The athletic department’s administration building has his name on it.
He has a younger sister at Illinois who used to play on the volleyball team. He has an older sister who is married to former Illinois basketball player Meyers Leonard. Both of his parents are Illini and his grandpa played football at Illinois.
But when senior forward Max Bielfeldt takes the court Thursday night at the State Farm Center, he’ll do so as a Hoosier.
Illinois didn’t heavily recruit Bielfeldt while he was at Peoria Notre Dame High School. Tom Lacher, the basketball coach at Peoria Notre Dame was an assistant while Bielfeldt was there, and said the Illini didn’t get into the game until late.
“I think they were a little lethargic and it was a case of too little too late,” Lacher said. “Michigan had already sold Max on going there.”
Bielfeldt’s recruitment started slowly. Ball State and Western Michigan were selling Bielfeldt the hardest, but as Bielfeldt helped Peoria Notre Dame keep winning, interest grew.
As Bielfeldt was in the midst of a season where he averaged 22.1 points and 11.4 rebounds a game and led a 28-0 team into sectionals, teams like Michigan, West Virginia and Florida noticed.
Illinois, an hour and a half away from Peoria, noticed too. But they offered the best player on the No. 1 team in the state a spot as a preferred walk on.
So by the time Illinois did offer a scholarship, Lacher wasn’t surprised when Bielfeldt chose Michigan.
“When he had his commitment day he had both a Michigan hat and an Illinois hat on the table and he picked Michigan which wasn’t a big surprise to anybody,” Lacher said.
When Michigan decided to not renew Bielfeldt’s scholarship for this season and he was looking for schools to use his last year of eligibility, Lacher said Illinois was not one of the many schools calling him about Bielfeldt. He did say IU was also not one of the schools who contacted him.
But since Bielfeldt has arrived in Bloomington, he’s been huge for the Hoosiers. Since conference play began, he’s averaging 8.5 points and 5.1 rebounds a game.
He scored a game-high 18 points with 14 rebounds off the bench in IU’s win at Rutgers to start the Big Ten season in a close game when IU’s stars struggled.
In his first game against Illinois this season, he scored 16 points with 8 rebounds.
He went toe-to-toe with both of Purdue’s 7-footers and held his own, scoring 10 points and taking a pair of key charges in the second half.
But through it all, Lacher said, Bielfeldt has remained unchanged. As a star in high school, a role player at Michigan and as what Dan Dakich described as a “sex symbol” at IU, he’s still the same person.
“The thing about Max is he was just the same kind of player he is now in terms of the team-first mentality,” Lacher said. “He was a dominant player in high school and one of the most dominant players our area has ever seen, but he was always team first.”
Physically though, he’s changed.
He went from what Lacher called a pudgy sophomore in high school who couldn’t shoot further than eight feet from the basket to a player banging inside and who could step outside and make 3-pointers his senior year.
But above all, what has never changed, is what Lacher thinks of whenever he hears Bielfeldt’s name.
“Whenever his name comes to mind I always think about the nickname that he had,” Lacher said. “He was the big puppy, just because he was a big, goofy, fun-loving kid who just happened to be a very good basketball player.”
