For the last 18 years, we’ve seen roughly the same soccer at Valley Fields. Not in terms of winning or losing, there’s been ups and downs there. I mean in terms of what does the guy in charge think the team should be doing, and that’s because Louis Bennett has been running the show ever since he came across town from UW-Milwaukee starting with the 2006 season. And now, things are different, as David Korn takes over as the seventh head coach in program history. This is how drastic of a change it is: Korn was still in college when Bennett started at Marquette, as he graduated from Arizona in 2007. For better or for worse, there’s going to be a younger set of eyes minding the store for the Golden Eagles, so that will have an impact on what’s happening on the pitch.
It might be a long slog of a season for the Golden Eagles. There’s going to have to be a lot of mixing together of returning guys who played notable roles and new guys in order to put a coherent soccer product out on the field. There’s no other way to say this part of it, but no matter what, Marquette is going into the campaign without a goalie who has played a single moment of college soccer. Not D1 soccer, any collegiate soccer at all. That’s probably not a recipe for success, but it can be a good starting point for long term growth as Korn’s tenure continues.
And so begins the David Korn era of Marquette men’s soccer. It’s been 18 years since the Golden Eagles had a new men’s soccer coach, and there’s upsides and downsides to that. The biggest upside is probably that you can easily argue that Marquette needed a new direction for the program, as 2023 was Louis Bennett’s first season with more wins than losses since the 2020 timeshifted campaign, and given 1) the weird COVID nature of it and 2) Marquette caught A LOT of breaks by way of the overtime rule still existing at the time, you can kind of throw it out as a sign of success. That means Bennett hadn’t had a normally scheduled fall season with a winning record since…. 2014. That one was the last year in a four year run of winning seasons that gave him just six in 18 years at Marquette.
While that’s the reason why change can be a good thing, the mere existence of the change at all can be a bad thing. There’s a couple of guys with eligibility left to go — Edrey Caceres and Beto Soto — that are somewhere else in college soccer right now. Both of them had big roles on last year’s team, and that means that Korn is getting started in Milwaukee with a little bit less than he might have hoped. The good news there is that David Korn gets a jumpstart on remolding Marquette in the direction that he wants to go a little bit faster. Look no further for evidence than the fact that he brought Tim Smith, his top scorer from last year at Maryville, with him to Wisconsin, along with Clayton Hamler, who was a freshman last year for the Saints but ended up playing big minutes for Korn.
It’s time to do some more season previewing for Marquette men’s soccer! We’ve already discussed the players returning from Louis Bennett’s 18th and final season in charge of the Golden Eagles, and if you missed it, scoot on over there and get caught up! Today, we’re going to talk about the 15 players that new head coach David Korn recruited to the squad, whether that’s guys that were already on board and kept their commitments to Marquette, brand new freshmen recruits, or inbound transfers from elsewhere in the soccer world.
We’ll go about it in the same order that we used for the returning guys: Forwards moving backwards down the field to the new netminders.
Off we go!
There’s only two new guys listed as forwards on the roster. One of them is particularly notable, as Tim Smith (5’9”, #20, Lee’s Summit, MO) has followed head coach David Korn from Division 2 Maryville for one final bonus season of eligibility. We’ll of course have to wait and see how Smith adjusts going from a very good D2 program to the Big East, but the fact of the matter is that he led Maryville in goals and assists last year with eight each. Cards on the table: Both numbers would have beaten out everyone on Marquette’s roster last year. Again: D2 vs Big East, but even half that would have had him tied for second in goals and tied for the lead in assists on the MU roster. Smith only has the COVID bonus season of eligibility left, so I imagine he’ll be a little bit motivated to make it count.
Marquette’s only other new forward is Adam Mekrami, who stands 6-feet tall and hails from Gottsunda, Sweden. While his official Marquette bio says he was named the best scorer in the Swedish league that he was playing in five times, it also doesn’t give us any actual scoring numbers. As usual, that makes my eye twitch a little bit, but in this case, given that “best scorer five times” bit, the twitch isn’t as noticeable.
The majority of the new faces land in this department. Korn has brought in two in-state transfers in Gabe Anguil (5’8”, #33, Wauwatosa, WI) and Mitchell Dryden (5’11”, #15, Whitefish Bay, WI). At a glance, they might be the two best new guys on the roster, as both men won the Wisconsin Coaches Association Player of the Year trophy during their senior prep seasons. Anguil comes to Marquette from UW-Milwaukee, which might give him the honor of becoming the first man to ever play on both side of a Milwaukee Cup match. He had to sit out last season with an injury, but in his first two years of eligbility, Anguil put up two goals (both as a sophomore) and 15 assists. Nine of those helpers came during his sophomore campaign, and he finished the year with the 16th most assists in the entire country. Dryden spent the last two years at Wisconsin, where he has started 10 times in 37 appearances, although eight of those starting spots were last season. He has just six goals and an assist in his two seasons, but I say “just” because he was a point scoring machine at Whitefish Bay. Dryden went for 35 goals and 22 assists as a senior, 27 & 9 as a junior, and another 19 goals during his sophomore season. I don’t know if he’s coming to Marquette to put points on the board, but he’s definitely got the potential to do some damage.
That moves us along to Clayton Hamler (6’1”, #26, Jefferson City, MO), who joined Tim Smith on the trip from Maryville to Marquette along with the new head coach. He started 13 times last season for Korn at Maryville...... but for some reason, the Marquette roster lists him as a freshman. Weird! Hamler had just one assist in nearly 1,200 minutes for the Saints in 2023, but he broke his high school’s goals and assists record, so perhaps he’s got a high ceiling in the scoring department.
We’ve still got two more transfers in the midfield with collegiate experience. Matt McLaughlin (6’0”, #13, Broadview Heights, OH) spent the last four seasons with Notre Dame. He didn’t see the field all that much, appearing in 10 matches. He did find a way to tally three assists while playing just 41 minutes as a sophomore, so maybe all he needs is playing time in his bonus season of eligibility to find a way to uncork that passing touch. Justin Milovanov (6’0”, #28, Brooklyn, NY) is a bit of a question. His official MU bio says he was at UMass Lowell last season, where he started 14 times in 15 appearances and logged over 1,100 minutes and scored twice. His Mississippi River Hawks team bio says he was at St. Francis before that...... but I can’t find a record of him playing. I presume, given the cutoff of 2022 and his home town that we’re talking about the St. Francis that shut down their athletic program entirely in the spring of 2023, but that’s just guessing.
Andreas Christou (5’11”, #11, Leivadia, Cyprus) is listed as a junior on the Marquette roster. It appears that he’s coming over from Cyprus as a transfer from college over there, and so he only has two more years of competition left. I can’t tell you anything about how he plays, but his MU bio says he was the captain of Cyprus’ U17 team. That seems pretty good.
We wrap up this department (finally) with two freshmen. Both Grant Locker (5’9”, #16, Saint Louis, MO) and Hudson Torrez (6’0”, #22, Walworth, WI) were United Soccer Coaches All-Americans as a senior in high school, so that’s pretty neat. I can’t add much more about either man, but Locker was co-Offensive Player of the Year in the entire state of Missouri after his senior season. Nothing in his bio to tell me exactly what kind of scoring he was doing to make that happen, but I imagine it had to be pretty impressive, yeah?
We’ve got one transfer and two freshmen here. Gabriel Rokov (6’2”, #12, Zadar, Croatia) is going to have to do a little bit of proving himself at Marquette. It’s good that he started 39 times in 42 appearances at his last stop, and adding nine goals and a helper in over 3,000 minutes played as a defender is really good. It’s just that he was playing for Columbia International University, which is an NAIA program. He was a two-time All-American in his two seasons there.... but that’s the National Christian College Athletic Association handing out that award. But still!
Jack Wandschneider (6’4”, #18, Brookfield, WI) is a local guy, coming to Marquette after playing for both Brookfield East High School and SC Wave MLS Next. Leo Rodriguez (6’0”, #19, Edwardsburg, MI) has played with the Indy Eleven youth program and has been on a developmental contract with the Las Vegas team in the USL Championship league. Does that mean he’s ready to start logging minutes against Division 1 teams? Well, you’d like to think that’s maybe the case, but we’ll have to wait and see.
Marquette has two freshman netminders joining Patrick Crantz and Renan Salumn in the position group. Yes, that means whoever starts the opener against Drexel will be playing in their very first collegiate match, no matter who gets the call. Marten Brink (6’7”, #1, Stukenbrock, Germany) would be the most physically interesting choice if for no other reason than watching a 6’7” guy play goalkeeper instead of small forward in basketball sounds like something that we should all experience at least once. He’s been taking part in the U19/youth side of Bundesliga play up til now, so that seems like it’s a pretty credible training experience if nothing else. Same goes for Cameron Simpson (6’2”, #30, Middlesbrough, England), who has been training with his local side in the UK, which is in the English second division after last appearing in the Premier League in 2017. I wonder if he got to be on the sideline when Middlesbrough played Chelsea in the FA Cup semifinals this past January.
