If you’d told a young Anna Williamson that one day she’d be atop a ladder at the John Paul Jones Arena, making the final snip to cut down the net after the UVA men’s basketball team won a share of the ACC regular-season title, she’d have thought you were pranking her.
But that’s exactly where Williamson, a then-fourth-year student manager who’s been an uber-fan fan of the team her entire life, found herself last March.
“When [Associate Head] Coach Williford came up to me and said, ‘Anna, you’re gonna finish it off, take the rest of [the net down],’ and handed me the scissors, it was so special,” Williamson says. “And to look over and see my family on senior day … I thought about my little self, who’d go to games and watch UVA beat Carolina schools.”
Watching Williamson, the daughter of two University of Virginia alums, climb to the top of that ladder was especially moving because she was born with spina bifida, and is paralyzed from the knees down. A North Carolina native, she has undergone more than a dozen surgeries and wears a brace on her right leg to help her walk. Inclines are difficult for her.
Before last spring’s ACC Tournament, few UVA basketball fans knew much about Williamson, other than that she was one of 10 student managers whom they’d occasionally glimpse on the sidelines—that is, until ESPN reporter Holly Rowe shone a light on her. And that’s when Williamson says parents of children with spina bifida, a birth defect in which an area of the spinal cord in a developing baby doesn’t form properly, reached out to her on social media, looking for reassurance that their children were going to be fine.
Williamson, who graduated in May and will open Revival coffee shop in Charlottesville this fall, is more than fine.
“It’s a mental game,” she says when asked about the often grueling work of being a student manager for a D-1 college basketball program (she estimates that she worked eight hours on game days, and another three or fours on practice days).
“I can do a lot more physically when I get my mind right about it,” Williamson says. “I’m 5-foot-4, and I’m not as strong [as other student managers], but I did the job to the best of my ability, which is what was asked of me.”
That “ask” came the summer before she started at UVA in 2019. She was working as the first female coach at the Tony Bennett Basketball Camp, when Ronnie Wideman, associate athletic director for men’s basketball, spoke to her about being a student manager when school started in the fall. After considering her strengths and weaknesses, and thinking about what she’d bring to the program, Williamson said yes—and never looked back.
Her job was to “do whatever made the [members of the team’s] lives easier day to day. To oil the machine, do behind-the-scenes work, and watch [the team] shine,” she says. “UVA was my dream school since I was a kid, and I’ve always admired [Head] Coach Bennett,” who Williamson says taught everyone about much more than basketball.
“He taught me a lot of perspective on life, and about hard stretches, and how caring for your friends and family is more important than basketball.”