This spring the young inexperienced Marquette Golden Eagles have started off the year on a roll, with a current record of 7-2 Marquette hired a new head coach Shaka Smart, after seven inconsistent seasons former head coach Steve Wojciechowski. 

Wojciechowski lead the team to a career record of 128-95, and Marquette only made one quarterfinal appearance and it was only in the National Invitation Tournament in the 2017-2018 season that included stars, Markus Howard, and brothers Sam and Joey Hauser, and the team still could not make the March Madness tournament. 

With Smart the team started the season 5-0 and recently lost to St. Bonaventure 70-54. Their biggest win so far was against ranked Illinois by 1 point.

The new head coach decision at Marquette is looking like a good one based on their record. “I like the energy he is bringing to Marquette. The high energy and high pressure defense has proved so far to keep a lot of good teams off the board,” junior EJ Kuster said. 

Smart came from coaching 6 seasons at the University of Texas, and he stepped down from coaching at Texas because the Longhorns had no March Madness apparences and Smart wanted a more talented team, so he decided to take the challenging option and take a talented Marquette team into the post season. “I think that it can only go up from here for them. Every game they’ve got guys stepping up and taking a key roll in the game on either side of the ball. Especially with the freshman, by the end of the year their going to be battle tested for March Madness,” sophomore Collin Kramp said. 

The team has 10 freshmen including four redshirt freshman. Freshman David Joplin from Brookfield Central High School,  In highschool Joplin was a 4 star recruit he was ranked 94th nationally, Joplin was named Associated Press Player of the year last year, and is averaging 4.4 points per game, and 1.5 rebounds per game, Marquette has high hopes for the young star. “I was kind of surprised when Joplin committed to Marquette and I was super happy because of how good he is,” junior Olivia Riester said.

While they gained talented freshman, they lost players as well. Recruit Dawson Garcia, who was in the top 30 recruits of the 2020 recruiting class, elected to enter the transfer portal after one successful year of playing with the Golden Eagles. Garcia reportedly left the team because of the loss of former head coach Wojciechowski. 

The team also lost their starting center Theo John who also entered the transfer portal, and decided to move on to Duke. John said that he decided to transfer to Duke because he felt it was best for his future and that the has a better chance in winning a national championship with them. “He was a big loss for the team, but I think we will be fine without him, it’s giving the younger guys more opportunities also,” Kuster said.

Some people believe that loss of John and Garcia and four other transfers was going to be huge losses for the team and they were not going to be good, however Marquette has shocked most people with such a good record. “I didn’t expect them to be doing this well, but they look really good so far and I think they’ll be really good, especially in the future when they are super experienced,” senior Noah Roder said.