Iowa State's Kenzie Hare will face her former team, Marquette, on Friday in Florida

AMES — No hard feelings.

Those are generally the operative words since the advent of the transfer portal era.

Players come and go — and sometimes come and go again.

So it’s no surprise that former Marquette transfer and current Iowa State starter Kenzie Hare is still tight with a lot of her erstwhile Golden Eagles teammates.

“A lot of love there,” said Hare, who will face her former team at 10 a.m. Friday in the Geico Coconut Hoops event in Fort Myers, Fla. “So just excited to see them, then obviously when it comes to game time, it’s time to complete, but that’ll be good. It’ll be fun.”

The Cyclones (7-0) climbed to No. 10 in the latest Associated Press women’s top 25 poll. Marquette (4-1) has posted 20 or more wins in four straight seasons. So this matchup, along with Sunday’s game against either Indiana or Gonzaga, will serve as the biggest tests for ISU so far this season.

“It’ll be good — and then we have a week off,” said ISU head coach Bill Fennelly, whose team is 7-0 for the first time since the 2021-22 season. “So the schedule’s kind of quirky, but we’ll be tested twice, we’ll come home, reevaluate where we are, good or bad, and then try and sprint to the finish line.”

Intrastate matchups with No. 11 Iowa and Northern Iowa loom next month before the Cyclones’ begin Big 12 play on Dec. 21 against Kansas at Hilton Coliseum.

But first things first: Hare and ISU must take on her former teammates and good friends with the Golden Eagles.

“Marquette’s a very good team, one of the more experienced teams in the country,” Fennelly said. “They have everyone back.”

Some of those experienced players — Lee Volker, Halle Vice and Bridget Utberg — came to visit Hare last weekend and attended the Iowa-State-Kansas football game, which the Cyclones won, 38-14.

“I’m still friends with a lot of them,” said Hare, who’s shooting 48 percent from 3-point range this season. “They liked Ames.”

So there are no hard feelings. Players shuffle in and out of the transfer portal, and what used to be a relatively rare bit of wandering is now par for the course across college athletics.

“Now it happens all the time,” said Fennelly, whose team includes six former transfers. “The portal world we live in, seriously, that used to be — you’d get teams all riled up because we’re gonna play ‘them.’ Hell, every roster’s got guys from everywhere.”

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