2026 Final Four: Illinois has always had a Chicago recruiting problem. Here's how it finally overcame that

The irony is not lost on former Illinois coach Bruce Weber.

Visit esporist.com for more information.

The most frequent complaint Weber heard throughout his nine-year tenure in Champaign was that he didn’t land enough elite Chicago-area recruits for Illinois to compete for Big Ten titles and national championships. Now, the Illini are back in the Final Four for the first time in 21 years despite an eight-man rotation that doesn’t feature a single Chicago-area player and includes just one who hails from the state of Illinois. 

“My former assistants and people who were in the administration then, we’ve all kind of laughed about that,” Weber told Yahoo Sports. “Because all we ever heard was, ‘You’ve got to recruit Chicago! You’ve got to recruit Illinois!’ We made a major conscious effort to do it, but with the portal and NIL it’s different now. Now you’re going all over the place.”

Recruiting the Chicago area is still Illinois’ “bread and butter,” according to assistant coach Geoff Alexander, but the Illini now cast a wider net than they ever have before. They’ve aggressively leaned into international recruiting the past few years as the dawning of the NIL era has allowed American colleges to pay more than what top-tier European clubs can offer.

When Illinois faces UConn in the first of Saturday’s two national semifinals at Lucas Oil Stadium, the Illini will feature four players from the Balkan region of Southeast Europe: Twin brothers Zvonimir and Tomislav Ivišić from Croatia, their former club teammate David Mirković from Montenegro and guard Mihailo Petrović from Serbia. Illinois also boasts Andrej Stojaković, who was mostly raised in America but is the son of Peja Stojaković, one of the best Serbian basketball players of all time.

Those five players have combined for 57.2% of Illinois’ points and 61.7% of its rebounds so far this season. They’re some of the cornerstones of a 28-win Illinois team that has emerged as a real threat to capture the program’s first national title. 

“I think the one thing that has changed because of NIL is maybe the caliber of the young player that we’re getting,” Illinois coach Brad Underwood said Friday. “There's always been tremendous intrigue in coming to the States and playing college basketball. I think that is heightened by what's gone on with the portal and NIL, and I think it's all been very, very positive. From my standpoint, I've loved coaching each and every one of our guys, so it's a great fit for me personally.”

Illinois coach Brad Underwood and Illini players celebrate after an NCAA tournament win. (Logan Riely/NCAA Photos via Getty Images)Logan Riely via Getty Images

For decades, the fortunes of the Illinois men’s basketball program have ebbed and flowed based on how much elite talent was coming out of the Chicago area and whether the Illini could secure enough of it. 

Lou Henson’s Flyin’ Illini team that reached the 1989 Final Four was loaded with Chicago-area talent including Nick Anderson, Kendall Gill, Kenny Battle and Marcus Liberty. It was the same with Weber’s 2005 Final Four team that starred Chicago-area prospects Dee Brown, Luther Head and James Augustine. Deon Thomas, the school’s all-time leading scorer, is a product of the Chicago Public School League. So is recent Illinois star Ayo Dosunmu.

And yet for every Chicago product that Illinois has landed, there are many other big-time players that the Illini have swung and missed on. Jalen Brunson, Jahlil Okafor, Cliff Alexander and Tyler Ulis turned down Illinois in favor of out-of-state powerhouses not too long ago. Jabari Parker, Anthony Davis, Jon Scheyer and Derrick Rose did the same before them.

When asked why pulling the elite recruits out of Chicago has often been challenging for Illinois, Weber cited the competition. Other Big Ten schools would try to tap into the Chicago market. So would blue bloods like Kentucky, Kansas and Duke.

Also a factor in those days was the presence of boosters making under-the-table payments and shoe company AAU connections. There were times when Chicago-area coaches warned Weber not to waste his time recruiting their players. 

“I’m not saying everyone cheated but there are groups that did cheat,” Weber said. “It’s pretty well known. Now cheating’s legal, so it doesn’t matter.”

Rather than hitch Illinois’ hopes to recruiting Chicago, Underwood has sought to find other pathways to landing elite talent. He was quick to realize that the changing NIL landscape would give American colleges access to a different level of European prospect.

As the NIL market for impact basketball players at the high-major level skyrocketed north of seven figures, the best young international prospects have taken notice. Teenagers who might have chosen to develop abroad in previous eras left their high-level European club teams and jetted across the Atlantic because the salaries were as much as 10 to 15 times more lucrative.

Underwood positioned Illinois to take advantage by promoting Geoff Alexander to an assistant coaching role in 2021 and by rehiring Orlando Antigua as associate head coach in 2024. Those two already had numerous overseas contacts from years of recruiting international players. 

Born in the Dominican Republic but raised in the Bronx, Antigua traveled the world with the Harlem Globetrotters from 1995 to 2002 and coached the Dominican national team from 2013 to 2015. He landed players from the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Spain and Nigeria during a three-year stint as South Florida’s head coach and later recruited All-American Kofi Cockburn of Jamaica to Illinois.

Alexander’s introduction to international basketball came via Marius Tamolis, a Lithuanian who lacked the talent to play college basketball but enrolled at Jacksonville Junior College in 2002 to be a student assistant. That same year Alexander served as an assistant coach on the Jacksonville staff and became good friends with Tamolis.

When Alexander moved on to Dayton State College to work for Underwood the following year, Tamolis followed. Tamolis eventually returned home to Lithuania after he graduated and began coaching in his home country, giving Alexander his first foothold in European basketball just as he was entering Division I basketball as an Idaho State assistant in 2007. 

“I started my career off at Idaho State kind of getting into that Lithuania market,” Alexander said, “and it just kind of ballooned from there.”

Now, Alexander and Antigua are overseas as often as four or five times a year. Underwood even sent Antigua and Alexander on a midseason trip this past December to check in on overseas prospects that Illinois is pursuing.

“The phone calls of the past of how people recruited internationally is not going to work anymore,” Alexander said. “You’ve got to go put feet on the ground and you’ve got to spend the time.

“It’s just like recruiting in the United States. They want to see you, they want to feel you, they want to build a real relationship. With their guys coming thousands of miles away, they have to know that they have people there that are going to care for them and love them. I put this staff up with anybody as far as unconditional love. It’s real. It’s not transactional. I think ultimately our guys feel that.”

Just because Illinois has found success recruiting in Europe doesn’t mean that the Illini are going to pin their hopes exclusively on that pathway moving forward. They’ll look for positional size, shooting and high basketball IQ wherever they can find it, whether that’s Chicago, Saint Louis, Zagreb or Sarajevo. 

The one thing that’s clear is that Illinois won’t be a program with a Chicago problem anymore. 

“Chicago’s our city,” Alexander said, “but today’s game is global.”

And Illinois is poised to keep taking advantage.

Read full story at source