Illinois beats Washington St. to advance to first WBIT championship game

INDIANAPOLIS (WCIA) — Makira Cook scored 16 of her game high 20 points in the opening half to lead No. 4 Illinois to a blowout win over No. 1 Washington St. 81-58 in the WBIT semifinals Monday afternoon at Hinkle Fieldhouse on Butler’s campus.

“I wasn’t even looking at the score,” Illinois senior center Camille Hobby said. “I was just playing and I feel like that’s, so much part of it is just playing and just going with the flow. I knew we were clicking on all cylinders but I didn’t realize that we had a heavy lead.”

The Illini (17-15) never trailed and led by as many as 29 points in the fourth quarter. Genesis Bryant put up 18 points, including scoring her 1,000th career point.

“I mean it’s amazing just to know where I started, averaging two points my first two years of college and seeing where I’m at now,” Bryant said. “Just to hit that mark.”

In addition to Cook and Bryant, Adalia McKenzie added 14 with Hobby scoring 12. For the game, the Illini shot 54 percent from the field and 44 percent from 3, with a big Illini crowd on hand to cheer them on.

“Just seeing all of our orange in the crowd and hearing ’em, they were definitely loud,” Cook said.”

The Illini have come a long way in the past month, after only playing one game at the Big Ten Tournament in early March, they are now set to face Villanova in the inaugural WBIT Championship game Wednesday at 6 p.m. CT on ESPN2. The Wildcats took down Penn St. 58-53 in the first semifinal game in Indy on Monday. Illinois head coach Shauna Green is familiar with Villanova after facing them when she was an assistant at Providence earlier in her career.

“It’s a new head coach but runs some of the same stuff and the assistant at the time was still there so I do know what they wanna do and how they play and the style that they wanna play,” Green said.

Another chance to suit up is something Green and the Illini say they’re grateful for, playing in April for the first time in program history.

“This is something that we can look back upon next year and years to come, referencing this and this is just, it’s building and it’s gonna help us with a lot of our returners coming back next year,” Green said.

“It would give us momentum and it would be a very cool thing,” Cook said.

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