INDIANAPOLIS — In the final months of his senior year at St. Ignatius on Chicago’s Near West Side, AJ Redd never could’ve envisioned the kind of moments he experienced Thursday. Two days before the start of the Final Four, he and his Illinois teammates were living a dream turned reality, and just about everything underscored the gravity of it all.
There was the festive atmosphere at the team hotel in downtown Indianapolis, the city starting to come alive. And the short ride to Lucas Oil Stadium on a charter bus decked out in bright Illinois colors. And the ubiquitous Final Four signage and logos, everywhere, on everything. And the walk into the enormous stadium, and the practice on the newly minted Final Four court.
Redd, who grew up on the South Side in Kenwood, looked around at one point in the locker room Thursday, his more prolific teammates swarmed by reporters and cameras while he sat back at his locker, and the realization hit him, again: He was actually a part of this. A lightly recruited kid out of St. Ignatius was here, in an Illinois jersey and at the Final Four.
“It’s hard to put into words,” he said, sounding a bit speechless.
Road to the Final Four: Illinois is making its 1st appearance since 2005
Connecticut, Arizona and Michigan, the other three teams here, all have players like Redd. They all have walk-ons who are fan favorites; end-of-the-bench guys who play larger roles than their meager statistical contributions might indicate. Few if any, though, have traveled as unlikely a journey to the Final Four as Redd, who smiled when he recounted his path and described it as “a wild story.”
It goes like this: Redd during his senior year at St. Ignatius didn’t have a lot of opportunity to continue playing basketball, at least not at the major-college level. He thought about pursuing a chance at Southern Illinois. Dartmouth was interested, he said, as was Holy Cross. He’d earned his way into Illinois academically, but he still harbored basketball dreams.
At the time, Redd had a connection with Tim Anderson, the former Illinois assistant coach with deep Chicago ties. It was late in his senior year of high school when Redd sent Anderson a message asking if there was a chance he could become a walk-on for the Illini. Years later, Redd can still recite the response:
More Top Picks Best Document Scanners
“It’s a little late, but we can get you in the door as a manager.”
“I was like, ‘You know what, I’m just going to go for it,’” Redd said.
The role of a student manager is hardly glamorous. It’s passing out water from behind the bench and wrangling sweaty towels and mopping the floor on hands and knees and all manner of other grunt work. At times, it’s rebounding for players putting up extra shots, and that’s how Redd first came to know Ty Rodgers, the Illinois guard recovering from knee surgery, who arrived in Champaign around the same time as Redd.
The two didn’t really know each other, though Rodgers knew Redd was a good high school player.
“Coming off a great high school career, you would think a guy like that would feel some type of way about being a manager,” Rodgers said. “But him, not at all.”
Almost four years later, they’re close friends and roommates. They’re also the two Illinois players who’ve been around coach Brad Underwood’s program the longest. Redd, especially, has become one of the team’s foremost culture-setters and behind-the-scenes leaders, a proverbial glue guy who doesn’t often show up in box scores but always shows up in practices or meetings.
Redd, a finance major, made the transition from manager to walk-on halfway through his freshman season, after the Illini encountered some injury woes that left the team short on healthy bodies. Underwood and his staff gave Redd a practice jersey, put him on the court, “and he performed,” Geoff Alexander, an Illinois assistant coach, said Thursday.
“And the rest is history.”
Like a lot of teams in college basketball, the Illinois roster has turned over and turned over again in recent seasons. One of its most promising young players from a season ago, South Side native Morez Johnson Jr., arrived with much fanfare — he was the 2024 Mr. Basketball of Illinois — and now plays at Michigan. Underwood, meanwhile, rebuilt his team with several European standouts, and with Andrej Stojaković, who transferred from Cal.
Redd has been a constant in Champaign, one of the only constants, for four seasons, for Underwood and his staff.
“He’s the most selfless kid I’ve ever been around,” Alexander said, recalling when Redd carried water, in a literal sense, for his future teammates. “The impact that he has on our team is tremendous. Practice-wise, just leadership-wise. He knows what Brad and the rest of us want.
“He echoes it. He speaks it. He demands it out of others.”
More recently, there have been a couple on-court highlights too. In the final moments of a runaway victory against Oregon on Senior Night last month, Redd sent Illini fans into a frenzy when he scored five points in his final home game. He scored again in the final minutes of Illinois’ 35-point victory against Penn in the NCAA Tournament opener.
More Top Picks Best Reading Guides For Kids
It was the Senior Night moment, though, that had his good friend emotional.
“I could’ve shed a tear,” Rodgers said Thursday of Redd’s five points against Oregon. “Honestly, like, I got chills watching that.”
On the other side of the locker room, Redd sat mostly alone, taking everything in. His higher-profile teammates, the ones who score much more often or who have professional basketball futures, either in the United States or overseas, received all the attention. In his own way, though, Redd has played just as much of a role in Illinois’ longest march in 21 years.
“I couldn’t have imagined it,” he said, tugging at his orange Illinois jersey, but there he was.
From manager to walk-on to Indianapolis — and the Final Four.