Big Red is your friend. 2025 NCAA Volleyball TournamentFirst Round#7 Western Kentucky Hilltoppers (27-5, 15-1 CUSA) vs Marquette Golden Eagles (17-10, 11-5 Big East)Date: Friday, December 5, 2025Time: 3pm CentralLocation: L&N Federal Credit Union Arena, Louisville, KentuckyStreaming:ESPN+Live Stats:Stat Broadcast, probably, but also maybe NCAA.com?Twitter Updates:@MarquetteVB Bluesky Updates:@AnonymousEagleAll-Time Series: Marquette leads, 4-2, including a 3-0 sweep earlier this season.I am still shocked that the NCAA booked a regular season rematch for the first round of the women’s volleyball national championship tournament. I know that they send unseeded teams around to first round sites more based on location/ease of travel than anything else for the volleyball tournament, so that could have played a part here. After all, Stanford, SMU, and Arizona State are the other #2 seeds, and if they were trying to slot Marquette against a #7 seed out of some sense of bracket fairness, sending the Golden Eagles from Milwaukee to Louisville makes the most sense at that point.The really crazy part about booking a regular season rematch in this specific case is it’s a game that the seeded team lost. Back on September 5th, Marquette put a damper on Western Kentucky’s day with a 3-0 sweep of the Hilltoppers. WKU had beaten #25 Dayton earlier in the day in an event hosted by the Golden Eagles, so the Toppers would have been inching even closer to getting ranked the following Monday if they had followed up with a win in a match between two teams that were earning top 25 poll votes at the time. Instead, Marquette got the 3-0 sweep of Western Kentucky, powered by a .474 hitting night from Elena Radeff and a .400 performance from Hattie Bray as well. MU held Western Kentucky to just .157 hitting as a team, and then head coach Tom Mendoza put his team up and over the top at the very end with a match winning replay challenge to get the W in his first home match in charge of the Golden Eagles. Wanna watch the highlights?Alivia Skidmore is Western Kentucky’s top attacker, averaging 3.45 kills per set and hitting .297 on the year. Marquette did not do a great job of slowing her down in September, as Skidmore put up 16 kills and hit .333. That’s generally speaking a bad sign for Marquette’s chances in this return bout. The good signs are the fact that MU induced 25 hitting errors overall from the Hilltoppers in that first meeting, including five from Skidmore and at least four from each of the top four women in terms of attacks that night. MU also got a huge advantage from WKU at the service stripe, as the Tops committed nine service errors in that match. Serving the ball has been a problem for Western Kentucky all season, as they rank #281 in the country in errors per set according to Evollve, and #213 in errors per match. That’s not a thing that Marquette can count on benefitting from again, but if the Golden Eagles can have a strong receiving night to start pushing WKU into taking some chances in that department, they can at least herd the Hilltoppers into repeating their problems. The winner of Friday’s MU/WKU match will advance to the second round of the NCAA tournament and play on Saturday evening at 5pm Central time. That contest will be against the winner of #2 seed Louisville hosting Loyola Chicago, and that match will start at 5:30pm Central or 30 minutes after the conclusion of Marquette’s match, whichever is later. Follow Anonymous Eagle on social mediaFacebook: AnonymousEagleInstagram: AnonymousEagleSBNBluesky: AnonymousEagle