IOWA CITY -- Twenty-three days -- that's how long the Iowa women's basketball team waited before nabbing Lucy Olsen as a transfer guard from Villanova last year.
The Collegeville, Pennsylvania native went on to lead the Hawkeyes with 17.9 points and 5.1 assists per game in the 2024-25 season.
This offseason, the Hawkeyes waited even longer to make an addition via the transfer portal as Chazadi "Chit-Chat" Wright committed to Iowa last month nearly a month -- 29 days -- after the spring transfer portal window opened.
During a fan event in Cedar Rapids on Thursday, assistant coach Randi Henderson explained why the Hawkeyes tend to wait until later in the offseason to make a splash.
"The portal is interesting and also deceiving," Henderson told the Quad-City Times. "You don't know what it's going to do for you or to your team. Our team environment is really important, and I think helps us stay competitive. So, I think we just take our time."
While responding to questions from athletic director Beth Goetz, who moonlighted as the emcee of the event, Henderson expanded on what makes Iowa's team culture, the "special sauce" as Henderson called it, so important to the program.
"If you keep the mindset of people first, people always, then you're going to put the first things first," Henderson said. "... You want to win, you want to be competitive and you want to care about the people that you have. So, we build a lot of relationships with our players. We spend a lot of time having fun with them, not just playing basketball. On road trips, we're playing board games, we go places together, the girls hang out together. ... We just try to keep the environment joyful."
In a world where most programs treat the portal as speed dating, an analogy Henderson said fits, the Hawkeyes go against the grain as a more judicious acquirers of talent.
Henderson said Iowa's more methodical process helps it make the most out of the portal and its transfer additions.
"(We are) finding things that we actually need, and not overdoing it," Henderson said. "We have some really good players coming back. So, it's like, we were very competitive in all of our games so it's not like we are in that same situation where five people left and we got to fill five people. We graduated three, and we have really good pieces coming back."
While the Hawkeyes' approach to the portal leads to greater returns as complement their roster with additions, it also slows the process down because of the need to find the right kinds of personalities to fit on the roster. The added chaos of name, image and likeness (NIL) and the potential of revenue sharing as early as next season create additional hurdles for teams to mind when navigating the transfer portal.
"You can watch on film and see skillset-wise, but then you don't know culture-wise or what they're looking for," Henderson said. "Do they want to be a role player or playing behind Hannah Stuelke? There's so many things that go into it that take a lot longer. ... It's a very complicated and I think it is really hard on coaches. I'm sure it is hard on the players and their families and the teams that they're leaving, too."
Between a combination of liking to know exactly what they need, not wanting to disrupt their team culture and battling new hurdles in college athletics, Iowa prefers to take things slow in the transfer portal.
The approach worked with Olsen and it landed the Hawkeyes Wright and potentially another addition.
"We still are dancing in the portal a tiny bit, but not too much," Henderson said. "We're pretty picky about who we take, and so there may be one other person that we end up bringing on that could help us in losing Lucy."
Comfortable Caitlin Clark ready to lead Indiana Fever with championship aspirations
Caitlin Clark talks upcoming WNBA season, Fever preseason exhibition
'Divine intervention' helped Cedar Falls native get into coaching, back to Iowa women's hoops