The Live Arts season opens with Uncle Vanya and Life Sucks in rotating repertory for 11 performances each through October 29. Photo by Will Kerner.
The theme of Anton Chekhov’s 1898 play Uncle Vanya is captured by two words in the title of Aaron Posner’s 2015 adaptation: life sucks.
That message won’t have audiences leaving the theater downhearted, however, when Live Arts kicks off its 33rd season with a concurrent run of Uncle Vanya and Life Sucks.
Even if the journey of life is sometimes a slog for the characters in Chekhov’s and Posner’s plays, they learn to get as much out of the trek as they can. “It should not leave people with a heaviness,” says Live Arts Artistic Director Susan E. Evans, who directs Uncle Vanya. “It should leave people thinking, but not feeling that life sucks. Life Sucks is tongue-in-cheek, even the title.”
A Chekhov fan since she was a teenager who related to Three Sisters, Evans noticed a lack of the Russian playwright in Live Arts’ repertoire and decided to change it. In order to help Charlottesville audiences connect with a show originally meant to resonate with Russians in another era, Evans is running the classic play in repertory with a living American playwright’s comic take on it.
“We’ve had feedback from the community about definitely wanting classics in the mix,” Evans says. “To me, this is a nice way of making connections between a contemporary playwright who’s actually right next door, because he’s based in D.C., and also being able to present a classic I love.”
While Evans helms Uncle Vanya, Fran Smith, co-founder of Live Arts, is returning after a three-year hiatus to direct Life Sucks. After directing more than 60 shows at the theater since its founding in 1990, she says this production “might be my swan song.”
“I’ve been waiting to do one more, and I just really love Life Sucks,” Smith says. “It’s about love, longing, and loss, but it’s also about hope. I think people will relate to it.”
Uncle Vanya takes place in an estate in the Russian countryside, where a group of people lament lust, unfulfillment, and ennui as strained relationship dynamics and arguments over the management of the estate threaten to disturb the boredom of everyday life. Life Sucks surrounds a similar gathering of seven people in the United States, 126 years later.
Running these plays at the same time presented a challenge for scenic designer Tom Bloom, associate professor emeritus of scenic design in the UVA Department of Drama, who was tasked with designing one set for two shows taking place over a century apart.
Audience members who come to the Founders Theater on consecutive nights this fall will notice a pair of different settings on the same stage. Uncle Vanya takes place in period-specific costume on a porch, and includes a working swing and real trees. In contrast, Life Sucks focuses on its actors as they revolve around a spare stage that features just a table, two chairs, and a stairway.
Like the foundation of their sets, the bedrock of the plots in Uncle Vanya and Life Sucks are recognizably similar, but distinguished by embellishments, such as the Chekhov character who shows up as a puppet in Posner’s adaptation. Where a missed gunshot causes panic and fury in Uncle Vanya, it leads to mockery of the shooter in Life Sucks. Where one character soliloquizes on her loneliness in Uncle Vanya, she turns to the audience and asks for a show of hands as to who wants to sleep with her in Life Sucks.
“That’s the thing I love about Posner,” says Smith. “He’ll take a situation that could be very intense and serious, and make it funny.” As talks of estate management and deforestation in Uncle Vanya turn into characters lamenting student loans and climate change in Life Sucks, the two shows remain connected by similarities that run deeper than the ever-present drinking of vodka. Both plays challenge their actors, thanks to Chekhov’s disinclination to define characters as good or bad. He similarly does not make a judgment about the overall mood of Uncle Vanya, which is labeled as neither tragedy nor comedy, but rather as “scenes from country life.”
Although that country life takes place in a distant location and time, many of the problems the characters face in Uncle Vanya, from unhappy relationships to environmental destruction, remain surprisingly relatable to 2023 audiences. “It’s very accessible,” Evans says. “It’s like a midlife crisis play, in a way, and a lot of us can identify with that.” Posner then takes those conflicts and makes them instantly recognizable through Life Sucks’ seven characters, who grapple with timeless issues, like the fear of aging you feel when you find a gray nose hair.
“Everybody in the audience can relate to one of these characters,” Smith says. “That’s what I find really fun about this show. It doesn’t need a lot. It really relies on the actors to carry it.”
More than 4,000 attendees are expected to gather for the 11th Cville Sabroso on September 16 at Washington Park. Mexican dance group Villa Sabrosa is one of the many featured performances. Supplied photo.
Since 2013, the City of Charlottesville has officially recognized the third Saturday of September as Cville Sabroso Day. This year, more than 4,000 people are expected in Washington Park for the annual Cville Sabroso Festival, central Virginia’s largest annual Latin American music, dance, and culture gathering.
That will break the event’s previous attendance record, according to Sin Barreras, the organization behind the day. Cville Sabroso launched alongside Sin Barreras in 2012 because of “a need to celebrate and to share a piece of yourself and your own traditions with the broader community,” says Edgar Lara, executive director of Sin Barreras. The Charlottesville- and Waynesboro-based organization supports the area’s Hispanic immigrant community with services including legal consultations and educational workshops.
Lara experienced this need when he first moved to Charlottesville in 2012 and struggled to connect with the city’s Hispanic community. “It was very clear to me as I met people that most didn’t know anything about the culture and the people that I come from,” Lara says.
He found folks who understood his background through Sin Barreras, and the inaugural Cville Sabroso Festival helped set the stage to connect those people with the broader Charlottesville community. “Oftentimes we have heard people say, ‘This festival makes me feel a little more at home. It makes me more comfortable,’” Lara says.
Estela Knott, who co-founded Cville Sabroso with Fanny Smedile, is a member of the Lua Project, a musical group blending Mexican and Appalachian musical styles. Like that Mexilachian blend, Knott describes Cville Sabroso as an opportunity for cultural bridge-building. “We were all immigrants, we all are descendants of immigrants at some time in our past,” says Knott. “The people that are coming now come with rich cultural traditions that add to the fabric of Virginia. These are people who are bringing something to our community, not taking.”
Encouraging positive perception of the impact of immigration on Charlottesville has become especially important for Sin Barreras following the violence that shook the city in August 2017. Lara calls that year’s Cville Sabroso, which was held less than one month later, “a healing moment” for the community. “This event, specifically right after, was such an important part of the healing process,” Lara says. “People saw diversity. They saw all these different things that really stood against what was seen on August 12 … that’s how we push back.”
This year, food trucks will include Mexican food from Antojitos Mexicanos, Sabor Latino, La Flor Michoacana, El Chapparito, and Guadalajara, as well as Uruguayan food from Marina Del Delicia and Argentinian fare from Arepas on Wheels. Vendors will display artisan goods from Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador.
Live performances will feature music and dance from Mexico, Bolivia, Panama, Puerto Rico, Peru, Honduras, El Salvador, the Caribbean, and Colombia. The formation of a Mexican dance group, Villa Sabrosa, was inspired by Cville Sabroso, according to Knott. “Coming to see El Sabroso, it’s an introduction, it’s a taste, and it might lead you to learning about not just where people come from, but how they live and who they are right here,” Lara says.
Midfielder Grace Santos and goalkeeper Carver Miller made their professional debuts 73 days and a continent apart.
Santos’ team won in Reykjavík, Iceland. Miller’s squad triumphed in Portland, Oregon. Neither victory came easily.
Santos set up for a corner kick on April 27 knowing her team, Fram F.C., was the underdog in a clash with HK Kópavogur, the higher-seeded opponent in the 2023 Iceland Women’s Football League Cup.
Miller dove to block a shot from the visiting Sporting Kansas City II on July 9, but the ball clipped his outstretched fingers and careened into the Portland Timbers2’s net to put Miller’s team in a one-goal deficit during his debut for Major League Soccer’s Portland Timbers’ reserve team.
It was a good thing Santos and Miller know how to convince opponents to take them seriously.
Back when each of them began working with Price Thomas and his Charlottesville-based youth soccer consulting program, Gradum, neither were expected to become part of the less than 1 percent of soccer players who make it professionally.
“It’s a wild story of two kids who people were not particularly high on, who have worked themselves into great positions, and who still have a long way to go,” Thomas says. “Both of them were very single-minded, very committed to this dream of playing … and even without a ton of positive feedback, they still had all the trappings of two players who would be successful.”
Price Thomas started Gradum, his youth soccer consulting program, in 2016 to help players who have the capability to play at high levels as adults. Photo by Eze Amos.
The difficulty with talent evaluation of young athletes is that scouts and coaches assess, by subjective metrics, the talent ceilings of kids with both physical and mental growing left to do.
Some athletes dismissed by coaches in their early teens still have the capability to play at high levels as adults, if they work consistently enough on the right parts of their game. Those are the athletes Thomas aimed to work with when he first launched Gradum in 2016.
The project began as an effort to create an offseason training program for Thomas’ sister Carmen, a former player for JMU. Eventually, it grew into individualized consulting for young players across Charlottesville, including economically disadvantaged and minority athletes funded by Thomas’ nonprofit, the Ireland Street Foundation.
“There was a gap in the market for who was helping these high-achieving kids who wanted to play in college, who wanted to play professionally,” Thomas says. “We found ourselves in the spot where we were really able to help move some of these kids along who were kind of in a gray area, who weren’t really getting the right support.”
Santos, then age 16, became one of Gradum’s first players during a time she says she “really wasn’t getting any support from my club in high school.”
“When everyone else was telling me I needed to aim lower in my expectations on what my career could look like,” says Santos, “Price was the one who actually believed in me enough to map out what the path to the next level would look like.”
Santos is a Scottsville native who grew up watching Emily Sonnett lead the Cavaliers to ACC dominance. She had a technician’s grasp of soccer. What she lacked was the athleticism of other Division I bound players her age.
This didn’t faze Thomas. He put together a plan to build her physical game from the ground up, a strategy Santos jokes involved teaching her how to run.
In a little over a year, she had begun getting offers from DI schools.
Santos’ college career took her from William & Mary to Arizona and finally to UVA, where she had dreamed of playing ever since she was a 10-year-old sitting on the bleachers at Klockner Stadium.
During summers, she still returned to Gradum to help Thomas as a technical training instructor.
“I think the cool part about training is that I’m doing what they want to do, sort of like Price was for me,” Santos says. “He had been through it all. He knew and could relate to everything I was going through. I feel like I can bring the same thing to a lot of these kids who either want to play in college or play professionally.”
Santos and her brother Nate, a fellow Gradum trainee and Stetson soccer commit, were both present at the Gradum practice where 14-year-old Miller first took the field with Thomas.
It was a tough introduction to pro-level conditioning for Miller, who ended the practice by vomiting. He recovered, straightened, and asked Thomas what time he should come back tomorrow.
That’s when Thomas knew the younger goalkeeper had the necessary drive to succeed.
Miller, who had climbed the ranks of SOCA (Soccer Organization Charlottesville Area) since moving to Charlottesville at age 4, already knew he loved being a goalkeeper. Now, he wanted to excel at it.
Thomas, a lifelong field player, leaned on outside experts like Jake Davis, who works with goalkeepers on the Virginia women’s soccer team, to teach Miller the basics of guarding the net.
With that foundation in place, Thomas got to work on the technical minutiae. The two met almost every day during summer 2018 as Thomas helped Miller hone his agility, putting him through band and resistance work until the goalkeeper could burst into sudden movement from any corner of the net.
Thomas also worked with Miller on his mental game. For a goalkeeper, arguably the toughest mental position on the field, that involved keeping him engaged in a game that demanded his attention for 90 full minutes, helping him bounce back from goals against and making him a coachable player able to learn from criticism.
Miller used those skills while playing for youth academies in Richmond and Washington, D.C., as well as most recently during two seasons in Germany, where he dialed Thomas’ number often.
“Even between the time difference, he would always pick up,” says Miller. “He was a good outlet for me, especially when times are rough.”
Thomas, who played at William & Mary before launching his professional career in Turkey, Germany, and Sweden, knew precisely the kind of challenges faced by a young player adapting to playing overseas.
He advised Miller to stabilize himself by setting a routine from a favorite restaurant to a regular grocery store, and also told him not to forget to enjoy his time there.
“You’re 17 years old, going to do the thing you love overseas. That is truly a one-in-a-million opportunity,” Thomas says. “When we would talk, it wasn’t a lot of soccer stuff. It wasn’t a lot of tactical stuff. It was more of how to embrace and how to enjoy the moment.”
Scottsville native Grace Santos, who plays professional soccer in Reykjavík, Iceland, joined Gradum because she “wasn’t getting any support from my club in high school,” she says. Supplied photo.
Reykjavík, which boasts a similar population to Albemarle County, is host to 30 different women’s soccer clubs, according to Santos. Their games, a major part of the city’s social life, draw energetic crowds armed with drums.
Santos’ Icelandic is limited to the words for “try again,” “good job,” and “thank you,” so she generally does not understand the crowds’ chants.
She did, however, understand the crowd’s excitement when her corner kick made it to the back of the net to help lift Fram to a 3-1 upset victory in her professional debut.
Santos finished that game with an assist, a goal, and a starting role on the team.
After years spent admiring the Virginia team, where she believes players embody a “beautiful” brand of possession-oriented soccer, the physicality of the Icelandic league took Santos by surprise. It was a thrill to learn she could compete in it.
At least, she could until she was sidelined by a nagging ankle injury that necessitated surgery.
Santos returned to Charlottesville for surgery, then navigated a month on crutches and a frustrating recovery process with Thomas to help her safely pace her return to the field.
Now back in Iceland, Santos stays in touch with her Charlottesville support system—her brother, her pickup group, her coaches, her UVA surgeon, and her parents, who she says “probably know more stats about the Icelandic league than I do”—through text and FaceTime.
That might be the case for the next few years. Santos is hoping to spend several more seasons playing professionally abroad on her newly repaired ankle.
“I think the biggest thing that I’ve learned is you’re really only as good as your support system,” Santos says. “I really would not be where I am today without all of their support.”
Miller’s pre-start routine involves sitting outside of the stadium, alone and away from his phone, and meditating over the best moments of his goalkeeping career.
His go-to memory in net took place with his German youth club, Arminia Bielefeld. During a fight for the top spot in the goalkeeping rotation, Miller turned aside a penalty kick—and the ensuing rebound—to earn a shutout and the No. 1 spot.
“The feeling after that game, I always go back to,” says Miller. “I just know that I’ve done it before, I’ve gotten this far, and there’s not much to stop me when I’m in the right mindset.”
That mindset was in danger of being shaken when Miller found himself on hands and knees, with a shot he believes he would have stopped eight times out of 10 in the net behind him, during his MLS NEXT Pro debut.
Miller shook himself, rose to his feet, and kicked the ball to center. There would be no shutout, but there were still 72 minutes left to win.
Miller went on to make seven straight saves, including one on a 74th-minute breakaway, to keep the visitors off the board as Portland surged to a 3-1 comeback victory.
“I just felt more comfortable [in the second half],” says Miller. “I was holding the ball a little bit more. I was a little bit looser … I had more opportunities to showcase my talent, and kind of show to the other team that you get one goal and that’s it.”
Miller, who turned 19 in June, is the youngest member of the Portland Timbers2. His debut has given him every reason to hope he has more starts to look forward to in the future.
When Portland Timbers2’s goalkeeper Carter Miller returns home to Charlottesville, he can often be found working with local youth soccer players, who are thrilled to have the opportunity to take shots on a professional. Supplied photo.
Miller and Santos trained, lifted, and prepared together this winter before the two headed off in opposite directions to make their professional debuts. They have kept in touch.
“We talk about the difficulties of being a pro, and the positives of being a pro, and living our dreams,” Miller says. “We’ve kind of gone through this process together.”
When Miller comes back in town, Thomas texts local players and suggests some swing by practice to take shots on a professional goalkeeper.
He rarely has trouble getting shooters to volunteer.
“It gives them an opportunity to say, ‘Wow, it’s possible,’” Thomas says. “And it’s great for me to be like, ‘Yeah, look at what he was able to do, but look at what he put into it to get out of it.’”
Miller, who has wanted to be a professional soccer player since fourth grade, is happy to play that role for the young members of Charlottesville’s soccer community.
“I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the people in Charlottesville. It’s a great soccer town,” Miller says. “There’s great talent in Charlottesville, so I hope my story will tell the kids there to not give up. I was once the little kid playing at Johnson Village on the Johnson Village soccer field, dreaming of this.”
Miller and Santos are not the only rising stars working with Gradum. The program’s current contingent of college players includes Phebe Ryan at Yale, Gabi Andres at Villanova, and Christoph Kuttner at Radford.
Given the strength of the soccer community in Charlottesville, it feels like only a matter of time until another local player joins Santos and Miller in the pros.
“I never in my entire life would have thought that we would be able to create this kind of little community,” Thomas says. “They have the thing that they love, and that they share, and to see them experience that together and watch them grow through it … it’s been really rewarding.”
Cabaret opens July 7 at the Culbreth Theatre. Photo by Tristan Williams.
In the midst of preparations for the Virginia Theatre Festival’s production of Cabaret, lead actor Ainsley Seiger missed a few rehearsals to fly to Monaco for the Monte-Carlo Television Festival.
That’s the cost of staging a play led by an actor with a regular role on NBC’s “Law & Order: Organized Crime.” And it’s a price director and choreographer Matthew Steffens is more than willing to pay to direct Seiger, an actor he and Virginia Theatre Festival Artistic Director Jenny Wales have worked with since she was 14 years old.
“We really wanted Ainsley because we know what she brings to the table,” Steffens says. “It not only feels like a performance that is in the late 1920s in Berlin, but also something that could be in Charlottesville on a Friday night down at the mall.”
In Cabaret, American writer Clifford Bradshaw (Keith Rubin) visits Berlin while working on a novel. There, he meets mercurial English nightclub performer Sally Bowles (Seiger), who is both manic and tragic, dominating every scene she is in. Meanwhile, behind the flash of song and dance, the growing specter of Nazism looms.
Steffens calls Sally a “tornado.” Seiger describes her as “unhinged.”
“Even when we did our first read-through at the table … I couldn’t stop moving around in my seat,” Seiger says. “There’s something about her that just begs to move. She wants to be in a different place at any given moment.”
It’s difficult to think of a character more dissimilar to NYPD detective Jet Slootmaekers, the stoic, introverted tech specialist Seiger has played on “Law & Order: Organized Crime” since early 2021.
“That’s been fun to play with, the huge dichotomy between someone who is quite small, someone who is learning how to take up space, like Jet … versus Sally, who I don’t think cares about any of that,” Seiger says. “She walks into the room, and it’s her room now.”
In front of the “Law & Order” cameras, Seiger shares Jet’s emotions with the audience through the minutiae of a pursed lip or a quick downward glance. Those nuances become impossible when she is trying to convey happiness and heartbreak to the last row of the Culbreth Theatre.
For Seiger, a theater kid since middle school, it’s freeing to return to a live performance.
“That was a bit of a learning curve for me, learning to exist within the frame of the camera. You really are bound by where that goes and where it takes you,” Seiger says of her TV work. “There’s a lot more freedom of expression physically on a stage, because you want to take up the entire space.”
Seiger’s theater career began in earnest after her sophomore year in high school, when she arrived at UNC Chapel Hill for a summer theater conservatory. There, Steffens and Wales were holding auditions for Hairspray.
Seiger won the role of Amber Von Tussle and found two mentors.
“They were really the first people to ever take me seriously as a performer and an artist that weren’t my parents,” Seiger says. “They were a very formative part of my development as an artist. As the years have gone on, that creative relationship has just deepened.”
During Seiger’s sophomore year at the UNC School of the Arts, Steffens reached out to her about joining the Virginia Theatre Festival for the 2018 production of A Chorus Line. Seiger describes it as her first “truly professional show.”
“I felt like I learned so much from that, and I’m drawing so much on that experience just being back here,” she says.
In Seiger’s return to the Virginia Theatre Festival stage, Steffens and Wales still see the talent they first spotted a decade ago.
“I can give her a very broad direction, and I know that she’s going to play in the sandbox with me,” Steffens says. “It allows me, as a director, to just direct freely.”
They’re also noticing the new confidence of a professional used to high-pressure television takes that, unlike theater, do not allow for do-overs the next night.
“I’ve been dreaming along with her, for her, for the amount of time that I’ve known her,” Wales says. “And now to have seen her transition into a fully professional career outside of school, and to come back and have a chance to work with her again—not to be cliché, but it’s like a dream come true.”
Seiger is not the only cast member leaving New York for a Cabaret summer in Charlottesville. Steffens (Into the Woods) and music director Justin Ramos (Moulin Rouge) were both recently working on Broadway, as well as cast members Janet Dickinson as Fraulein Schneider (Anastasia and How the Grinch Stole Christmas) and David Mattar Merten as Emcee (Afterglow, an off-Broadway hit.)
“It’s gratifying, because I think that there is something special about Charlottesville, and about the Virginia Theatre Festival,” says Wales. “These are people who want to return to our community.”
“Pressure is not a bad thing. Pressure is a good thing, and pressure is what makes
this team so great. I love it. It makes the game way more exciting.” Kyle Teel, cavaliers catcher. Image courtesy UVA Athletics Communications.
A baseball catcher has a dangerous job.
There are the usual risks, like knee strain and getting hit by foul balls, but junior Kyle Teel had something new to worry about on Sunday, June 11.
If the University of Virginia won game three of the best-of-three Super Regional against Duke, the team would celebrate qualifying for the College World Series in Omaha, Nebraska, with a dogpile on the pitcher’s mound.
The last time UVA won a Super Regional in 2021, Teel was a freshman right fielder. By the time he jogged home, he was able to launch himself into a coveted spot atop the pile.
Now, Teel would be squatting just feet from pitcher Brian Edgington, who was destined to become the epicenter of the celebratory crush.
Teel’s reward for becoming the first catcher in UVA history to be named a semifinalist for the Golden Spikes Award, given to the country’s best amateur baseball player, was to be crushed by his own teammates.
In the tunnel, Teel turned to graduate student outfielder Travis Reifsnider. “What should I do?”
Reifsnider considered. “Here’s what you’re going to do,” he said. “You’re going to tackle Brian Edgington. And you’re going to roll off.”
That was the plan.
When sophomore outfielder Colin Tuft caught the final out of the game to seal Virginia’s 12-2 victory, Teel launched himself into Edgington’s arms, then tried the Reifsnider roll.
He had forgotten to account for the fact that this would require Edgington letting go.
Edgington only clutched Teel tighter, and the two were suddenly buried beneath the entire Virginia baseball team.
“It was a little painful, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world,” Edgington said.
The risk of temporary suffocation was worth it. Just two days prior, it seemed possible that the Cavaliers wouldn’t even play a game three, let alone win it.
Jake Gelof is the team’s all-time home run leader, and broke Virginia’s single-season RBI record with 84 this season. Image courtesy UVA Athletics Communications.
Jake Gelof is UVA’s all-time home run leader, and he broke Virginia’s single-season RBI record with 84 this season.
When he stepped up to the plate for the final at-bat during game one of the Super Regional on Saturday, June 9, with two runners on base and the Cavaliers down by one, the home crowd was on its feet. If Gelof recorded a hit, Virginia would walk off with a win.
Gelof connected with the final pitch of the game so forcefully the crack could be heard across Davenport Field as the ball sailed toward the shouting audience behind the left-field fence.
Then Duke’s Tyler Albright leapt upward and snagged it out of the air, quieting the crowd and forcing UVA to concede a 5-4 defeat. It was only the fifth time in 42 games the Cavaliers had lost at home. That was enough to stun the players. It was not enough, however, to panic them.
“When you’re one loss away from ending the season, sometimes the team is really quiet and worried, but seeing everyone be confident still was really cool,” sophomore shortstop Griff O’Ferrall said.
In the tunnel before the do-or-die game two on June 10, Teel did his best impression of a broadcaster watching an upcoming Virginia win.
Into his imaginary microphone, Teel intoned the story of O’Ferrall hitting his first home run of the season. The bases were loaded, of course.
It might not have been a grand slam, but it turned out Teel’s prediction wasn’t too far off.
As the host of a Super Regional, the Cavaliers got the rare opportunity to be the away team at home when the batting order flipped for game two. That meant O’Ferrall, Virginia’s lead-off hitter, started the game at the plate.
“The crowd was all chanting,” O’Ferrall said. “That was the loudest I think I’ve heard the crowd.”
On the first pitch, Duke pitcher Alex Gow missed upwards. O’Ferrall knew Gow would zero in on the strike zone after getting behind on the count, so he decided to be aggressive on the next throw.
On the second pitch, O’Ferrall connected.
Brian O’Connor has taken the Cavs to the College World Series six times. Image courtesy UVA Athletics Communications.
Just like announcer Teel had called before the game, his hit went all the way over the left-center wall.
“It was really special to see him hit his first home run of the season in such a big spot,” Teel said. “He worked so hard, and he’s such a great ballplayer. It was really exciting to see.”
Starting pitcher junior Connelly Early stepped onto the mound in the bottom of the first with the cushion of both a 1-0 lead and a riled-up stadium.
“When Griff O’Ferrall hits a leadoff home run, I mean, the fans are gonna be into the game right from the start, so I didn’t have to get the crowd going,” Early said.
Virginia extended its lead to 4-0 before Duke hit a pair of doubles to cut the Cavaliers’ lead to one in the bottom of the fourth.
That was when Early started thinking of graduate student pitcher Edgington, who was scheduled to start the next game, if there was a next game. Game three still had the dreaded parenthetical “if necessary” beside its Sunday start time on the NCAA schedule.
“I had a realization,” Early said. “I was like, ‘There’s no way I’m not going to give Brian a chance to pitch this third game.’ That’s all that was running through my mind. I was like, ‘I’ve gotta do whatever I can to be able to get Brian out there for what could be his last outing.’”
Early buckled down for the final three innings of his start, allowing zero runs on two hits and forcing four batters into swinging strikeouts.
Meanwhile, Cavaliers batters piled up 14 runs. Gelof joined in on the fun by finally getting that home run he’d been swinging for at the end of game one. It was enough to tie the series with a 14-4 win.
Kyle Teel is the first catcher in UVA baseball history to be named a semifinalist for the Golden Spikes Award, given to the country’s best amateur baseball player. Image courtesy UVA Athletics Communications.
It would all come down to Edgington in game three.
Before the winner-takes-all game three on Sunday, June 11, pitching coach Drew Dickinson pumped his fist.
Dickinson had just watched Edgington, who was warming up in the bullpen, hurl his split-finger. This pitch, thrown like a fastball with the pitcher’s grip spread into a V, surprises batters by dropping suddenly at the plate.
“When it’s not on, it’s [a] battle for him … but when he throws it with confidence, it’s good,” Dickinson said. “It just looks like a fastball, and then it gets to the home plate and just disappears. He had it going the other day, and I knew right in the bullpen. … As soon as he threw that first pitch, I was like, ‘It’s on.’”
Sure enough, the Blue Devils had no answer for that tricky pitch.
Edgington kept Duke off the scoresheet for the first half of the game, opening with five brutally efficient, scoreless innings while the Cavaliers’ offense got to work.
By the time the eighth frame rolled around, Virginia had scored 11 runs. Edgington had held Duke to two.
In the final two innings of a normal game, a starting pitcher would usually sit and allow a closer to finish out the win. This, however, was no normal game.
“As a kid, you always dreamed [of] a complete game, especially in sending your team to Omaha,” Edgington said. “I was just hoping they weren’t going to take me out. And that was never discussed.”
That dream looked like it would never come for Edgington when he injured his shoulder as a freshman at Saint Joseph’s University back in 2018. It wasn’t certain he would ever be able to throw again at full strength, let alone pitch a meaningful D1 contest.
Six years and three schools later, Edgington finally got the chance to pitch his dream game. It was the first complete NCAA Tournament contest from a UVA pitcher in nine years.
“I don’t think words can describe the joy, the excitement I was going through,” Edgington said.
Nine Cavaliers batters connected for hits in game three. In two must-win games, Virginia outscored Duke 26-6.
“Pressure is not a bad thing,” Teel said. “Pressure is a good thing, and pressure is what makes this team so great. I love it. It makes the game way more exciting.”
Of 299 D1 men’s baseball programs, only eight make it to the College World Series each summer.
In Brian O’Connor’s 20 years as head coach, the Cavaliers have made the trip six times, including their 2015 championship season and most recently in 2021.
“That’s something that we always talk about in the fall. We break the huddle saying, Omaha in three,” O’Ferrall said. “In this program, it’s something we talk about every day. It’s always in the back of our minds.”
On Saturday, June 18, six days after the Super Regionals game three victory, Virginia was eliminated from the College World Series after a 4-3 loss to Texas Christian University.
This is the end of the road for the Hoos this season, but “it doesn’t diminish what this team accomplished,” O’Connor said after Sunday’s loss. The team finished with 50 wins (for the fifth time in program history), and ended 50-15 overall. The Cavs’ 44 regular-season wins were the second most in program history, and just one short of matching the record. UVA also won 19 ACC games during the regular season, the most since 2016, and won its first ACC Coastal title since 2011. In other words, UVA’s 2023 baseball season was a big success, by any measure.
Ashley Anumba. Image courtesy Matt Riley / UVA Athletics Communications.
For fans who enjoy pointing to their televisions and saying, “I watched them back when they played for UVA,” this University of Virginia athletics season is required viewing. From marking national bests and setting school records, to going on championship streaks to taking teams to the postseason, athletes are making UVA history this year—and they’re not planning to stop when they leave Grounds. Here’s a look at memorable seasons from five Virginia athletes who, based on their performances this spring, will be players to watch in the future.
Ashley Anumba
Track & Field
Ashley Anumba. Image courtesy Matt Riley / UVA Athletics Communications.
A discus throw takes place in the span of a second.
During that second, second-year law school student Ashley Anumba has dozens of muscle movements to think about.
“A misconception about throwing is that it’s all arms, but it’s a total body movement from your legs up to your hands,” says Anumba.
Anumba has to make sure her hips are open enough for her turn. She must turn her head as she uses her glutes to power her twist to the front, while keeping her back precisely angled so her release sends the 2.2-pound disc flying in the right direction.
She might think over each of these movements while practicing, but in competition the throw is seamless. After thousands of repetitions, her body knows exactly what to do.
That’s not to say that Anumba’s throw isn’t still evolving. This fall, new UVA throwing coach Steve Lemke helped her see the process differently. Instead of leaning on her natural elegance in the ring, she began deliberately using each muscle to its maximum strength during the wind.
That’s part of why she was able to set a Virginia discus record with her first throw of the 2023 season.
At North Carolina State’s Raleigh Relays on March 24, Anumba threw the discus 59.37 meters, or 194 feet and nine inches. That’s the fifth time she has set a new school standard since she joined the team in 2022—and it was with a distance 2.87 meters (nine feet, five inches) farther than her first record-breaking throw.
“When you reach a certain level of expertise, the jumps in distance or time progressions … get smaller, because you’re already reaching that peak,” says Anumba. “So, the fact that I was able to bypass all of that and still, even though I’m on a high level, make such a big jump, that’s been amazing. Evidently, something is going right with this technique change.”
Anumba arrived at UVA as a graduate transfer from the University of Pennsylvania, holding a degree in public health and two extra years of athletics eligibility thanks to COVID-19. She was looking for a school that would support her simultaneous pursuit of a law degree and the world standard discus throw of 63.5 meters (208 feet, three inches). She found that university in Charlottesville.
“This team, this school, has shown me that I shouldn’t be afraid of pursuing goals that are scary, or things that I want in my life that may be far away,” says Anumba. “People will help me get there.”
After taking on the ACC and NCAA championships this spring, Anumba wants to qualify for the World Athletics Championships in Budapest in August. Her ultimate goal is to represent Nigeria, where most of her extended family lives, in the 2024 Paris Olympics.
“I’m chipping away at it, and more than ever, I see it as more of a reality than a possibility,” says Anumba.
This is a future Anumba never imagined while playing soccer as a child. While her older sister Michelle, now head athletic trainer for the WNBA’s Las Vegas Aces, was setting shot put records at Duke, Ashley was busy dreaming of a future in the National Women’s Soccer League. She joined track only as a part of injury recovery in eighth grade.
It was not until a high school coach told her that her discus talent could someday earn her a college scholarship—and even an Olympics bid—that Anumba began trying to become one of the best in the world.
“I never expected to be as good as what I am now,” says Anumba. “Seeing the vision that my high school coach had for me, it’s absolutely crazy. I’m believing everything he said, because it’s becoming true.”
Connor Shellenberger
Lacrosse
Connor Shellenberger. Image courtesy Matt Riley / UVA Athletics Communications.
When Connor Shellenberger was 9 years old, he watched his hometown University of Virginia triumph over Maryland in the 2011 NCAA Men’s Lacrosse Championship.
Ten years later, the Cavaliers took on the Terrapins in a 2021 title rematch—but this time, Shellenberger was on the field.
The redshirt first-year scored four times to help Virginia to a 17-16 championship victory.
“I don’t know if it’s hit me, to be honest,” says Shellenberger. “I’m hoping one day, once I’m done playing lacrosse, it’ll be able to fully sink in. It was crazy. It happened so fast.”
For his 14 goals and 10 assists in four 2021 playoff games, Shellenberger was the second rookie in NCAA history to be named the tournament’s most outstanding player. He finished the following season as a finalist for the Tewaaraton Award, handed to the most outstanding player in college lacrosse, after leading UVA with 76 points and 44 assists in 16 games in 2022.
Shellenberger tries not to focus on accolades. He says he models his game after Steele Stanwick, the last Cavalier to receive the Tewaaraton in 2011, who he always felt cared more about team wins than stats chasing.
That might be part of why on May 23 of last year, the day after the Terrapins knocked Virginia out of the 2022 NCAA quarterfinals, the team voted to make Shellenberger captain.
“You’re always thinking about winning games and winning championships and stuff like that, but some of the bigger honors are stuff like that, where your teammates trust you and want you to lead them,” says Shellenberger.
Shellenberger’s dominant 2022 season earned him an invite to U.S. Men’s National Team tryouts last summer. There, Shellenberger was able to pick the brains of players he’d grown up watching, like Cornell’s Rob Pannell and Princeton’s Tom Schreiber. Both are now professional lacrosse players.
“I was seeing all the guys that I had grown up watching on TV,” says Shellenberger. “Being around them off the field and talking to them, and also on the field and going against them— it’s tough to have that confidence at first, to feel like you belong, because you’ve seen all the great things they’ve done.”
Shellenberger is starting to believe he belongs as he gets closer to his goal of making the national team—and to leading UVA back to the national championships.
Although the team entered the 2023 season without Matt Moore, Shellenberger’s offensive partner and UVA’s all-time points leader, Virginia offense has been led by Shellenberger and a squad of fifth-year veterans.
Xander Dickson has become one of the top scorers in college lacrosse, Petey LaSalla is one of the best in the country on draws and Payton Cormier’s 145 career goals rank No. 2 in UVA history. All three were wearing orange and navy blue for both Virginia’s 2019 and 2021 championships.
Now, Shellenberger is looking to get a second ring of his own as he finishes out the season with his family watching from the stands of Klöckner Stadium.
“Thinking back 10 years ago, I was going to the game with them as a fan, and now I get to look over and they’re standing in the same place that we stood,” says Shellenberger. “It’s kind of a full circle.”
Eden Bigham
Softball
Eden Bigham. Image courtesy Matt Riley / UVA Athletics Communications.
The day before the UVA softball team boarded a plane to Houston for its February 9 season opener against Lamar University, freshman pitcher Eden Bigham got the news she would be starting.
It was a moment she had spent every day that fall preparing for. She had completely reworked her changeup. She had learned not to rely on the rise ball, her go-to in high school.
She also toughened her mental game, which might have been the most important skill waiting in her arsenal as she stepped onto the mound for her collegiate debut.
“You have the ball in your hands, you have every possible chance that something can happen, so it creates a lot of excitement,” says Bigham. “At the same time, it is also a lot of pressure.”
Bigham made it through five innings without Lamar registering a hit. Someone mentioned the forbidden, jinx-ridden word—“no-hitter”—between frames, but she shook it off.
“It’s in the back of my head, but I know if I focus too much on it, then I’m not going to go perform well,” says Bigham. “I was definitely thinking about it, but I didn’t let it change anything.”
In the top of the sixth, two Lamar runners got on base on a walk and an error. Bigham remained cool.
With her dad, the coach of her travel team, and her mom, a former college pitcher who was named to the Liberty Athletics Hall of Fame in 2017, watching in the crowd, Bigham retired the next six batters in order.
She ended her debut with a 5-0 shutout win, nine strikeouts and the first solo no-hitter recorded by a Cavalier since Ally Frei in 2019.
“My team was so happy for me, and having them there was really exciting,” says Bigham. “I was nervous, but (it showed) I could come out and compete with college girls.”
Bigham has continued to prove that throughout the season. Her ERA ranks her among this season’s top 15 freshman college pitchers. She has started in more than a third of the Cavaliers’ outings and earned seven shutouts.
Last year, UVA softball came to the edge of qualification for the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2010.
Bigham is part of a strong first-year class that looks ready to end the decade-long drought, and bring this Virginia softball back to the NCAA postseason.
It is not a long drive from Bigham’s hometown of Rustburg, Virginia, to Palmer Park, but there is a significant distance between the skill level of the opponents she faces in Charlottesville and those she challenged in high school. Having old travel ball teammates like her roommate Jade Hylton, who leads UVA with 10 home runs, has helped Bigham adjust.
Growing certainty from Bigham on the mound and Hylton at the plate has helped Virginia softball put up the program’s highest single-season win total in 13 years.
“In high school and travel, if something didn’t go my way, it would tear me to pieces,” says Bigham. “But I definitely know these girls have my back, and if I give up runs, they can come back and score them … my confidence has definitely gotten better since I’ve been here.”
Jake Gelof
Baseball
Jake Gelof. Image courtesy Matt Riley / UVA Athletics Communications.
When third-year Jake Gelof fouled a ball straight back in his first at-bat against the University of Richmond on April 11, the crowd let out a collective sigh.
They, like Gelof, knew what was at stake. His 37 runs tied E.J. Anderson (1995-98) for the career record by a Cavalier, and his next homer would make school history.
In the fifth inning, Gelof returned to the plate. This time, he put the ball over the fence at far left field to become Virginia’s all-time leader in home runs during the Cavaliers’ 18-0 shutout of the Spiders.
“Once I saw it go, I was really excited,” says Gelof.
It’s a record Gelof never expected to hit during his rookie season, when he was seeing limited at-bats. It wasn’t until the 2021 postseason that he showed the Cavaliers what his swing could do.
Truist Field is famous for its long balls: Three days before UVA took the field to face Notre Dame in the 2021 ACC Tournament quarterfinals, the University of Louisville set an ACC championship record there for home runs, with seven in a single game.
It’s no wonder Gelof sent his first collegiate homer over the fence at Truist, and helped Virginia move on to the tournament’s semifinals.
“I was batting a little low in the lineup, and balls were flying for guys in the beginning of the lineup,” says Gelof. “Once I hit it, I hadn’t had that feeling in a while … that feeling of getting a ball out of the stadium, that was a great feeling.”
The key to hitting 37 more home runs in the 108 games since that day, Gelof says, has been not changing too much, staying in his approach and remaining confident each time he steps up to the plate.
That strategy helped him become a key part of the lineup as UVA went to the 2021 College World Series.
After starting every game his second season, and ranking second in the ACC with 81 RBIs, Gelof earned an invite to the 2022 USA Baseball Collegiate National Team Training Camp, where he bumped elbows with other rising stars in American baseball.
Tips from the camp’s nationally ranked players and coaches have helped Gelof lead the Cavs in RBIs and home runs, as he helps power them to their third straight NCAA postseason in 2023—and so did off-season training with his brother, Zack, who started every game for UVA from 2019 to 2021, until he was selected by the Oakland Athletics in the 2021 MLB draft.
He’s exactly where Gelof wants to be someday.
“Having such a great person to come to, who has had success at the levels that I aspire to play at … just to have someone to talk to all the time that you look up to, is very special,” says Gelof.
Gretchen Walsh
Swimming
Gretchen Walsh. Image courtesy Matt Riley / UVA Athletics Communications.
Heading into the 2023 NCAA Women’s Swimming and Diving Championships in March, Gretchen Walsh was very familiar with the American record for the 100-yard backstroke. After all, she was there, just one quarter of a second behind, when North Carolina State’s Katharine Berkoff set the 48.74-seconds record last year.
That’s why the UVA second-year knew she had broken it the moment she touched the wall and saw 48.26 on the clock.
That thrilling moment would have been unimaginable to Walsh just a few years ago, when she was a Tennessee high school student, doing backstroke just for fun. It wasn’t until she arrived in Charlottesville that coaches convinced her to compete.
Walsh says UVA swimming coach Todd DeSorbo calls her underwater abilities her “secret weapon.” She worked on maximizing it by training to hold her breath under water through punishing sets, until not breathing became second nature.
“Once I started doing that, my backstroke career really took off, and obviously now here I am with the American record,” says Walsh. “I never, going into college, thought I’d be saying that, but here I am, and I couldn’t be happier.”
Walsh’s 100-yard backstroke win, in addition to a victory in the 100-yard freestyle and a role in four of the Cavaliers’ five relay triumphs, helped the Virginia women’s swimming & diving team win its third consecutive NCAA championship on March 19.
The rest of the Cavaliers’ six individual titles went to Walsh’s training partner, senior Kate Douglass, who set American records in the 200-yard individual medley, 100-yard butterfly and 200-yard breaststroke, and Walsh’s sister, junior Alex Walsh, who claimed a title in the 400-yard medley.
Both swimmers have been instrumental in pushing Walsh since she arrived at UVA last year. Like Walsh, both have set American records. And like Walsh strives to do, both medaled at the 2020 Summer Olympics.
Now, Alex is waiting to get her Olympic rings tattoo until Gretchen gets hers, too.
Walsh has dreamed of the Olympics ever since she and Alex swam together as children. In fourth grade, when the class was told to create self-portraits, Walsh drew herself standing on the Olympic blocks.
Her performance in the 2020 Olympic trials, the summer before her first year at UVA, fell short of qualifying. She thinks that could be different in 2024.
“Since coming into UVA, having this change and this new environment, I feel a lot more confident going into next summer, in my abilities and my training, all around,” says Walsh. “I think it’s definitely feasible.”
Next season, Walsh has a long list of individual goals. She wants to hit 20.5 seconds in the 50-yard freestyle and 47 seconds in the 100-yard backstroke, both events in which she has already set the national standard. She wants to add another American record by beating 45.56 seconds in the 100-yard freestyle. It’s a lot of numbers to keep track of, but that’s no problem for a finance major and math minor.
“I always find myself counting my strokes, or my kicks, or how many breaths I have to take,” says Walsh. “I think a lot of swimming is numbers, and that’s one of the reasons I probably liked math—and swimming, too.”
Most of all, Walsh wants to help UVA become the first school to win four straight NCAA swimming & diving titles since Stanford did it in 1995.
“I think we can do it again, so we’ll see,” says Walsh. “We’re creating a legacy, and that’s one of the coolest things about this whole experience.”
On Friday, Psyche Williams-Forson joins Clarkisha Kent, author of Fat Off, Fat On: A Big Bitch Manifesto, for a discussion featuring samples of traditional Black and African American diasporic dishes. Images courtesy of the VA Festival of the Book.
One day, Psyche Williams-Forson’s daughter stopped letting her father pack Ghanaian food for her lunch. Her lunchbox smelled different than others, and she didn’t want to be made fun of. This is still a familiar scene for some American students coming from migrant families, and unless people rethink their understanding of food culture, it will be for future generations too, Williams-Forson says.
“It’s a sad story, and we’ll say, ‘Oh, that’s horrible,’ but we don’t teach our kids anything different,” she says. “The cycle repeats. It’s not just about the food. It affects the person’s whole being.” In an effort to break this cycle, Williams-Forson wrote Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America, which she will discuss at the Virginia Festival of the Book.
In an era of what the University of Maryland professor calls “food hysteria,” where people fight to define their diets by trendy labels like “organic,” “clean,” and “local,” Eating While Black argues that Black Americans remain connected to important traditions, cultures, and histories by eating foods often shamed for not fitting within these categories. Eating While Black is also the culmination of Williams-Forson’s passion for delving into African American history, which began while studying literature at the University of Virginia on her way to majoring in English, African American studies, and women’s studies.
“It occurred to me that I was really interested in the context in which these texts were emerging,” Williams-Forson says. “And in order to find out the context, the historicity, you have to do a little bit more research. You have to go outside the text itself.” As a research assistant during graduate school at the University of Maryland College Park in the 1990s, Williams-Forson found there was little information available about African American foodways. Her searches for Black food history turned up only old cookbooks with recipes for collard greens and cornbread. “I was being told the same thing: These are foods that Black folks tend to eat,” Williams-Forson says. “What I was curious about is, why were we eating these foods? And that question opened up a whole world for me.”
This journey into the history of Black Americans’ relationship with food took Williams-Forson everywhere, from the annals of the U.S. Department of Agriculture to the archives of Alderman Library. Growing up, the author had been told Black food culture descended from enslaved people being forced to eat only scraps of discarded food. Her research painted a very different picture. Williams-Forson read about ships that carried to America not only enslaved people but ingredients from their homelands, from okra to melons to black-eyed peas. She found evidence that some enslaved people were able to hunt and forage, and that they introduced new cooking techniques like deep frying to the continent while preparing these foods. She learned that even while under horrific subjugation, enslaved people began a complex and variegated food culture, one that exists today in everything from traditional Southern dishes to Louisiana Creole foods.
By expanding upon this history in Eating While Black, Williams-Forson hopes she can encourage African Americans to discuss the origins of why they are shamed, and why they shame others, for what they eat. “Will everyone agree with me? Absolutely not,” Williams-Forson says. “But at least we can have a conversation about it, and recognize that some of the things you’ve heard growing up, some of the things that you think about other people or about yourself, are actually not true.”
Psyche Williams-Forson will appear at Food and Blackness at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center on Friday, March 24.
Live Arts presents The River by Jez Butterworth, directed by Robert Chapel, and starring Caitlin Reinhard, Steve Tharp, and Christina Ball. Photo: Will Kerner.
A man catches a silver trout, which turns into a “glimmering girl with apple blossom in her hair” before fading away. Though he grows old searching for her, he will find where she has gone, pledges the narrator of William Butler Yeats’ ethereal 1897 poem “The Song of Wandering Aengus.”
This yearning poem’s lyrics open and close Jez Butterworth’s The River, a play that will turn the Live Arts stage into a fisherman’s cabin perched on a cliff above a trout-filled river, from January 20 to February 11.
What happens on this moonless night, says Director Robert Chapel, is “something akin to what one might see while watching an episode of ‘Twilight Zone.’”
Chapel, professor emeritus at the University of Virginia, led more than 50 productions as executive director of the Virginia Theatre Festival (formerly the Heritage Theatre Festival), and ran the UVA Department of Drama for more than 25 years. He says The River is like no other production he has introduced to Charlottesville audiences. “This is a very different play than they are used to me directing,” Chapel says. “I think it’s going to be fun to get their response.”
The River takes place on a single stage set, the remote cabin where fishing enthusiast The Man (Steve Tharp) brings his guest, The Woman (Christina Ball). What appears to be a simple setup is complicated by the introduction of The Other Woman (Caitlin Reinhard)—as well as the unsettling feeling that the chronology of the play is not as it first appears.
“We have found in rehearsal that the play has evolved, and the understanding of the play has evolved, as rehearsal has gone on,” Chapel says. “It’s not an easy play to decipher on the first reading.”
Ball and Reinhard bring what Chapel describes as a “different kind of energy” to each of the two diametrically opposed women, and the entire cast’s understanding of the play continues to grow alongside their characters.
“I try to be more of an editor than a director, because I was an actor once in my lifetime and I never liked a director necessarily standing over me and telling me exactly what to do,” Chapel says. “We’re all working together on this.”
Artistic Director Susan Evans introduced Chapel to The River when she asked him to return to Live Arts to direct it. He agreed before reading the play because he had already fallen in love with Butterworth’s writing while attending New York productions of The Ferryman, a journey to rural Northern Ireland during the Troubles of the 1980s, and Jerusalem, which received international acclaim for its punchy portrayal of modern-day Britain. When he picked up The River for the first time, Chapel was introduced to what he describes as a poignant and poetic new side of the playwright.
It took Chapel several read-throughs to cement his understanding of the story. “When I first read it, I gasped,” he says—but that doesn’t mean he wants audiences to spend their time agonizing over the story’s ambiguity. Butterworth’s intent, Chapel says, is for the audience to encounter The River, not solve it.
The River runs 80 minutes with no intermission, and many people will likely leave the production with questions, and maybe spend the drive home thinking it over. “You just have to play the play for its truths, and play the text, and let the audience decide what they will,” says Chapel.
When Amaka Agugua-Hamilton was growing up in Herndon, Virginia, she didn’t want to be a coach.
Long before she earned the nickname “Coach Mox” as an assistant coach at VCU, or recorded a historic inaugural season as head coach at Missouri State, or was named the sixth head coach of UVA’s women’s basketball in March, Agugua-Hamilton did not plan to be on the sidelines.
She wanted to be the first woman to play in the NBA.
Agugua-Hamilton saw herself in Charles Barkley, who muscled his way past players six inches taller to become one of the best rebounders in basketball history. At 5-foot-11-inches tall, she needed similar tenacity to earn a spot on a college roster. When she was accepted at Hofstra in the early 2000s, her dream—especially since the WNBA was founded—felt within reach.
Then, her knee gave out.
The injury sidelined her for the majority of her freshman season. She was considering transferring by the time Felisha Legette-Jack, now head coach at Syracuse, took over and shocked Agugua-Hamilton by naming her team captain as a sophomore.
“At first, I was like, ‘Are you sure? Me?’” says Agugua-Hamilton. “But she saw something in me, and it’s something that a lot of people had already brought to my attention, but I just didn’t really tap into it yet.”
Agugua-Hamilton’s injury troubles persisted throughout college. She fought through everything from stress fractures in her feet to sciatica in her back. One of her six knee surgeries forced Agugua-Hamilton to redshirt her senior year, so she spent it on the sidelines with the coaching staff.
“I started seeing how my teammates reacted to me,” says Agugua-Hamilton. “I got a lot of gratitude, and it filled me up, helping others and being a mentor to others. That’s where I started falling in love with coaching.”
Agugua-Hamilton received offers to play professionally overseas, but when her surgeon mother looked at scans of her daughter’s knees, she turned to Agugua-Hamilton and warned her she had to stop playing basketball if she ever wanted to be able to play with her kids.
“My vision of this program is the Final Fours, the Elite Eights, because that’s what I grew up knowing about UVA.” Coach Mox. Photo: Tristan Williams.
Into the thick of it
After honing her leadership skills with assistant coaching jobs at VCU, Indiana, and Old Dominion, Agugua-Hamilton worked her way up to associate head coach at Michigan State.
Then, in early 2017, head coach Suzy Merchant fainted on the sidelines during a game and took time off to recover. Suddenly, Agugua-Hamilton was an interim Big Ten coach in charge of everything from game planning to radio interviews. “My head was spinning for the first couple of weeks,” she says. “And then, I found a rhythm.”
This trial by fire ensured Agugua-Hamilton was ready two years later, when she was offered her first full-time head coaching position at Missouri State.
“People there told me, ‘You know, as a first-time head coach, it seems like this isn’t your first rodeo,’” she says. “And I think it’s all because of those experiences I had at Michigan State, so I’m grateful for that. I’m also grateful that Suzy’s in better health.”
Merchant, who still coaches Michigan State today, recovered and was able to attend Agugua-Hamilton’s wedding that May, when Agugua-Hamilton tied the knot on a romance that, like her career, blossomed beside a basketball court. She met her husband, Billy, at the San Antonio Final Four, while she was an assistant coach at Indiana and he was an assistant at Savannah State. The two now have a son—and with every lingering twinge of old injuries, Agugua-Hamilton remembers how close she came to not meeting him.
As Agugua-Hamilton prepared her family to move to Springfield in 2019, she knew she was headed for more than just her first head coaching gig. She was also getting ready to be the first African American woman coach in Missouri State history.
Some would have seen it as pressure. She saw it as an opportunity.
Her 26-4 record in 2019-20 marked the best inaugural season by a head coach in the history of the Missouri Valley Conference. “I’m a believer and a God-fearing woman, and I truly believe I was called there,” says Agugua-Hamilton. “It’s a community that’s more of a conservative community, and maybe I was able to open some closed eyes.”
Despite the heartbreak of that first promising postseason being lost to COVID-19, Agugua-Hamilton returned to lead the Lady Bears to a 16-0 conference record and the NCAA Sweet 16 in 2020-21. She hopes her legacy will not be just that she broke racial barriers, but that she excelled at her job while doing so.
“At the end of the day, I do want to represent my community, and I want to make sure women of color have a platform and get more opportunities to get jobs, and to lead, and to help grow the next generation,” says Agugua-Hamilton. “But at some point, I just want to be known as a great coach, no matter what my skin color is.”
The undefeated UVA women’s basketball team, led by Ruckersville’s Sam Brunelle, has uplifted the university community during a heartbreaking time. Photo: Tristan Williams.
Coming home
UVA athletic director Carla Williams was part of the coaching staff that took Georgia to two Final Fours and the 1996 NCAA championship, so she knows what a good coach looks like. And she knew she’d found one in Agugua-Hamilton during their first Zoom call.
“Coach Mox talked about academics first, and developing young ladies off the court first,” says Williams. “Once I realized how passionate she was about their lives outside of basketball, I already knew she was a great coach.”
When Williams extended the offer to coach at UVA, Agugua-Hamilton jumped at the chance to move her son and husband closer to extended family—and also to make the leap from mid-majors to the ACC.
It took her just two weeks to secure a high-profile commitment from Notre Dame transfer Sam Brunelle. After leading ACC freshman in scoring in 2019-20, Brunelle’s next two seasons were cut short by injuries, the last of which required intensive surgery last summer. Agugua-Hamilton and her staff have helped Brunelle through the agonizing process of relearning how to use her healing shoulder.
“I’m one of those coaches that holds kids out a little bit to make sure that they’re prepared to come back physically, but also mentally,” says Agugua-Hamilton. “Coming back from injuries is really taxing on the mental side, and that sometimes is overlooked.”
This guidance is part of why Brunelle, who first met Agugua-Hamilton as the former No. 1 overall high school recruit out of Greene County’s William Monroe High School, says Virginia’s new coach played a major role in her transfer decision. “Coach Mox has been through it as well, with her knee injuries, and she really understands where I’m coming from with the adversity I’ve had to face,” says Brunelle. “It’s really nice to have someone who understands that in the forefront of helping you with rehab.”
Last year, Virginia women’s basketball missed the NCAA tournament for the fourth straight year after winning just five of 27 games.
That’s not the UVA Agugua-Hamilton remembers while watching coach Debbie Ryan and Dawn Staley, Wendy Palmer, and Tammi Reiss play in orange and navy blue.
“I understand the program kind of went on a downward spiral the last couple of years, but my vision of this program is the Final Fours, the Elite Eights, because that’s what I grew up knowing about UVA,” says Agugua-Hamilton.
The first thing she wanted to do to jolt the Cavaliers out of this spiral was change the team culture, which she found was easier than expected. “I think I was a little bit surprised with how hard we work, and how competitive we have been from day one of getting on the court with them,” says Agugua-Hamilton. “I thought that was going to be something that I was going to have to change a little bit, just based on last year. But our kids want to win, and they work hard.”
With family culture in place, Agugua-Hamilton can focus on emphasizing her players’ versatility and athleticism with up-tempo basketball. Alongside the bulk of her Missouri State coaching staff, she pushes her seven returnees, two transfers, and two first-years through energetic practices.
Shooters rotate briskly around the floor. Defensive drills are frenetic. Agugua-Hamilton is readying her players to push the ball.
Whenever Williams stops by practice, she sees joy in everyone’s face, even through the pain. “We’ve got a long way to go, but we’ve come a long way,” says Williams. “I think that she is exactly what college athletics, women’s basketball, and UVA athletics needs, and that’s a coach who cares about the student athlete outside of their sport and is truly invested in their development as people.”
Chris Martin’s bakernobakery selections, including her paw-paw bonbons, are a huge hit at the City Market. Photo: Chris Martin.
Chris Martin has baked in cities from Chicago to San Francisco, but she has rarely found local ingredients like those in central Virginia.
That’s one reason bakernobakery, her pop-up bakeshop, boasts one of the most unique menus at the City Market.
“Sourcing ingredients is really a delight here in Charlottesville,” says Martin, creator of delicacies such as raspberry and bay leaf tres leches and whisky ginger blondies, among others. “The climate and the location are really incredible for growing a lot of produce.”
Not only do locals find inventive methods of growing non-native produce—one of Martin’s vendors keeps a greenhouse hot enough to grow citrus year-round—but the woods around Charlottesville are thick with treasures like the paw-paw fruit, recognizable by its tropical-looking vines.
The paw-paw has a flavor Martin describes as a mixture of banana, mango, and pineapple. Her version of a bostock—typically a slice of brioche soaked in simple syrup and covered with almonds—is filled with paw-paw pastry cream and paw-paw purée, then topped with crunchy nutmeg. She also gives the French pastry a Southern twist by substituting a slice of pound cake.
After sharing a city market tent with local company SoSS, Martin decided to incorporate SoSS’s small-batch hot sauce into a pastry. She folded charred onions into cream cheese filling, then added soy sauce, lemongrass and SoSS’s Burger Venom to create an explosively flavorful Danish.
Martin is currently prepping fall ingredients for holiday cookie orders. She jellies persimmons by soaking them in simple syrup for weeks. She purées regional kabocha, a light, almost floral-tasting winter squash, which pairs well with white chocolate and candied ginger. And the creamy paw-paw purée is a perfect match to the white chocolate ganache inside her hand-painted bonbons.
When customers are intimidated by these new flavors, Martin suggests starting with her apple fritters, and that’s usually enough to convince them to try more.
“Since my background is in fine dining, I’ve had a lot of exposure to different techniques and different flavors,” she says. “It allows me to expand and build a level of trust with a lot of my customers.”
