By Jeff White (jwhite@virginia.edu)
VirginiaSports.com
CHARLOTTESVILLE — As Sunday gave way to Monday, additional details continued to emerge about the shooting that took the lives of three University of Virginia students and injured two others on Grounds.
The news that football players Devin Chandler, Lavel Davis Jr. and D’Sean Perry had been killed after returning from a field trip rocked every part of the University community. The men’s basketball team gathered virtually on a Zoom call Monday morning to discuss the situation. After UVA’s game against Northern Iowa, scheduled for that night at John Paul Jones Arena, was canceled, the team gathered at the home of head coach Tony Bennett and his wife, Laurel.
“The best thing we did was get together,” associate head coach Jason Williford said from Las Vegas, where the 16th-ranked Wahoos will play in the Continental Tire Main Event this weekend. “We needed to be around each other on Monday when we got that news. We just told the guys, ‘If you need to talk, we’re here.’ ”
Later Monday night, the players headed to the South Lawn for the student-led vigil. They returned to JPJ for practice on Tuesday morning.
“The mood was somber, and guys were noticeably more quiet than normal,” Williford said. “But I think for them, and I can just speak personally, anything that happens like this, a lot of times your sport and being with your teammates becomes the outlet. And so I think they used that as their outlet and tried to be somewhat normal and get back into whatever a normal routine is now. And I think being able to be on the floor allowed them, at least for those two hours, to not have to focus and deal with what’s going on and give them a little bit of a reprieve from that.”
Bennett said: “It’s been really sad and really hard, and a number of our players are close with the football team, and specifically with those guys [who were killed]. We’ve talked about trying to be together and the things that are going on. I just keep thinking about that football program, those players and those coaches, and then the families and what they’re going through.”
The first UVA team to return to competition after the shootings was women’s basketball. In Chicago, the Cavaliers rallied to defeat host Loyola 68-62 on Wednesday night.
“This was difficult,” Amaka Agugua-Hamilton, who’s in her first year as Virginia’s head coach, said afterward.
“Our community’s hurting. Our university is hurting. Our athletic department is hurting. Our football team is hurting, all those student-athletes and our players. We had several players that were very close to those three amazing young men, and just for us to have the courage to come out here and compete and band together and fight through adversity is very inspiring.”
Her players “were emotional in warm-ups,” Agugua-Hamilton said. “They were emotional all day, but they wanted to play, so I stood behind them. I wanted them to be able to make that decision and they wanted to play to honor [Chandler, Davis and Perry], and I think they did that tonight.”
The Cavaliers wore patches on the sleeves of their shooting shirts with the numbers 1, 15 and 41—those of Davis, Chandler and Perry, respectively—in hearts above the words “UVAStrong,” and they’ll continue to do so for the rest of the season.
Bennett’s team will pay tribute to the fallen players in similar fashion.
“I just want to remember those guys,” Williford said. “They were taken way too soon. Lavel, I knew. I had several interactions with him. My boys knew him. He was like a gentle giant. That one hit me hard.
“Nothing prepares you for these situations. There’s no handbook for this. But if you’ve got faith, you’ve got to rely on that to get through this, and we’ll get through. We’re going to be UVA Strong.”