Green Street: North of the Border

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.

Cearah Parchment is a name to know in Big Ten women's basketball circles.

The four-star Class of 2025 forward, after all, has cut her college choices down to four. And all four hail from the Big Ten. The 6-foot-2 Fort Erie, Ontario, native announced on Instagram last Friday her finalist list had been narrowed to Illinois, Maryland, Michigan and Minnesota.

The 17-year-old is among a number of high-profile recruits Shauna Green and Co. are pursuing in the 2025 class alongside four-star center Layla Hays (Wasilla, Alaska), four-star shooting guard Bryn Martin (Springboro, Ohio), five-star wing Taliyah Henderson (Tucson, Arizona) and five-star point guards Divine Bourrage (Davenport, Iowa) and Destiny Jackson (Chicago Whitney Young).

Parchment, who is listed as the No. 39 overall recruit in the 2025 class per ESPN's HoopGurlz, is coming off a junior season at Fort Erie International Academy where the Canadian power forward averaged 17.9 points and 10.9 rebounds with a 40.9/36.4/64.3 shooting slash.

This summer, Parchment played for Team Canada at the U17 World Cup in Mexico and put up 3.9 points, 5.4 rebounds and 2.1 assists per game at last month's international tournament. Canada finished as the silver medalists after losing 84-64 to the United States in the final.

The Illini are still looking for their first verbal commitment in the 2025 class with Green preaching patience last month on the recruiting front.

"The higher-level kid that you're in the mix on, obviously the more stressful, number one," Green said. "Number two, they're going to probably wait because they're going to go on visits. Now they may go and take a couple more visits. That's part of the process. They're going to go check those out. Now especially, you can have unlimited official visits so these kids can go on 10, 15 official visits if they wanted to. We're going to have to wait a little bit longer and you just have to really trust the work that you've put in.

"Every kid in the '25 class, we have been there the longest. We have been there from the beginning and you've got to trust those relationships, you've got to trust the work. If it's meant to be and they really are true to what they want, then hopefully, we can get a couple of them. You have your top kids and you also have to have that next level ready to go, too. The higher ranked and the better player, the harder it is to get them."