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Mar. 16—Illinois women's basketball team returned home from Indianapolis with a clear plan in mind for how the Illini would approach the bye week between the end of the Big Ten tournament and Selection Sunday. Illinois knew it would make the field of 68 for the NCAA tournament.
The Illini could be confident in that given their solid resume with three Quad I wins and a Top 30 NET ranking. understood the need for rest after the long grind of a four-month-long regular season and a stretch of three games in three days at the Big Ten tournament with Illinois defeating Wisconsin and Michigan State before a quarterfinal loss to Iowa. That meant Green gave her Illini players two days off before diving back into practice.
A practice week at Ubben Basketball Complex that was almost exclusively self-scout. Illinois, after all, had no idea who they would be playing in the NCAA tournament. That much wasn't revealed until Sunday night when the Illini (21-11) landed a No.
7 seed and a first-round matchup with No. 10 seed Colorado (22-11) at 8:30 p. m.
on Saturday in Nashville, Tenn. "We've just been doing a lot of competitive stuff, playing a lot, getting up and down, kind of just getting back to the basics of our core values, our participles both ends of the floor," Green said of the practice plan in the week leading to Selection Sunday. "You don't really know (what opponent) you are going to see (in the NCAA tournament until the bracket reveal).