Kology Twins Enjoying Reunion at UVA

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

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — Lara Kology remembers it as an “aha moment.” It dawned on her, after she entered the transfer portal last spring, that the University of Virginia would offer her an experience she could not find elsewhere. At no other school would she be reunited her with her brother Griffin.

“I was like, ‘Not many people can say that they were able to go to school with their twin and both be athletes there,’ ” Lara recalled this week.

Griffin was already at UVA, studying economics in the classroom and playing close defense on the men’s lacrosse team. He’d arrived on Grounds in the summer of 2022 after spending his freshman year at the University of Richmond.

Two years later, Lara began looking for a new home after two seasons at the University of Florida, the first of which she’d missed with a knee injury. Another sibling, Kyle, had preceded Griffin on the Cavalier men’s team, so Lara already knew something about Charlottesville and UVA’s academic reputation. Moreover, she had childhood friends at the University.

And so when Sonia LaMonica, head coach of the Virginia women’s lacrosse team, reached out to Lara, things progressed quickly. Lara enrolled at UVA last summer, and she and her twin see each other regularly.

Griffin sat in the stands at Klöckner Stadium on Wednesday night and saw his sister, a starting defender, help the UVA women close the regular season with a 19-9 rout of Virginia Tech. Lara will be there Saturday afternoon to see the UVA men host Lafayette at 1 p.m. in their penultimate regular-season game.

“I think this has just been such an awesome experience for both of us to have grown separately and been able to come back together,” Lara said. “From a family perspective, it’s been so awesome. I definitely say that I do appreciate this time in our relationship more because of this experience that we’ve had together.”

Kyle, who graduated from the McIntire School of Commerce, started as a close defenseman on two NCAA title teams (2019 and 2021) at Virginia. Coming out of Chatham High School in New Jersey, Griffin might well have followed his brother to UVA, but the interest wasn’t reciprocated.

“I would see [Virginia coaches] on the sidelines for some club summer tournaments,” Griffin said, “and they were probably looking at me just because my brother was on the team. I think it was more like due diligence that they had to do.”

With no offer from UVA, Griffin chose UR, where he made an immediate impact. As a freshman defenseman in 2022, he helped the Spiders upset the Cavaliers 17-13 and was named to the All-Southern Conference second team. Richmond won the Southern Conference title and advanced to the NCAA tournament that spring.

At the end of that school year, however, Griffin decided he wanted a different college experience, and he entered the transfer portal. That gave UVA head coach Lars Tiffany an unexpected second chance.

“It was not smart of me when I didn’t recruit Griffin Kology out of high school,” Tiffany said. “It’s so much easier as a coach when you miss on a recruit to say, ‘Oh, I didn’t know about him.’

“I can’t say that about Griffin Kology. We had Kyle, obviously, and so now we were looking at the little brother. We watched him a bunch and saw some good things but just weren’t sure. We hesitated. We don’t take him. Then we play against him his freshman year and Richmond beats us, and he’s guarding [All-America attackman] Connor Shellenberger.”

Tiffany laughed. “That’s one of those moments where you look yourself in the mirror like, ‘Boy, did we screw that one up in the recruiting.’ So the moment Griffin shows up in the transfer portal, my eyes light up, because now I’ve got a chance to erase a big mistake I’ve made. Fortunately, we were able to erase that mistake.”

Griffin started three games in 2023 and two in 2024, helping the Hoos advance to the NCAA tournament’s Final Four each year. He’s started every game this season.

“He is our sledgehammer,” said Tiffany, who oversees the Cavaliers’ defense. “He is the defenseman on our end of the field who will knock the shooter to the ground. He will lay people out in the crease and send a direct message that if “you come through here, you’re going to get knocked down after you take that shot.’ Every defense needs someone like that, and he is definitely our sledgehammer.

“He’s also really high IQ. He’s quiet off the field, but on the field he’s doing so much communicating for us.”

The twins were born in October 2002 in Summit, N.J., with Griffin entering the world 32 minutes before Lara. They grew up near Summit in the neighboring town of Chatham, about 25 miles west of New York City.

“We were very close,” Griffin said. “Lara had some injuries, so that kind of set her back a little bit. But we kind of did everything together, took the same classes together.”

Lara said: “We were always together. We were in the same friend group from elementary school on through high school.”

Theirs is an athletic family. The twins’ sister, Regan, swam at Harvard, and their mother, Gail Kology, is a cousin of former UVA men’s basketball great John Crotty.

Griffin said he met Crotty years ago on the Jersey Shore but knew nothing about his basketball exploits “until my mom and my grandma kind of told me the whole story.”

As a 10^th-grader, Lara tore her ACL, an injury that involved a long rehabilitation period and set her recruitment back.  She and Griffin graduated from high school in 2021, after which he headed south to Richmond. Lara, meanwhile, took a gap year before enrolling at Florida. Living at home, she took college courses and coached with her club team in 2021-22.

Lara enrolled at Florida in the summer of 2022, only to miss the 2023 season after tearing her other ACL. In 2024, she played in every game and helped the Gators advance to the Final Four. Florida’s second-round game last year, coincidentally, was against UVA at Klöckner Stadium, and Griffin was there to cheer on his sister.

By the postseason last year, Lara said, she had decided to enter the transfer portal but hadn’t begun weighing her options. When she did so, Virginia made sense for multiple reasons, not the least of which was Griffin’s presence in Charlottesville. They’d talked often on FaceTime from their respective campuses, and “we were like, ‘Wow, it would actually be really cool to spend [a year] of college together,’ ” Lara said.

LaMonica, who was head coach at Towson University when Lara was coming out of high school, was delighted to add her to Virginia’s 2025 roster. Lara has started every game this season for the Hoos, who are ranked No. 9 nationally heading into next week’s ACC tournament.

“She plays with tenacity,” LaMonica said. “She’s the type of player that lets her opponent feel her. She’s not afraid to be physical and get out and really play some physical defense. A loose ball, she’s going after it. There’s no hesitation. She plays with great instincts, and she’s done a great job clearing the ball for us, too. We need our defenders to be able to handle pressure and use their speed. She’s doing that really well.”

That Lara was already familiar with the University accelerated her transition to her new team. It helped, too, “that our group here is so very welcoming, so inclusive,” LaMonica said. “She settled right in very quickly, and the friendships have blossomed. You can see it from the outside.”

Even as a newcomer on the team, Lara has taken on a leadership role, LaMonica said. “She’s really great at pumping up her teammates and helping the younger players, and how she delivers it is, I think, is really remarkable. She’s just got a great way about her and how she communicates. She comes from a really encouraging, positive standpoint, but she’s got an intensity to her, because she’s definitely a fierce competitor.”

Lara is majoring in sociology, with a minor in entrepreneurship through the McIntire School of Commerce. She’s on track to graduate next spring but would be eligible to play for the Hoos again in 2027.

“I’ve definitely thought about it more since I’ve been at UVA,” Lara said. “I think that I’ve really found my love for lacrosse again since being here, and I’ve adapted to the style of play that the coaches foster in this team. I’ve gotten really close to the girls on this team and they make it so hard to even think about leaving.”

Griffin will be among the UVA players honored in a pregame Senior Day ceremony Saturday. After graduating next month, he plans to join his brother in New York and work in investment banking. Of his decision to transfer to UVA, Griffin said he “definitely would follow the same path again.”

He’s thrived as a Cavalier, in part because of Tiffany’s coaching style, Griffin said. “Coach Tiffany always wants us to be loose and relaxed, but when it’s actually time to work hard, we do, which I love, I love that balance.”

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