A furious fourth-quarter was not enough to knock off No. 9 Iowa in the quarterfinals of the 2026 Big Ten Tournament. Illinois now waits for its NCAA selection on March 15.

INDIANAPOLIS — Illinois’ longest Big Ten Tournament experience in 15 years came to end after the third night.

A nightmare of a first quarter and an unfortunate 30 minutes from All-Big Ten forward Berry Wallace and freshman Cearah Parchment created a deficit the Illini simply couldn’t find a way out of in a 64-58 quarterfinal loss to No. 9 Iowa.

The streak of double-digit scoring efforts from Parchment, who was named to the All-Big Ten Conference Freshman Team, stopped Friday night as the Hawkeyes high-low interior offense got the 6-foot-3 forward in early foul trouble. Parchment’s sputtering first quarter, which included two fouls, two points, no rebounds and a turnover, bled into the rest of her 32-minute effort as she finished with just two points on 1 of 7 shooting with four giveaways.

The physical post play of Iowa’s Ava Heiden and Hannah Stuelke were simply too much for Wallace and Parchment to handle on its third game in three nights. Heiden and Stuelke combined for 29 points in a game where both of them were saved by Iowa head coach Jan Jansen for this weekend as Illinois made a furious fourth-quarter comeback to get the margin to single digits. At the end of the third quarter with Iowa leading 53-31, Wallace and Parchment had combined for just six points on a combined 2 of 19 shooting.

“It's kind of an interesting matchup because their 4 and 5 players, how good is Parchment, right? And Berry Wallace is as good as they come,” Jansen said. “We made some defensive tweaks in how he wanted to handle them based on what we saw when we played them eight, nine days ago. We changed that up a little bit.”

The 33.3 percent shooting from Illinois (21-11) on Friday night was its lowest of the 2025-26 season, which was a complete flip from the hot shooting that the Illini found in a close loss on Feb. 26 inside Carver-Hawkeye Arena.

“I don't know if that's fatigue, whatever it is, they just didn't go in,” Illinois head coach Shauna Green said “I always tell our players they're not going to hear me get upset about shots that don't go in. They're going to heart me get upset if we're not playing hard, we're not giving everything they have, we're not putting all-out effort, we're not having all-out position, we're not having all-out togetherness.”

After struggling with her offense in the first two nights of the league tournament, Jasmine Brown-Hagger led the Illini with a season-high 22 points on 8 of 13 shooting where the third-year player participated in all but one minute and 11 seconds of action.

With Illinois down by as many as 22 points in the final quarter, Green’s squad managed to pull within a single-digit deficit by holding Iowa (25-5) without a point for the final three minutes and 59 seconds of action.

Illinois was trying to reach the semifinal weekend round of Big Ten Tournament for the first time in 15 years but the 11th game of this season against a ranked opponent in the Associated Press Top 25 poll was too much following back-to-back wins over Wisconsin and Michigan State.

“Just the first quarter to start the game, we came out flat and got behind and dug ourselves a 10-point hole and just didn't have enough to really fight back,” Green said. “Just ran out of gas a little bit.”

Illinois will now wait a little over nine days until the NCAA Tournament selections are announced on the evening of March 15 (7 p.m. CST, ESPN). The expectation is for the Illini to be anywhere from the 7 to 10-seed line and Shauna Green’s squad will be making a third appearance in a four-year span for
the first time since pulling off the trick from 1996-97 to 1999-2000 campaigns under then-head coach Teresa Grentz.