It’s just after 5:15 in the evening on Friday, Feb. 16, the day before the Cyclones take on Texas Tech in Hilton Coliseum. The Cyclones’ final pre game practice ended only 45 minutes ago.

Emily Durr, Bridget Carleton and Claire Ricketts are in the living room of their Ames home, joking around, eating Chipotle and trying to “act natural” for the Daily’s photographer.

Durr shows us a blanket she got from her hometown that’s covered with pictures of her whole family, and Carleton discusses the group of 40 friends and family heading down in a bus from Chatham-Kent, Ontario, Canada for Saturday’s game.

They go by “Bridget’s Brigade,” and they show up in full force, Canadian flags and all.

“They play Iowa State trivia on the way down,” Carleton says. “They enjoy themselves.”

Minutes later, Carleton makes a joke about Ricketts not taking shots during games, then nearly falls off the couch in laughter when Ricketts calls her on it. In the immediate aftermath, Carleton tries to dig her way out of that hole while Ricketts and Durr playfully give her crap.

In only 20 minutes with all three, it’s clear they’re at their most comfortable here. It also becomes increasingly clear they’re more than just student-athletes encouraged to live together.

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Iowa State Daily: So, when did you three become roommates?

Ricketts: So, the three of us together was just this year.

Durr: It was me and Bridget for two years.

Ricketts: So it was me and Emily in our freshman year, and we were the only two in our class to room together. Then Emily stayed back, because she didn’t have a car. That’s when Bridget came, and so the two of them lived together. I was gonna be “homeless” for senior year, so I asked the two of them if they wanted to come live with me. That’s how we-

Carleton: We’ll take you in (laughs).

ISD: What are you like at the house? Who keeps it clean and who makes a mess?

Carleton: That’s an easy one. Claire is the clean one for sure. She’s always cleaning. It makes her feel good, so that’s what she does.

Ricketts: It’s a stress reliever!

Carleton: Emily is just-

Durr: My room looks like a bomb just exploded.

All three: (laughter)

Ricketts: Our rooms are in this one corner right next to each other, and you look at Emily’s and you can’t see the floor, and you look at mine, and it’s-

Carleton: Spotless.

Ricketts: It’s like a frickin’ OR, you could have surgery in there. Bridget’s room is like the middle.

Carleton: A happy medium.

Ricketts: She keeps it clean. I think I motivate her.

ISD: Do you help each other with schoolwork?

Durr: (points at Carleton) We’re in the exact same major, and we’re taking one class together.

Carleton: Then I have five others on top of that.

Durr: So we help each other with schoolwork.

Ricketts: They don’t help me.

ISD: What are your majors?

Carleton: We’re [Carleton and Durr] kinesiology and exercise science majors.

Ricketts: And I’m in hospitality.

ISD: Those are a little different.

All: (laughs)

Ricketts: They’re like ‘oh, did you color fruit today? Or vegetables?’

******

All three players came from very different areas to wind up in Ames. Ricketts, a redshirt junior who will be graduating after the season, came from Parkland, Texas, and had originally committed to play for Texas Tech to stay close to home. After Tech changed coaches, she realized Iowa State was a place where her parents could still watch her play, and “I just felt at home.”

Durr, a native of Utica, New York, was found on the AAU circuit, and Iowa State began recruiting her after a game in Nashville, Tennessee. When her coach at the time told her Iowa State wanted to talk to her, Durr thought he had said Ohio State.

“I had no idea where Iowa was on the map,” Durr says with a chuckle.

Once she went on an official visit, though, she fell in love with the Cyclones.

Carleton was found through videos of her international competitions, and when Iowa State associate head coach Jodi Steyer came to see her play, even though the quality of play was “not very good” Carleton knew the Iowa State staff was committed to her. It was the official visit that sealed the deal for Carleton, though.

“I wanted to find home away from home, and as soon as I visited I knew that’s what this was,” Carleton said.

On the court, their close relationship turns into a sixth sense. Often, there’s multiple possessions with a Bridget-Emily-Claire triangle as the fulcrum. They feed off of each other, building momentum with every basket, screen and backdoor cut.

Carleton says the understanding between the three comes down to how often they talk about basketball when together outside of practice and their experience on the court.

Coach Bill Fennelly said playing different positions is also a factor in their on-court chemistry.

“They’re not fighting for the same minutes, they know they’re going to play,” Fennelly said. “They all know exactly what they want to do.”

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ISD: How important is it for you to be so close with each other?

Durr: It just makes it more fun, if anything, knowing you can trust people you play with and people you live with. Playing in the Big 12, it gets tough, and you have good days and bad days, and no matter what we’re always there for each other.

Carleton: It’s the best of both worlds, having a team and then having best friends within that team. It’s what I want in a student-athlete experience.

Ricketts: I feel like having a good relationship that’s not surface level will help us in the future. We’ll always stay in touch. We’ll be following Bridget at the 2020 games in Tokyo-

Carleton: (groans)

Durr: A part of me wishes time would just stop and we could relive this year over and over again, ‘cause it is so much fun.

ISD: Does Fennelly get on you about not letting basketball overwhelm you?

Ricketts: I think that he knows that most of us aren’t Bridget, and that most of us don’t have Olympic aspirations that-

Carleton: Aw, come on!

Ricketts: He wants you to focus, wants you to get in the gym, but he also understands that there is life outside basketball. Most of us want to go out into the world and do whatever, so, he wants you to focus when the time is right, but he understands that it’s gonna end and you’re going to need to have a plan set up for after.

Carleton: He relates everything back to your job or to your family. Life isn’t about basketball, and he tells us every day that the skills we’re learning in basketball are going to help us in our future lives.

ISD: What’s it like rooming with two teammates, especially during the season?

Durr: I personally love it, just because if one of us has a bad game or a bad day we’ll be there to pick each other up and we know how each other works. Claire, she keeps it balanced, and it’s not always about basketball. She tries to keep our minds off of it. Bridget, she already has enough pressure on her shoulders, so we just try to balance each other out and know when to talk about basketball and when to talk about other things.

Carleton: We just know it doesn’t always have to be about basketball. We need a life outside of basketball, and I think that’s why they’re such good friends of mine and such good roommates to have.

Ricketts: We’ll talk about it, but then we’ll be like, ‘OK, enough basketball for right now,’ and we’ll try to do something else, like last night we watched Olympic Fails.

ISD: Not the actual Olympics?

Ricketts: No, not the actual Olympics, we wanted to see-

Durr: We wanted to see those weightlifters that drop the bar on themselves, we could watch those for hours. (all three laugh)

ISD: What do you usually do to unwind?

Ricketts: Well, Bridget always does homework. Quote of last night: ‘I need to stop doing so much homework.’

Durr: We’re lounging around, but she’s doing homework that’s due in a month’s time. We watch Harry Potter, we’re kind of nerds.

Carleton (quietly): Or, Claire watches the Cooking Channel.

Ricketts: Or basketball. We watch a lot of basketball.

Durr: But those are the best times, is when we’re just lounging around in our living room, joking around and watching basketball.

******

After the Cyclones’ 69-57 win Saturday over Texas Tech, Durr and Carleton walk into the post-game press conference beaming. They sit down side by side, relaxed and laughing with each other.

When Durr is asked about the duo’s big game on the offensive end (45 combined points), she goes out of her way to note the cohesion they have off the court is what’s important.

“At the end of the day, we’re best friends and we live together,” Durr said. “That goes a longer way than what we do on the court.”

This trio of Cyclones have formed a special bond that has transcended the basketball court and become a lifelong friendship.