How one Final Four team recruited in a unique way, with a Kentucky connection
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Underwood’s staff recruited many Eastern European pros and prospects.
- Antigua’s Kentucky ties helped spark key international commitments.
- Illinois uses overseas scouting, portal work, tests and HS recruiting.
A year ago, in a back hallway of the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, coach Brad Underwood was hanging out with a handful of reporters to talk about his Illinois team, its upcoming game against Kentucky and the general state of college basketball.
Underwood’s media obligations for the day were done, but he held court for 20 minutes or so, casually answering questions and serving up anecdotes about the changing nature of the sport.
One topic of conversation that day: the rise of international recruiting in college basketball.
That Illinois team prominently featured a couple of first-year foreign recruits: Kasparas Jakucionis, who would become a first-round NBA draft pick a few months later, and Tomislav Ivisic, the twin brother of ex-Wildcat Zvonimir Ivisic and the Illini’s starting center.
“We’ve always been invested in overseas guys,” Underwood said that day. “We’ve got a lot of European guys over the years that have been very good. NIL has changed maybe the quality of the player that we can get. I’ve said many times, the basketball world is pretty small. We’ve known about Kasparas Jakucionis for years. Everybody’s known about Big Z and Tommy forever — the 7-1 twins. …
“We go over about every month to six weeks. We’ll continue. It fits our university. We have a very diverse university. I like coaching them. There’s a maturity that I think a lot of these young guys bring. They fit us and fit our program.”
It didn’t work out for Illinois the following day. Powered by Koby Brea’s 23-point game, Kentucky beat the Illini to earn a spot in the Sweet 16. But Underwood’s program won the larger battle this past weekend, sticking to the script and securing Illinois’ first trip to the Final Four since 2005.
This Illinois team has plenty of international flavor, too.
The last offseason saw Jakucionis go off to the NBA, but Tomislav Ivisic is back, his brother, Big Z, transferred in to join him, and another Eastern European player, David Mirkovic, is a college basketball newcomer helping Underwood’s team in a big way.
The day before Illinois’ victory over Iowa in the Elite Eight, the Illini head coach — a 62-year-old man who spent nearly a decade in the juco ranks and was one win away from the first Final Four of his career — was asked a two-part question. When he started heavily recruiting Eastern Europe, did Underwood think it would lead to such immediate success? And now that it has, did he envision other college basketball coaches going all in on the same route?
“Yes and yes,” Underwood said. “Yeah, I think that our whole intent has been to recruit players that have the ability to lead us to a national championship-type run. That’s the goal every year. It’s been a lot of work. It’s been just an unbelievable process.”
He went on to say that two assistants — recruiting coordinator Geoff Alexander and associate head coach Orlando Antigua — deserve “most all of the credit” in terms of building the relationships possible to get guys like Mirkovic and the Ivisic twins to Champaign. “It’s taken years,” Underwood said of building the foundation that has led to this Final Four success.
“Basketball-wise, it’s a great fit for me, and I like coaching them,” he said. “The way we’re playing with positional size and shooting, it’s just a great marriage and a great fit. So we’ll continue it. I would think others will continue to migrate over there and keep trying to recruit those guys.”
Illinois’ international recruiting
The Illini have played a global brand of basketball this season.
All-American freshman Keaton Wagler — an unheralded recruit from Shawnee, Kansas, and another shrewd recruiting victory — has been the star, but the team’s second-leading scorer is Andrej Stojakovic, the son of former NBA sharpshooter and Serbia native Peja Stojakovic.
The younger Stojakovic played high school ball in the Sacramento area — where his dad starred for the Kings — but lists Greece (where his mom is from) as his home country and spent a season each at Stanford and Cal before transferring to Illinois.
Mirkovic, who is from Montenegro, is the team’s third-leading scorer. Then comes Champaign native Kylan Boswell and the Ivisic brothers, who both are from Croatia.
The Illinois roster also includes Serbian guard Mihailo Petrovic and Croatian forward Toni Bilic, who joined the team in the middle of the season to get a head start on his college basketball career.
Mirkovic and the Ivisic brothers were teammates back in Europe, and they’re represented by the same agency, based in Serbia, that has had success in getting players into high-level college basketball. Petrovic was actually expected to be Illinois’ starting point guard this season before Wagler, who was not a top 100 recruit, wowed in the offseason.
The international route is one Underwood’s program has been exploring for years. Someone from his staff (and sometimes it’s Underwood himself) visits Europe on a regular basis to meet with potential recruits and evaluate their games in person. Anyone who’s been paying attention has surely noticed what the more recent influx has meant for results on the court.
As the transfer portal has led to more roster turnover everywhere, Illinois has added the wrinkle of pursuing professional players from overseas at a high rate.
The Illini aren’t alone in this endeavor — Arizona’s Tommy Lloyd, another first-time Final Four coach this year, has long had the reputation of an astute international recruiter, going back to his days as the top assistant at Gonzaga — but Underwood’s rotation is especially abundant in foreign players.
Finding the right fit on the court is as important as ever in college basketball, and that challenge goes beyond skill sets and positional needs. In that back hallway at the NCAA Tournament last year, Underwood spoke to the Herald-Leader about making sure the personalities are right, too.
“For us, it’s huge,” he said, repeating that sentence for emphasis. “I wouldn’t want to speak on somebody else, but knowing who I want in my locker room is a big piece to our success and how we want to continue to build this.”
Underwood employs “personality tests” developed by an outside firm to help in that process, but it’s a multi-pronged effort that includes information gathering, leaning on relationships across the basketball world and trying to find the right fit in what can often be a small window of time.
“We do a lot of research. It’s a deep dive for us,” Underwood said. “It’s not being afraid to pick up the phone and talk to the other coaches, of people that you have an interest in their players. And then, again, those personality tests are pretty revealing, pretty accurate for us, and they’ve been right on.”
In the case of this particular Illinois roster, it all started years ago. At Kentucky.
Final Four with Kentucky connections
Antigua was on John Calipari’s final Memphis basketball staff and in 2009 followed the head coach to Lexington, where he was a key assistant and developed a national reputation as one of the country’s best recruiters. He was instrumental in putting together the UK rosters that led to three Final Fours — including the 2012 national title — the Cats made in his five years on staff, as well as the 2015 roster that went 38-1 and returned to the Final Four during Antigua’s first season as South Florida’s head coach.
Antigua was at USF for only three seasons, and his return to the assistant coaching ranks led him to spend four years at Illinois, where he helped Underwood turn the Illini into a contender before Calipari hired him back at Kentucky.
In Antigua’s second stint in Lexington, the UK coaching staff was tipped off on Zvonimir Ivisic, and Antigua — who had extensive international basketball ties going back to several years spent as a Harlem Globetrotter — reached out to Big Z’s agent, Drazen Zlovaric.
Ivisic came to Kentucky for the 2023-24 season and then followed Calipari to Arkansas two years ago. When Calipari and UK split, Antigua decided to go back to Underwood, who was also in search of a true big man with some skill and shooting ability.
By this point, Antigua was familiar with Tomislav Ivisic, who was looking to follow his twin to the United States and played a more physical style than his brother. Antigua got Tomislav, and Illinois added Big Z last offseason.
“I call it cooking with gas, so to speak,” Underwood said last week of coaching the twins. “You’ve got two 7-foot-plus guys that can shoot it. They’re both highly intelligent players. They know how to set screens. … Z is scary athletic and fast and blocks shots. Tommy is more of the physical type, so there’s a difference in those two. But yet offensively they can both really shoot it, make great decisions and have a really high understanding of how to play the game.”
A couple of days after Big Z committed, Illinois landed Mirkovic, too.
Underwood has been quick to give Antigua credit for bringing in Tomislav Ivisic and starting the domino effect with this specific segment of international additions, but Illinois’ approach to recruiting has been a carefully orchestrated plan that includes hitting the traditional high school ranks, scouring the portal for the best fits and sprinkling in foreign players.
Three of this year’s Final Four teams have at least one European starter. The exception is UConn, but Alex Karaban, who has started all but one game for the Huskies over the past four seasons, is the son of two Eastern European immigrants, and German freshman Eric Reibe has been a key player off the bench.
As NIL opportunities have become more abundant in recent years, young pro players from Europe have shifted their focus to college basketball as a realistic and lucrative developmental path to the NBA, leading to the influx of international talent in the sport.
Kentucky plucked Croatian big man Andrija Jelavic off a Serbian pro team last year. Jelavic, who emerged as a starter for Mark Pope’s team this season, told the Herald-Leader that he didn’t pay much attention to college basketball until fellow countryman Big Z committed to UK.
Now the Ivisic brothers are in the Final Four, and Antigua — the man who brought them together at Illinois — will be right there with them, 12 years after he last coached on that stage.
This Illini team was born out of Underwood’s vision, but its season is still going, in part, because of that Kentucky connection and the international ties the Illini tapped into along the way.
“Yeah, he’s the GOAT. And I mean that,” Underwood said of Antigua last week. “He is as good as there is. He’s great for me. I have a tendency to want to coach kind of the glass half empty. I strive for perfection. I want the perfect game. He’s got a tremendous way of looking at it as the glass is half full. He’s got great humor. He makes me laugh. But he is a tremendous relationship person. He’s a great communicator. He’s a very good basketball coach. But he is an unbelievable communicator and connector of people, and that’s invaluable today.
“He walks in a room, he walks in a gym, he knows everybody, and he can talk to everybody. And you see why he was the lead man for the Globetrotters for many, many years. He’s just got a great demeanor and personality. And, personally, a great friend. But he’s great for Brad Underwood, the basketball coach, too.”
