Green Street: Not burning bridges

Welcome to "Green Street," your dose of women's college basketball news from Illini beat writer and AP Top 25 voter Joe Vozzelli. He'll offer up insight on Shauna Green's Illini team and the women's game at large every week on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

As much as the transfer portal has been a place for players to find new opportunities elsewhere. It's also offered a second chance of sorts for coaches to recruit players they may have missed on the first time around.

Shauna Green has been successful at the latter in her first now two-plus seasons as Illinois women's basketball coach. The latest example? Jasmine Brown-Hagger .

Admittedly the Illini looked far more attractive to the Shorewood native this offseason than when the former Example Academy standout was a top-rated recruit in the state of Illinois coming out of high school as a Class of 2023 prospect.

Nearly two full decades of futility made the Illinois program not all that appealing back in 2022 when Green first arrived on campus. Two years later, the sales pitch that Green had made to recruits in her first months on the job about the direction she would take the program in has actually come to fruition with the Illini appearing in an NCAA tournament, winning the inaugural WBIT title this past winter and posting a 41-25 record the past two seasons.

But it's also been the coaching staff's ability to keep relationships alive — even with players that initially say "no" to them that has been just as valuable.

Brown-Hagger, who spurned Illinois as a high school recruit and instead went to Mississippi State, was in the portal after just one season with the Bulldogs and the 5-foot-9 guard is now an Illini as one of two transfer additions for Green's program ahead of the 2024-25 season.

"We've been able to get kids the second time around, and they've all had success here," Green said earlier this month. "Number one, you never burn bridges. When there are real, true relationships, yeah it's disappointing when someone tells you 'no,' but you have to understand that's what they thought was best. Then obviously through that relationship that you've built, usually that was a really hard decision. Of the kids we lost, it's a really hard decision, but at Dayton, they wanted to go Power Five. And here, it's maybe, like when we recruited Jasmine here, it was our first year and we hadn't won at all and hadn't done anything.

"Then she saw maybe, 'OK, they can do it and I can do it in my home state.' I just think it's all about those relationships, staying true to them, and when they tell you 'no,' don't be a jerk and get mad at them. It's their decision, and a lot of times when they decide to go in that portal, they call us. It's worked out for us, and I think the success our transfers have had has been really key for us."