Illinois head coach third-year wing Gretchen Dolan has been granted a fifth season of eligibility after missing all but eight games last year with a season-ending knee injury.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Illinois women’s basketball head coach Shauna Green has said the NCAA Eligibility Center has granted Gretchen Dolan’s waiver request for an extra year of eligibility.

Green announced to local media Friday during her media availability inside the Ubben Basketball Complex that her office had recently received the approval ensuring Dolan has the remainder of this season and then two more seasons of college eligibility remaining.

Dolan, who is second on the 2025-26 Illini squad in scoring (14.4 points per game), minutes (30.1 per game) and assists (3.4 per game), missed all but eight games of last season after suffering a knee injury.

The NCAA’s approval of the waiver allows for Green to possibly plan for a future of having arguably one of the most dynamic scoring wings in the Big Ten Conference for multiple years in the future.

“It’s huge. The more years you can have here is so important,” Green said Friday. “You guys know me by now and the biggest thing with recruiting, to me, is retaining the group with have.”

Dolan, who turned 21 years old last month, is coming off of back-to-back stellar performances with 16 points in a blowout win over Indiana in the Illini’s Big Ten opener on Dec. 6 and a 21-point outing Wednesday night to lead Illinois (9-1) to a 70-62 win at Missouri.

“She made some big-time plays and was very solid for 40 minutes, made her free throws and only had one turnover,” Green said on her radio post-game interview on Wednesday night. “She just seemed to make plays when we needed her the most.”

Green, who is in her fourth season in Champaign-Urbana, is leading by far her youngest roster, with an average age of 19.83 years as of the start of the 2025-26 campaign. This places Illinois as the third-youngest power conference roster in the behind Kansas State (19.78) and Creighton (19.79).

Dolan is one of two players (along with Gisela Segura) who started the season above the age of 21. Segura, a graduate transfer forward is the team's oldest, after celebrating her 23rd birthday on Wednesday and is the only member of the roster without at least two years of eligibility remaining following this season.

Illinois will next put its seven-game win streak to the test on Sunday at State Farm Center in Champaign by hosting North Texas as the Mean Green already have a pair of losses to power conference opponents (67-47 vs. Texas Tech and 73-55 vs. then-No. 24 Oklahoma State). The game on Sunday (2 p.m. CST, Big Ten Network-Plus) will see Green going for her 200th career win as a Division I head coach.