Gilling it
Former UVA basketball standout Anthony Gill didn’t make the NBA right off the bat. The forward earned 2015 and 2016 Third-Team all-ACC honors in his junior and senior seasons under Tony Bennett, but went undrafted after graduating. Gill headed abroad, and spent a season playing for Yesilgiresun Belediye in Turkey, and three years with Khimki in Russia.
Recently, however, Gill has started to find his footing in the big leagues. The 28-year-old signed a two-year contract with the Washington Wizards, and after starter Deni Avdija went down with an injury, Gill found himself with an opportunity. He’s averaged 16 minutes, 9 points, and 4.7 rebounds across the team’s last three games.
“The guy works harder than anybody on our team,” said Wizards coach Scott Brooks this week. “He comes in every day. He comes in early. He’s always cheering his teammates on.”
Area leads the way on vaxes
The Charlottesville-Albemarle area is setting the pace for vaccine rollout in Virginia. As of Tuesday morning, Albemarle County had the highest proportion of the population to have received at least one vaccine dose of any locality in the state. 56 percent of the county has gotten one shot, and 37 percent is fully vaccinated. In the city, 52 percent have one shot, and 32 percent are fully vaxed. Statewide, those numbers are 43 and 29, respectively.
That doesn’t mean we can rest on our laurels: The Blue Ridge Health District, which includes Charlottesville and Albemarle, Greene, Louisa, Nelson, and Fluvanna counties, reported 19 new cases yesterday. Since early March, the health district has consistently registered around 30 new cases per day.
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Quote of the week
“My great-grandfather had to take a literacy test and find three white people to vouch for him just to be able to register to vote.”
—Virginia gubernatorial candidate Jennifer McClellan, speaking about her voting rights plan on the Downtown Mall this week
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Attention, attorneys
With Chip Boyles serving as city manager for the time being, Charlottesville is now beginning to look for people to fill other high-level vacancies in the municipal bureaucracy. This week, City Council will hold a closed meeting to interview potential candidates to be the next city attorney, the elected government’s legal advisor. Former city attorney John Blair left earlier this year to become Staunton’s city attorney.
Give me the bat news first
Three of Virginia’s native bat species are 90 percent extinct, reports the Virginia Mercury. A deadly fungus called white-nose syndrome, which arrived in the country about a decade ago, has swept through Appalachian bat species, decimating the population of northern long-eared, little brown, and tricolored bats. Biologists have been working to help the nocturnal critters, but the disease continues to spread.
Whispering woes
Last week, UVA’s newly constituted Naming and Memorials Committee solicited suggestions from the community on the future of the Frank Hume Memorial Fountain. The fountain, better known as the Whispering Wall, has long been considered a piece of quirky school color, thanks to the way sound carries from one side of the curved bench to the other. But Hume, the monument’s namesake, was a Confederate soldier (and, later, a Virginia state legislator). At a recent listening session, every caller recommended scrapping the wall in its entirety, reports the Cavalier Daily. Last year, two students started a petition, which now has more than 2,100 signatures, to remove the monument. In the last week, the statue has been vandalized twice, and as of Monday, it’s been fenced off.