Sanchez Set to Take On New Challenge

By Jeff White (jwhite@virginia.edu)
VirginiaSports.com

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — Ron Sanchez stood in the back of the John Paul Jones Arena dining hall Friday morning, watching and listening as Tony Bennett explained at a press conference why, with a new season about to start, he unexpectedly decided to retire as head men’s basketball coach at the University of Virginia.

“To be in that room, it was a lot,” said Sanchez, who’d also been at Bennett’s introductory press conference in April 2009. “For me personally, it was a lot, because it was 15 years compiled into his closing statements.”

As always, Sanchez marveled at the grace with which Bennett handled a difficult and emotionally draining situation.

“Tony couldn’t have done it any better. I told him afterwards, ‘You know, I hate that you do everything really well,’ ” Sanchez recalled with a smile Monday. “But I love that he was so honest and sincere.”

Sanchez, who returned to UVA in June 2023 for a second stint on Bennett’s staff, has a new title: interim head coach. He’s now overseeing the program that Bennett built into a national power. Under Bennett, the Wahoos went 364-136, won the ACC tournament twice, captured six ACC regular-season titles and advanced to the NCAA tournament 10 times.

In 2019, the Hoos reached the summit of college hoops, winning the NCAA title in Minneapolis.

He’s sad to see his closest friend depart the profession, Sanchez said, “but there’s some happiness as well, because you feel like somebody is where they would like to be at this point in their life after giving so much. There’s this level of gratitude and joy for what has been gifted and invested by an individual to create such a legacy at a university. There’s gratitude to the people that have supported him throughout this journey.”

At a team meeting, Bennett informed his players Thursday afternoon that he was retiring, effective immediately. To give them time to asborb the shocking news, the coaching staff canceled the practice scheduled for later that day. But the Cavaliers returned to JPJ for practice Friday afternoon, and “the guys had good energy,” Sanchez said.

“Honestly, all we did as a staff was just wrap our arms around them and love on them and let them know that what they wanted from this space is [still] here. They want the Virginia way, and that is something that is cemented into this space,” Sanchez said. “Our leadership has changed; the institution has not. The love that we have for them doesn’t change either. So we want to make sure that we brought that to the forefront of our players. I told them, ‘Before your name even appeared on Tony’s desk, we’re the ones that identified you and recommended to him that we should bring you into our basketball family. So if you want to know who believed in you first, it’s all the people that are in this room, and that’s the truth.’ ”

UVA hosted VCU in a scrimmage Saturday at JPJ. Virginia held out three players who were dealing with minor injuries: guards Isaac McKneely, Christian Bliss and Dai Dai Ames. McKneely is the Cavaliers’ top returning scorer (12.3 ppg). Moreover, center Blake Buchanan, who’s also been banged up this fall, played only a few minutes as a precaution.

Virginia’s roster includes seven newcomers: transfers Elijah Saunders (San Diego State), TJ Power (Duke), Jalen Warley (Florida State), Carter Lang (Vanderbilt) and Ames (Kansas State) and freshmen Ishan Sharma and Jacob Cofie. Bliss and Anthony Robinson were freshmen at UVA in 2023-24, but each redshirted.

“There’s a lot of new guys,” Sanchez said.

Only four scholarship players who saw time last season are still in the program: McKneely, Buchanan, Andrew Rohde and Taine Murray. With McKneely out and Buchanan limited to about eight minutes Saturday, the Hoos struggled, not surprisingly, for stretches against the Rams.

“We don’t have a lot of returners,” Sanchez said after practice Monday evening, “and we were missing a couple of them. We basically had a whole new roster of guys that hadn’t played together. So of course it was going to be a rough start with that, but in the end they settled in and they did some really good things. We are going to celebrate the things that we did well and look at the things that we need to work on and attack those. That’s what we did today.”

Sanchez and the Bennett family go back nearly a quarter-century.  In 2000-01, Sanchez was associate head coach at SUNY Delhi, a junior college in New York. His girlfriend was Tara Jones, who’s now his wife. Tara played for the Indiana women’s basketball team coached by Bennett’s sister Kathi, and Sanchez, on his visits to Bloomington, got the know then-head men’s coach Mike Davis, who offered him a position as a volunteer assistant.

Sanchez accepted. He spent two seasons at Indiana, where he earned a master’s degree in 2002. In 2003, when Dick Bennett came out of retirement to take over the moribund program at Washington State, Kathi recommended to her father that he consider adding Sanchez to his staff.

“I guess she maybe saw something in me and said, ‘Hey, maybe somebody can give this kid a chance. He’d be OK,’ ” Sanchez told VirginiaSports.com in 2009.

At Washington State, where he served as coordinator of basketball operations for three seasons, Sanchez became friends with Tony Bennett, an assistant coach on his father’s staff. And when the younger Bennett took over as head coach after the 2005-06 season, he promoted Sanchez to an assistant’s position.

“He’s as faithful and servant-oriented a man as I’ve seen,” Bennett said of Sanchez.

When Bennett left Wazzu for UVA in the spring of 2009, he brought Sanchez with him. Sanchez spent nine seasons on Bennett’s staff at Virginia—the final three as associate head coach—before leaving in March 2018 to become head coach at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

At Charlotte, Sanchez took over a team that had finished 6-23 overall in 2017-18. The 49ers finished with a winning record three times during his tenure, including a 22-14 mark in 2022-23, when they captured the College Basketball Invitational title in Daytona Beach, Fla.

“When you take over a struggling program like I did at Charlotte and try to elevate it to a level of respectability, it’s a lot of hard work,” Sanchez said. “There are some troublesome days in practice as you try to build it. I do believe that journey is going to be something that’s going to help me navigate this new space.

“How you handle hard things really is what I think is the biggest identifier of your character in this space. We want to be super competitive. We want to have a competitive culture. We want guys that really understand that the one thing that we’re not going to coach is effort and things of that nature. When you’re a young head coach, or a first-time head coach, you think that it’s philosophies and theories and spacing. You [come to] understand that some of the things are simply just playing hard, playing really hard. So I do believe that some of the things that I’ve been through in the past, whether it was with this group or my group at Charlotte, even when I was with the Dominican national team, I think those experiences will definitely help me as I travel this road.”

The Cavaliers’ staff consists of Sanchez, associate head coach Jason Williford, assistant coaches Orlando Vandross, Isaiah Wilkins and Brad Soderberg, graduate assistant Chase Coleman, athlete development mentor Kyle Guy, associate athletics director for basketball administration/operations Ronnie Wideman, strength and conditioning coach Mike Curtis, head athletic trainer Ethan Saliba and operations assistant Stelios Tzoutzis.

Soderberg has been head coach at five colleges: Loras, South Dakota State, Wisconsin, Saint Louis and Lindenwood. Like Sanchez, he has strong ties to the Bennett family. Soderberg played at Wisconsin-Stevens Point for Dick Bennett and was an assistant on the elder Bennett’s staff at Wisconsin, which reached the NCAA tournament’s Final Four in 1999-2000.

Tony Bennett was a volunteer assistant on that Wisconsin team and held the same position when the 2000-01 season started. Three games in, however, Dick Bennett unexpectedly retired, citing burnout. Soderberg was named interim head coach, and Tony Bennett became a full-time assistant.

At Wisconsin, Dick Bennett created the Pack Line defense, which became the trademark of his son’s teams at Washington State and UVA. Defensive breakdowns plagued Virginia in its scrimmage with VCU, and so there was no question what the point of emphasis would be Monday.

At the start of practice, Soderberg stood in front of a chalkboard and gave Virginia’s players a history lesson on the Pack Line, which Wisconsin used to elevate itself from a Big Ten afterthought to a Final Four team.

“Sometimes you have to let these kids know that you’re not making things up on the fly,” Sanchez said Monday evening. “Most of them are new. They don’t know what the Pack is. They have an idea of it, but we were sitting there talking [in a staff meeting] and we said, ‘Do you think they actually know what this is? Have we done a good enough job of getting them to really understand what it is that we’re trying to do?’

“And we said, ‘We could sit here and assume that they do, because we’ve talked about it and we’ve put some drills in and we’ve been working on it for, or we could just remove all the assumption and really educate them.’ So that’s what we did today.”

Defensive drills dominated the practice. “There’s no magic formula for this,” Soderberg told the players. “We’re not doing this once in a while. We’re doing this all the time until we get good at it.”

At the end of practice, Sanchez praised the players’ effort, and Williford chimed in. “That wasn’t soft,” Williford said. “That’s the Virginia basketball I know.”

With only Murray and Warley out of eligibility after the coming season, Bennett mentioned several times that the program was embarking on “a two-year plan,” with a significant payoff likely to come in 2025-26.

“That’s what’s special,” Bennett said Friday. “I’m excited. I’m excited for these players. They’ll have to grow together.”

Bennett, who plans to stay in Charlottesville, is expected to keep a low profile around the program this season, but Sanchez will continue to turn to his mentor for counsel.

“Absolutely,” Sanchez said. “To be honest, I would be a fool if I don’t literally beg Tony to journey with me, even if it’s from afar or as close as he wants to be. Tony is my closest friend. I would talk to him when I wasn’t here, so I’m definitely going to take advantage of this. And I’ll tell you this, Tony loves this place so much, and he cares about these kids so much, that I know that he will do anything and everything that we ask of him to assist us.”

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