Weren’t they seniors? Sure, but what are rules, anyway…….
As we got further and further away from the end of the college basketball season, it was really starting to look like Marquette women’s basketball coach Cara Consuegra was going to go into 2025-26 with 13 players on her roster. She added Jordan Meulemans by way of the transfer portal, and y’know what, 13 is a lot of people, you’re not going to to get everyone into the game regularly, that’s fine.
And then
On Tuesday, Marquette announced that seniors Abbey Cracknell and Lee Volker will be returning for a fifth year of eligibility in 2025-26.
Both women were honored on Senior Night at the end of the regular season, so this is certainly a surprise on multiple levels. They were honored with good reason, as well. Cracknell played for two years at Gulf Coast State College before transferring to Marquette for the past two seasons. She played in 50 games for the Golden Eagles, averaging 1.2 points and 1.3 rebounds in 8.5 minutes per game. Her playing time didn’t change all that much between Marquette shifting from Megan Duffy to Cara Consuegra as head coach.
As for Volker, she appeared in 39 games across two seasons for Duke before transferring to Marquette. She played in 12 games with six starts for a total of 176 minutes for the Blue Devils in 2022-23 before leaving the team during the season and then making the move to Marquette. Volker played about 15 minutes a night off the bench in her third year of college hoops before starting all 32 games for the Golden Eagles and Consuegra this past season, averaging 12.6 points, 4.6 rebounds, 2.8 assists, and 1.5 steals per game.
In short, it certainly seemed obvious that both women were out of eligibility. It also seems obvious that Marquette was not particularly expecting this development, given the whole Senior Night thing. I presume that Cracknell’s continued eligibility comes by way of Vanderbilt quarterback Diego Pavia suing the NCAA relative to the idea that you can’t infringe on a player’s ability to earn NIL money just because they were in junior college for a minute. I’m not 100% sure how that applies to Cracknell, who hails from Australia, because I was under the impression that foreign born athletes can’t benefit from NIL rules….. but given that schools should be able to start paying athletes directly if the House settlement gets approved, I guess that all fits together. In Volker’s case, I presume that the NCAA is granting her a waiver for whatever transpired in her second season at Duke that led to her mid-season departure.
By the way! I’m completely guessing because they announced the returns on Tuesday morning just after 9am….. and it’s now 11 hours later and there’s nothing resembling a press release explaining what’s going on. Seems silly!
And now, a brand new scholarship chart……
Marquette was clearly getting better as a team as the season went along last year, so returning the entire squad for next season and adding a transfer and two freshmen can’t possibly make them worse. You could easily argue that MU could have had a shot at an NCAA tournament bid if not for early season losses at UCF and at Bowling Green, back when Consuegra was still figuring out her team and the players were still figuring out each other. If the Golden Eagles can just pick things up where they left off in the spring of 2025, I like their chances to do big things in the spring of 2026.
By the way: I just want to point out that Ayuen Akot and Aryelle Stevens spent two years at a junior college before coming to Marquette. I’m going to keep listing them as seniors until I see MU doing something different when the 2025-26 roster page officially goes live on GoMarquette.com.
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