When Carla Williams took charge of University of Virginia athletics in 2017, she was the only African American woman directing sports at a Power Five school.
Now, she is one of three.
But Vanderbilt’s hiring of Candice Storey Lee, and Duke’s of Nina King, is not the only way Williams has helped shape sports during her six years as UVA’s athletic director. On March 21, Williams made one of the biggest hires of her career by naming Amaka “Mox” Agugua-Hamilton head coach of UVA women’s basketball.
In 2019-20, Agugua-Hamilton set a Missouri State record for wins as a rookie coach. After leading the Lady Bears to a 73-15 record over three seasons, she will bring four assistant coaches and her FABs (family, academics, basketball) coaching philosophy to Virginia.
While Agugua-Hamilton implements her fast-paced scoring style, which she says is influenced in part by men’s basketball head coach Tony Bennett’s mover-blocker offense, Williams will continue implementation of her “Master Plan,” a $12-14 million overhaul of UVA athletic facilities.
As these two women decide the future of UVA women’s sports, here’s a glimpse at 11 of the female athletes who have shaped the university’s 2021-22 season, plus a Notre Dame transfer who’s thrilled she’s “coming home.”
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Halfway through Virginia rowing varsity four’s grand final race, where senior Hailey Barnett (1) was rowing in lane five, Duke nosed ahead in lane six.
“We knew they would try to make moves on us,” Barnett says. “So, we decided to take a move against them.”
In the final 500 meters of the race, the Cavaliers made a power 10 move, where all rowers coordinated 10 powerful, simultaneous strokes.
The crew finished with the fourth-fastest varsity four time in conference history to help Virginia win its 12th consecutive ACC rowing championship.
“We didn’t do as well as we’d hoped throughout the beginning of the season, so we were honestly a bit nervous going into it,” Barnett says. “But our motto on the team is to stay humble and hungry, so we were ready to give it our all.”
That competitive mindset is a Barnett family tradition. Barnett’s father, Fred Lee Barnett, was an NFL wide receiver from 1990 to 1997. Her mother, Jacqueline Barnett, is a dancer. Both provide guidance and support for Barnett and her twin sister and UVA roommate Myla Grace Barnett (2), a senior defender for UVA lacrosse.
Myla Barnett recorded 10 caused turnovers in 2022, including a single game-best of three in the 2022 ACC semifinal. Growing up, she had few Black lacrosse players to look up to. Now, she is playing in this month’s nationally televised NCAA women’s lacrosse tournament.
“I know that there are a lot of younger Black lacrosse players who want to be in my shoes and want to have these opportunities,” she says. “I’ve had younger Black aspiring lacrosse players DM me on Instagram. That is something that’s super important to me, and a lot of why I keep going.”
Barnett has provided coaching clinics for young Black players, and played tournaments alongside Black college stars like Syracuse’s Emma Ward and Ohio State’s Chloë Johnson.
Meanwhile, as part of her Citizen Leaders and Sports Ethics Community Impact Fellowship at UVA’s Contemplative Sciences Center, Barnett is planning anti-racist student-athlete education and a commemoration for Virginia’s enslaved laborers. She is also a member of Generation Now, an organization diversifying the sport of rowing.
“There is definitely a disparity in Black collegiate rowers, and Black rowers in high school, and I think it’s because of the lack of exposure that kids of color have in the sport of rowing,” Barnett says. “I’m happy to set the example for other kids of color who want to row.”
After UVA’s NCAA lacrosse bid, Barnett is preparing for the strangeness of being “more than 10 feet away” from her sister for the first time when she starts a job on Wall Street this summer.
“I’m glad that there’s still FaceTime, and things like that,” she says. “We’ll definitely be speaking to each other every day.”
This year’s Virginia men’s and women’s swim and dive ACC championships, usually held at staggered times, played out side-by-side at Georgia Tech from February 15 to 19.
That meant 15 minutes after junior Kate Douglass (3) helped the women’s team set an American record for the 200-meter freestyle relay, she was able to watch the men’s team set a record of their own.
“I think that was one of the coolest things I’ve ever been a part of,” Douglass says. “Breaking the American record myself was super exciting, but then getting to see the men do it right after, our team just went crazy. You could just tell how much we all loved and supported each other.”
The relay record wasn’t the only mark statistics major and 2020 Tokyo Olympics bronze medalist Douglass made on college swimming history in 2022.
As she helped Virginia successfully defend its NCAA title on March 16, Douglass became the first college swimmer to claim three individual titles in three different strokes by winning the 50 freestyle, 100 butterfly, and 200 breaststroke.
What’s more, she set American records in all three events.
“I just wanted to get as many points as I could for my team, and I wanted to make sure that I was having fun with my teammates and that everyone was just smiling and enjoying themselves,” Douglass says. “I think what’s really special about our team is that we don’t really do it for ourselves. We do it for each other. And that definitely helps take the pressure off yourself.”
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Whether indoor, outdoor, or at a championship, junior sprinter and jumper Jada Seaman (4) loves the 200-meter race.
“It’s so quick and just fun to me,” Seaman says. “I feel like the 200 is the perfect length, too. It’s not too short, like the 60. It’s not too long and painful, like the 400. It’s just that happy balance.”
In 2021, Seaman set the Virginia freshman record for the 200-meter with a time of 23.70.
The next year, she clocked in at 23.18 seconds—just 0.01 short of Sonja Fridy’s 1987 all-time school record.
“I really want to break 23 seconds,” Seaman says. “That’s my goal, so hopefully I’ll be able to do that.”
In addition to working toward a school record and studying business with a “Mad Men”-inspired interest in marketing, Seaman has been perfecting her long jump.
“My strategy up to now has just been to run and just kind of hope for the best, because speed on the runway has kind of saved me,” Seaman says. “I’m not that pretty in the air, but I’m fast on the runway. I just need to be able to hone my speed and really put it all together in the end.”
Seaman put this work to the test at the ACC championships on May 12. This jump was different from the others. With the help of teammates and coaches, she had learned to enjoy the leap.
“I got sixth place, and I’ve won long jump three times now, but getting that medal means a lot to me,” Seaman says. “That was the first time I really had fun.”
After 70 scoreless minutes of soccer against defending national champion Santa Clara, Virginia was granted a free kick near the top left corner of the box.
Sophomore midfielder Lia Godfrey (5) lined herself up, thought of the team’s desire to win for recently injured senior forward Rebecca Jarrett, and curved her shot into the net.
“I work on shooting from different areas around the box, and getting it up and over the wall, because that’s kind of one of the most difficult parts of shooting a free kick…and it went up over that wall,” Godfrey says. “That was something that I’ve just been working on for so long.”
Godfrey’s goal decided one of the 15 victories, which allowed the Cavaliers to clinch the top spot in the ACC with a draw against Florida State on October 28.
“That is one of the hardest things to do, is win a regular season title, playing that many games and coming out on top,” Godfrey says. “We celebrated in the locker room. There was a lot of dancing.”
While completing the first two years of a biology degree and shadowing small animal vets in pursuit of a veterinary career, Godfrey has led Virginia in assists for two seasons.
“A lot of it has to do with connections between me and my teammates,” Godfrey says. “They make the right runs so that I’m able to play those passes. Sometimes I may not see them, but they make a good run…they’re able to read what you want, and I know what they want, so those passes are just able to connect.”
In the top of the first inning against Sacred Heart on February 19, a Virginia softball player waited in scoring position.
From the confidence with which freshman catcher and utility player Sarah Coon hit the ball to send her home, the crowd could have never guessed it was only Coon’s eighth college game.
Sacred Heart retaliated with three runs in the bottom of the frame. That blow might have felled a previous Virginia squad. Instead, Coon polished off a 9-4 comeback win in the sixth inning by cracking the first homer of her college career over the fence.
That four-RBI game helped ACC All-Freshman Coon rack up 32 RBIs in 51 games to help Virginia tie a school record with 12 conference wins.
When Virginia volleyball went down 23-21 against Bellarmine at Memorial Gym on September 18, it looked as if the Cavaliers were in danger of dropping the first set of the home tournament.
Instead, 6-foot 3-inch graduate student middle blocker Alana Walker, who joined the Hoos after racking up 741 career kills for Northwestern, led a comeback. She slammed down back-to-back blocks to clinch both the second and third sets of a 3-0 win.
Walker recorded 16 kills that day as the Cavaliers swept Georgetown and Fairleigh Dickinson to finish out a perfect 9-0 tournament. She went on to lead the ACC, rank second in the NCAA, and mark the second-best single-season blocking performance in Virginia volleyball history by averaging 1.51 blocks per set.
With 19.5 seconds left in the third quarter of a scoreless battle with No. 6 Syracuse, junior midfielder Danielle Husar found the ball on her field hockey stick at the side of the net.
She lifted it into the goal to help No. 16 Virginia grant Syracuse its first loss in over a month.
The goal reflected the Virginia midfielder’s international career as striker for Team Canada. In April, Husar traveled to Potchefstroom, South Africa, to represent Virginia and her native Mississauga as a striker at the FIH Junior World Cup. Last year, she helped win the first Pan American gold medal in Canadian history at the Junior Pan American Cup in Santiago, Chile.
During the May 10 Ann Arbor Regional, from which four golf teams advance to the NCAA tournament, all eyes were on Virginia sophomore Jennifer Cleary after three birdies put her 3-under par halfway through the second round of play.
A bogey on the 12th hole looked like it might set Cleary back—but the Cavaliers’ leader in stroke average knew how to rally. Cleary knocked in back-to-back birdies on holes 14 and 15 to record a career-best 4-under 67.
Cleary’s score marked just the fourth time in program history a Cavalier has recorded a 67 during regional play, and helped Virginia claim an NCAA berth with the third-best team score ever recorded in a single round at Michigan’s golf course.
A storm thundered through Charlottesville as Virginia tennis hosted Oklahoma State in the NCAA Round of 16 on May 14, causing the singles tournament to move indoors halfway through as Oklahoma State claimed four of the first six sets.
But it takes more than a two-set deficit and some rain to rattle sophomore Emma Navarro (6), who dispatched her opponent in two efficient sets to help the Cavaliers advance to the quarterfinals of the NCAA Women’s Tennis Team Championship for the first time since 2016.
After joining Danielle Collins (2014, 2016) as the second player in program history to claim the NCAA singles title in 2021, Navarro, in 2022, was the first Virginia singles competitor to enter the NCAA singles tournament as the No. 1 seed.
In her second game as team captain of Virginia squash on November 14, senior Caroline Baldwin won her first set against fourth-ranked Columbia’s Ellie McVeigh.
McVeigh claimed the next two sets, putting Baldwin—and Virginia’s hopes of emerging with victory against their Ivy League opponent—on the ropes.
Baldwin rallied to win the final two sets, earning the difference-making point in a historic 5-4 win over the highest-ranked squash team Virginia has ever defeated.
“I’m coming home,” Tweeted Ruckersville native Sam Brunelle on April 9, when she announced her decision to transfer from Notre Dame to Virginia.
In 2019, Brunelle emerged from William Monroe High School as one of the top basketball recruits in the United States. After leading ACC freshmen in scoring (13.9 points per game) in 2019-20, a series of injuries haven’t been enough to slow the 6-foot 2-inch Brunelle.
In Notre Dame’s November 9 season opener against Ohio, she came off the bench to drop 20 points in 17 minutes. That’s the kind of offensive explosion Agugua-Hamilton hopes Brunelle will repeat in Charlottesville.