​Rewritten: This past week at Ubben Basketball Complex, the Illinois women’s basketball program took a meaningful step forward. For the first time this summer, the Illini were able to practice 5-on-5, giving coach Shauna Green a genuine glimpse of what her current roster might look like when the games count in four months during the 2026-27 season. Although Illinois returns the core of last season’s lineup—nine players who helped the Illini win 22 games and advance to the NCAA tournament’s second round—this summer’s mix includes key transfers and newcomers that could shape the team in different ways. Those factors make the 5-on-5 drills this summer particularly informative for Green and her staff.
The road to this point wasn’t instantaneous. Injuries and other absences early in the summer slowed the progression, with guard Gretchen Dolan and forward Manuella Alves still working back from knee injuries. Additionally, forwards Irene Noya Catoira and Cearah Parchment were unavailable for portions of the summer, one overseas with Spain’s U20 team at the FIBA Women’s EuroBasket and the other with Canada’s training camp roster ahead of the FIBA Women’s Olympic Pre-Qualifying tournament. Still, Green emphasized that steady improvement has been the overarching theme. “From the start until now, we have continued to get better and better,” she said last Thursday in the Ubben lobby, when she offered a summer update. “We’ve had to take it pretty slow … and not really having 10 players that we could really compete 5-on-5 until the last couple days. We had a really good competitive practice (last Wednesday) and I wanted to challenge them again with another really hard one and had a slow start, but I really liked their response. Those are good moments, too. We need it to where, ‘OK, we’re not where we want to be. We’re not to the standard. Who’s going to step up and be those leaders?’ Really good things throughout the summer, and I like where we’re at. … We finally got to compete a little bit, and it was fun. In five-on-five, when everyone’s going at each other, we have options.”
While Noya Catoira remained overseas in Lithuania through the weekend (Spain’s 81-59 win over Belgium on Sunday securing a third-place finish), Parchment returned to campus, at least temporarily, after a weeklong training camp in Montreal late last month. She has one more training camp on the schedule later this month in Victoria, British Columbia, before she heads to Guadalajara, Mexico, for the Olympic pre-qualifying tournament from Aug. 17-23. But what mattered most for Illinois is that Green’s squad had Parchment on the floor with them last week. Coupled with the good news that Dolan and Alves have been cleared to participate in 5-on-5 practices, it represented a major stride in the program’s ability to get meaningful work in.
In the broader context, the Illini are still juggling a blend of established contributors and new faces. The return of the top nine players from last season’s rotation provides a familiar core upon which Green can build, yet the additions—both via transfer and incoming recruits—promise to alter Illinois’ ceiling. The summer sessions, especially the emergence of a competitive 5-on-5 environment, will help determine which players step into leadership roles and which newcomers adapt most quickly to the program’s standards. As Green noted, the team has now reached a point where they can truly compete against one another in full-court, five-on-five drills, and that development is exactly the kind of progress that can translate into tangible growth when the season starts.