And so the projected roster for Marquette women’s basketball gets thinner….and thinner
On Wednesday, the issues facing Marquette women’s basketball in 2024-25 got significantly stronger, as sophomore wing Kenzie Hare entered the transfer portal. Talia Goodman, Portal Tracker Extraordinaire for The Next, was the first that I saw with the news.
Marquette’s Mackenzie Hare has entered the transfer portal, a source tells @TheNextHoops.
She averaged 14 ppg this season as a sophomore.
— Talia Goodman (@goodmansport) March 27, 2024
Hare joined Marquette as a late addition to the 2022 recruiting class after exiting her letter of intent to play for Saint Louis after the Billikens made a coaching change. She played in all but one game as a freshman, coming off the bench each time and averaged 7.2 points and nearly two rebounds in just under 17 minutes. Hare found her shooting touch as a sophomore, jumping from a sub-par 31% from behind the three-point line to 42.5% from long range in 2023-24 on less than two more attempts per game. That 42.5% ranks #14 in the country as of the end of the first two rounds of the NCAA tournament. That helped her rank second on the team in points per game this season at 14.0, and Hare added 2.1 rebounds, 2.4 assists, and 1.2 steals a night as well.
So, obviously, Hare’s departure is a major loss for the 2024-25 Marquette roster. In fact, with Hare transferring, the Golden Eagles are now projected to return none of their five starters, pending Liza Karlen’s decision about her bonus year of eligibility. Hare’s departure makes freshman Skylar Forbes the projected leading returning scorer and rebounder…. At 4.7 points and 3.9 rebounds per game.
Let’s drop in the new and updated scholarship chart and then I have one more thing to say.
The One More Thing is actually going to be a collection of statements. I’m going to type out some facts, and then you tell me in the comments what this all looks like to you.
For the second straight season and for the third time in four seasons, Megan Duffy has lost an underclassman starter to the transfer portal.
As it stands right now — and the transfer portal can obviously not fix this — the 2024-25 Marquette women’s basketball roster will have zero juniors or seniors that Megan Duffy recruited out of high school. Please remember that the seniors for the season that just finished were the first recruiting class Duffy assembled at Marquette.
Not counting grad transfers, Megan Duffy has now had eight players transfer out since the end of her first season in 2019-20, five of whom were her high school recruits. Jordan King is the only one out of four freshman that Duffy inherited who made it to the end of four years of eligibility at Marquette with the other three departing by the end of their sophomore years. Another player finished their degree in three years and then left college basketball altogether.
You tell me what this looks like to you.