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. 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.