Lattimore Looking to Reach New Heights at UVA

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

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — She has yet to dunk in a University of Virginia basketball game, but Latasha Lattimore remains confident she’ll reach that milestone soon.

“I just need that one steal,” Lattimore said at John Paul Jones Arena. “I play at the top of the zone, so once I get that one steal, I’m gonna take off. It’s coming.”

In the meantime, the 6-foot-4 Lattimore is contributing in multiple other ways. At 11.8 points per game, she’s the Cavaliers’ second-leading scorer, and she’s shooting 53 percent from the floor. She leads Virginia in rebounds (8.7 per game) and blocked shots (1.8 per game).

UVA plays its penultimate non-conference game Tuesday night. At 7 o’clock, Virginia (6-5) hosts Maryland Eastern Shore (4-7) at JPJ.

This is Lattimore’s first season at Virginia, and she “still hasn’t completely tapped into her potential,” Amaka Agugua-Hamilton said Monday, but “I think she’s starting to realize how good she can really be, and just her confidence is growing. So I think she’s starting to get there, for sure. She’s being more consistent. I think she’s producing more than she probably ever has, but in my eyes I just know the ceiling is even higher.”

The Wahoos’ head coach has been charting Lattimore’s progress for years. Then an assistant at Michigan State, Agugua-Hamilton remembers seeing Lattimore dunk as a middle-schooler in Toronto.

“I thought that was crazy at her age,” said Agugua-Hamilton, who’s in her third season at UVA. “At that point she was raw, but you knew she was gonna be a player. She was playing above the rim, finishing stuff, blocking people’s shots. We knew that she was gonna be a pretty special talent.”

Agugua-Hamilton left Michigan State in the spring of 2019 to become head coach at Missouri State. She figured Lattimore was destined for a Power Five program, so Agugua-Hamilton didn’t try to sell her on Missouri State. She continued to monitor Lattimore’s career, though, and when Lattimore entered the transfer portal after the 2023-24 season, Virginia reached out to her quickly.

Lattimore narrowed the list of schools she was considering to three: Tennessee, Mississippi and Virginia. In the end, her relationships with Agugua-Hamilton (who goes by Coach Mox) and UVA assistant coach Alysiah Bond, whom Lattimore also remembered from her schoolgirl days in Toronto, were the deciding factors.

A long phone conversation with Bond, who’d worked with Agugua-Hamilton at Michigan State and Missouri State, “made me realize that I’d found a school that obviously knew my game and a coaching staff I felt like I can trust,” Lattimore said. “They felt like family. Coach Mox literally felt like a mom away from my mom. So I felt like I was at home.”

Lattimore, who turns 22 next month, isn’t the only Canadian playing basketball at UVA this season. The freshmen on the Cavalier men’s team include Ishan Sharma, who’s also from her hometown, and “it’s like everybody in Toronto knows each other once you play basketball,” Lattimore said, smiling.

Sharma remembers seeing Lattimore play in Toronto. Lattimore graduated from Royal Crown School, whose rivals include Fort Erie International Academy, which Sharma attended.

“She was tall, athletic, and she played hard,” Sharma said.

As a high school senior, Lattimore tore her right ACL, but she was still a sought-after recruit. She signed with Texas, and as a freshman in 2021-22 she played in all 32 games for a team that reached the NCAA tournament’s Elite Eight.

Off the court, however, Lattimore said, she “began to just get a feeling that maybe this isn’t home. That’s natural for a lot of people, but for me, I like to feel at home, away from home. It doesn’t matter where I am. So I was losing that feeling.”

And so she entered the transfer portal in the spring of 2022. Lattimore ended up at the University of Miami, whose head coach was Katie Meier.

“As soon as I met her, I just could feel that I could trust her,” Lattimore said.

Had Meier remained with the Hurricanes, Lattimore would still be in Coral Gables, Fla. “To this day we still speak,” Lattimore said. But Meier retired last spring, and Lattimore began searching for a new home. She found it in Charlottesville, whose slower pace agrees with her.

“I felt like this environment was just quieter,” said Lattimore, who lives with teammate Edessa Noyan.

Another serious injury marred Lattimore’s Miami career. She started her sophomore season well, posting a double-double (25 points and 10 rebounds) against Boston University, only to tear her right ACL on Dec. 1, 2022.

Having pushed through a grueling rehabilitation in high school, Lattimore knew what lay ahead for her. A torn ACL can be demoralizing, “because you don’t get to play basketball, you don’t get to work out, and you’re basically just a log sitting in there rehabbing every single day,” Lattimore said.

“But going into rehab, you have to make sure that your mindset is you want to get back, you want to get better. Every day I did have moments where I was just like, ‘What is happening to me?’ But at the same time, you’ve got to stay strong. So my second time hurting myself, I did lose a little confidence, but as I remembered the first time and how it went, I was like, ‘I know what I’m doing. I know what it takes to get out of this. I know what it takes for me to gain my confidence again.’ ”

Once she was cleared to play again, Lattimore appeared in 27 games for the Hurricanes in 2023-24, with six starts. She averaged 5.6 points and 3.1 rebounds per game and led Miami in blocked shots, with 34.

She arrived at UVA with two years of eligibility remaining, and she’s one of seven newcomers in the program. Lattimore, who wears jersey No. 35, is starting to take on more of a leadership role on the team, Agugua-Hamilton said, and she’s growing more comfortable on the court with every passing game.

“So I think she’s in a great place,” Agugua-Hamilton said. “We just need her to be consistent, stay focused, and I think you’re gonna continue to see her grow.”

Lattimore, who’s majoring in women, gender and sexuality, has been struck by the support the Cavaliers receive in Charlottesville.

“The fans definitely support you wherever you are,” Lattimore said. “You can be in Walgreens and somebody will walk up to you and talk to you. And the hospitality here is amazing. It’s so good down here. This is an environment where I feel like I’m at peace, and moving forward I definitely know as we start winning and we start pulling things together, the [support] is going to expand way more.”

The Hoos have struggled more than expected in non-conference play, but Lattimore said she’s confident that “once we put all of our pieces together and everybody finds their role, we’re gonna be fine.”

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