if you want to say the lineup is actually seven women because of the libero position, I’m not going to argue with you about it. I don’t think we’re stepping on anyone’s toes here to name seven women First Team All-Big East and another seven Second Team All-Big East. All you did with this 18 woman team — four more on top of my First & Second Teams idea, by the way! — is create a situation where nine women were unanimous choices for the squad and so we all know who the coaches really think are the best players in the league. You’re just advertising how silly it is to have such a big all-BE team! If you did a 7&7 approach, I’m guessing you don’t get nine unanimous choices either, and that makes getting every vote more exclusive and impressive along the way. The Big East keeps doing this in multiple sports, and it drives me straight up a wall every single time.
Shouts to golf, where they have a statistical analysis for “who was the best this year” and boom, no thought process or voting required.
ANYWAY
Let’s start with Hattie Bray. Here’s the Marquette press release writeup on her season:
Bray’s hitting percentage of .431 in conference play leads the league by nearly 20 points and her 2.68 kills-per-set mark ranks in the top 20. For the season, she hits .355 with 2.48 kills and 0.85 blocks per frame and has earned three weekly league honors this fall, including in each of the last two weeks.
Bray, who earned AVCA All-Region honors last year alongside Hamilton, will look to join Allie Barber (2016-19) and Meghan Niemann (2013-16) next fall as the only MU players to earn four all-league first team honors when she returns for her redshirt senior season in 2025.
Bray was joined by Aubrey Hamilton in the unanimous choice department. Here’s her writeup:
Hamilton leads MU in kills for the third time in as many years with 354 for an average of 3.54 per set overall and 3.79 in league play. She reached her 1,000th kill in a MU uniform with a career-high 28 in a five-set home win over DePaul on Oct. 18, and enters postseason play seventh in program history with 1,178 kills at MU. The native of Hartland, Wisconsin has earned AVCA All-Region honors in each of the last two campaigns.
Hamilton can join Hope Werch later this week as the only MU players to earn three all-conference tournament selections in a career.
And finally, Yadhira Anchante, who made the list but was not a unanimous choice…. which probably just says more about Creighton’s Kendra Wait, the 2024 Setter of the Year AND Player of the Year, than anything else, to be honest.
Anchante is the first MU setter to earn three first team all-conference accolades and was the 2022 BIG EAST Setter of the Year. Her season average of 10.51 assists per set ranks second in the league behind Creighton’s Kendra Wait and Anchante averages a career-high 3.21 digs per set to lead the Golden Eagles.
The native of Lima, Peru is the fourth player in program history with over 3,000 career assists and enters postseason play with 3,244 in her three-year NCAA Division I career. She leads MU this season with 19 double doubles.
Marquette currently sits at 22-7 overall this year after wrapping up the Big East regular season schedule with a record of 16-2. The Golden Eagles are #20 in the RPI and #32 in the Evollve rankings, which should put them in a good position for an at-large berth to the NCAA tournament. That’s important, as their hopes of the Big East’s automatic berth by way of a conference tournament championship rely on someone — maybe Marquette, maybe not — being able to beat Creighton for the first time this year.
And speaking of the conference tournament, as I type this, we’re waiting to find out who #2 seeded Marquette will play in the semifinals on Friday. It will be either #3 seed UConn or #6 seed Villanova, as those two face each other in the first round in Omaha on Wednesday evening. No matter what, MU’s semifinal match is scheduled to start at 5pm Central time, and FloSports will have the streaming broadcast.
You can check out the entire Big East press release on the awards here and the entire Marquette press release right here.