Green ready for the challenge of turning Illinois women’s basketball into a winner

“If I was going to leave the position that I was in, which was an unbelievable place that I love dearly, it was going to be with the right people,” said Green, whose hiring was announced Monday. “I felt that connection initially and then obviously it kept getting more and more and ultimately led me to the decision to take this challenge because it is a challenge and it’s going to be hard, but I’m ready for it. I think I needed a little bit of a challenge, and I think the time was right.”

Green had a record of 127-50 at Dayton, which earned four NCAA tournament berths during her time. Dayton’s 2021-22 season ended Friday with a 70-54 loss to Georgia in the first round of the NCAA tournament. The Flyers (26-6) beat DePaul 88-57 in the opening round.

The Flyers lose three sixth-year senior starters: Erin Whalen; Jenna Giacone; and Araion Bradshaw. Two other seniors, Kyla Whitehead and Amari Davidson, do have another year of eligibility because the 2020-21 season didn’t count against anyone’s eligibility, but both went through Senior Day ceremony Feb. 26.

At the press conference, Green thanked UD and praised the support she received from President Eric F. Spina, Athletic Director Neil Sullivan and Senior Associate AD Angie Petrovic. She also thanked her players for “six of the best years of my life.”

While Dayton has finished with a winning record 14 times in the last 15 seasons and won 20 or more games 12 times in that span, Illinois has suffered nine straight losing seasons. Dayton has won six NCAA tournament games in its history and reached the Elite Eight in 2015. Illinois is 8-8 in the NCAA tournament but hasn’t won a tournament game since 2000 and has never advanced past the Sweet 16. Dayton won four Atlantic 10 Conference regular-season championships in Green’s six seasons. Illinois last won the Big Ten in 1997.

Green now has a a six-year contract with a starting salary of $800,000 per year. Dayton does not make public announcements about its salaries as public institutions do, but its tax returns are public, and the most recent tax return available online showed Green made $489,064 in the fiscal year ending in June 2020.

Dayton Athletic Director Neil Sullivan said he was “very satisfied” with the package UD offered — not only in compensation but in all-around support of the program — to Green after she received the Illinois offer.

“I’m very grateful for Shauna, and we absolutely did everything we could to keep her as our basketball coach,” Sullivan said Wednesday. “I’m not naive to the realities of the marketplace, but in basketball at Dayton, we don’t hire with an expectation that anyone will leave for a better job. It happens. It’s the Big Ten. I’m not naive to that. But we look to retain talent. We’re not looking to develop talent and hand it over to a competitor. That’s not what we do.”

The opportunity to coach in the Big Ten appealed to Green. The conference sent six teams to the NCAA tournament this year and four to the Sweet 16. The A-10 sent two teams to the tournament, and Dayton was one of the last four teams to receive an-large bid.

“I want to compete against the best, and I want to win,” Green said. “I want to be playing right now instead of sitting in my office. I told our players that in the meeting earlier. I said, ‘I don’t want you guys to have a lift today. I want you to have the week off or I want us to still be playing.’ ... That is our goal. That’s our vision. That’s what I’m here for. But I understand it is a process, and you will not have someone that believes in the process more than me. I am moment to moment, second to second, a choice-by-choice person. Those choices in all of those events in how you respond to them will lead to the outcome of playing in March and more importantly winning in March.”

Another reason Green took the job was Champaign is closer to home. She’s from Clinton, Iowa, where her parents live.

“They drove 7½ hours to almost every game at Dayton,” Green said. “No one’s happier about only driving three hours to games now.”

Green replaces Nancy Fahey, who retired March 4 after five seasons at Illinois. She had a record of 42-99. The Illini finished 7-20 this season and lost 67-53 to Dayton on Nov. 26 at the Daytona Beach Invitational.

While the Illinois women’s basketball team has struggled to find success, the men’s program has played in the NCAA tournament the last two seasons and was a consistent Big Ten power until an eight-year drought of NCAA tournament appearances after the 2013 season.

Illinois AD Josh Whitman wants the women’s program to start hanging banners at the State Farm Center like the men’s team. He told reporters he drove to Dayton twice to meet with Green — once on March 11 after the Illinois men’s team lost in the Big Ten tournament in Indianapolis and again on Saturday from Pittsburgh, where the men’s team was playing in the NCAA tournament.

“I told (Green) that we’ve done this before,” Whitman said. “We’ve built programs here. We’ve demonstrated as an athletic program that we can do hard things, and this is going to be hard. It’s going to be a challenge. That’s something we embrace and what we were looking for in our new leader, somebody who embraced that with us, who was excited about the challenge in front of us, who saw it for what it is and was willing to look at it in the context of the full picture to see it as an incredible opportunity. The right person, without question, to do that for us was Shauna Green.”