CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – First-year Fighting Illini women's basketball head coach Shauna Green and junior guard Makira Cook have been recognized by the Women's Basketball Coaches Association (WBCA). On Thursday, the WBCA announced that Green – the architect of one of the biggest one-year turnarounds this season – was a finalist for the National Coach of the Year honor while Cook collected All-America honorable mention status.
Green was one of 10 WBCA NCAA Division I National Coach of the Year finalists, including winner Dawn Staley, as selected by a committee of coaches. Throughout the season, Green was tabbed ESPN Coach of the Week (Dec. 19, 2022), Just Women's Sports' Midseason NCAA Coach of the Year Frontrunner (Jan. 13, 2023) and was listed on the Naismith Women's Coach of the Year Late Season Watch List (Feb. 15, 2023).
Year one at Illinois saw Green lead the program to new heights both on and off the court. The Illini finished 22-10 (11-7 B1G) and returned to the NCAA Tournament for the first time in 20 seasons. Illinois found itself ranked in the AP Top-25 for the first time since 2000 and would appear in four polls, ranking as high as No. 21. Green is the only Illini head coach to have a team ranked in their first season at UI.
Across its 15 home games during the 2022-23 season, Illinois Women's Basketball saw 52,295 fans fill the State Farm Center en route to a 12-3 record. That total attendance ranks fifth in program history and makes Green the only head coach to bring in 50,000 or more fans in her first season with the Illini.
With five returners from the 2021-22 Illinois squad that posted a 7-20 record, Green delivered the largest turnaround in program history and one of the top all-time in Big Ten history. The 15-win improvement from last season's 7-20 campaign set a new best turnaround in program history and ranks third-best in Big Ten history. In league play, Illinois tallied 10 more wins that last season's mark (1-13), the best turnaround in program history, which tied for the best all-time in the Big Ten.
One of the key pieces to the success of the 2022-23 squad was Cook, who followed Green from her previous stop at Dayton. Cook's WBCA All-America honorable mention honor marks the second of the sort as the AP also recognized her.
Across her first season at Illinois, Cook averaged a team-best 18.3 points per game and dished out 125 assists while starting all 30 games she appeared in. The Cincinnati, Ohio, native tallied a 41.4 field goal percentage and shot 34.2 percent from deep. Cook led Illinois in scoring 13 times across the season and turned in 15 20-point games while scoring in double figures 27 times.
Cook's 548 total points scored ranks 15th on the program's single-season scoring list and makes her just the 23rd Illini to ever score 500 or more points in a season.
Cook is the first Illini player to earn All-America honors from multiple entities since Ashley Berggren in 1996-97.
Ranked fifth in ESPN's transfer rankings at the end of December, Cook was a unanimous All-Big Ten First-Team selection by the conference's coaches, and she was the first Illini to earn all-conference first-team honors by Big Ten coaches and media since Jenna Smith in 2010.
