Bettridge Ready When Needed for Cavaliers

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

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — Sitting next to each other in the Scott Stadium stands, his girlfriend and his mother couldn’t bear to watch as Will Bettridge readied himself for the biggest kick of his life. With then-No. 8 Florida State leading Virginia 38-35 in overtime, Bettridge needed to make a 39-yard field goal to extend the game last Friday night.

“I think they were just squeezing hands the whole time,” Bettridge said this week.

His girlfriend, UVA fourth-year student Ella McCaw, later showed him a photo taken of her Oura Ring in the moment, Bettridge said. “Her heart rate was something like 150, so she was nervous.”

On the home sideline, offensive guard Noah Josey didn’t watch Bettridge’s kick, either, but not because of nerves. Josey was getting ready for the Wahoos’ next offensive series.

“I have complete faith in Will, so I knew the ball was going through the uprights,” he said.

Josey wasn’t alone. “You could feel the belief on the sideline that nobody was even thinking that Bettridge wasn’t gonna make that field goal,” Virginia head coach Tony Elliott said.

The night ended happily for the Hoos, of course. Bettridge nailed his kick, after which UVA quarterback Chandler Morris ran for a touchdown on the first possession of the second overtime. Morris then passed to wide receiver Trell Harris for a two-point conversion to make it 46-38. Virginia’s defense did the rest, ending the game with its third takeaway, and a celebration for the ages followed as jubilant fans blanketed the field at Scott Stadium.

Bettridge couldn’t resist joining in.

“That was my first time ever doing some type of field storm,” he said, smiling. “I got caught up in the moment, and I just got mauled. And I turned around and my girlfriend and my parents were right there. So it was a pretty crazy moment that somehow they were just right there in the middle of that.”

When he finally had a chance to check his phone after the game, “it was a bit overwhelming,” said Bettridge, who graduated from Gulliver Prep in Miami. “I think part of that was playing Florida State and having a lot of buddies that go to Florida State, and also a lot of buddies that go to Miami who were really just rooting against Florida State.”

Growing up, Bettridge pulled for the Hurricanes, so cheering against the Seminoles “was something that was ingrained in me … It’s always fun to beat them.”

As he lined up for his kick, the tension in the crowd was palpable. But Bettridge did his best to block out the importance of the field goal. The key, he said, is “just knowing that every kick’s the same kick. Kicking that at the end of the game, the 39-yarder, it’s the same thing as hitting an extra point to go up 7-0. It’s the same process for me. I do the same thing. Same step, same breathing, same technique. So nothing really changes on my end. The kick just has a little more significance.”

That last statement was something of an understatement, Bettridge knows. “I have looked back at the kick, and it’s definitely something I’m gonna cherish for a long time, that experience,” he said. “You can’t get too high and you’ve got to move on, but it was pretty surreal.”

As a true freshman in 2022, Bettridge made his debut in the Cavaliers’ fourth game. He handled field goals and extra points for the rest of the season and finished 7 for 10 on field goals and 12 for 14 on PATs.

His production has increased as his career has progressed, and Bettridge now ranks fifth all-time at UVA in career points, with 248.

“And he’s been through a lot,” Elliott said. “You’ve also got to take into consideration the jersey number that he wears.”

After wearing No. 17 as a freshman, Bettridge switched to No. 41 in 2023 in memory of D’Sean Perry, his good friend and former teammate. Perry, who preceded Bettridge at Gulliver Prep, was one of the three Cavalier football players shot and killed in November 2022, along with Lavel Davis Jr. and Devin Chandler, after returning to Grounds from a class field trip.

Davis, Chandler and Perry wore Nos. 1, 15 and 41, respectively.

Bettridge changed numbers with the blessing of Perry’s parents, Happy and Sean, and he still talks regularly with Perry’s mother.

Fewer than 20 players on UVA’s current roster were on the team with Davis, Chandler and Perry in 2022. Most of the players from that team have graduated or transferred, Bettridge noted.

“With this new age of the transfer portal, there’s so many guys that obviously weren’t here,” Bettridge said. “But I think Coach Elliott and the coaching staff do a really good job, especially when we had that UVA Strong game [last month], of talking about the legacies.”

Davis, Chandler and Perry are memorialized in displays inside the Hardie Football Operations Center, and players who weren’t in the program in 2022 will ask him about the slain Cavaliers, Bettridge said. “And it just feels good to talk about that, to be able to know that they can come to me and ask me questions and be vulnerable with each other and talk about my experience and just grow together, because they’re UVA Cavaliers now, so it’s a part of them.”

No. 24 UVA plays its second road game of the season Saturday. At 3:30 p.m., in a game to air on ESPN2, Virginia (4-1 overall, 2-0 ACC) meets Louisville (4-0, 1-0) at L&N Federal Credit Union Stadium.

For the season, Bettridge is 8 for 11 on field goals (and 28 for 28 on extra points). He missed from 52 yards against Coastal Carolina, from 47 against NC State and from 25 against Stanford.

Virginia posted one-sided wins over Coastal and Stanford, so Bettridge’s misses in those games weren’t costly. At NC State, however, Bettridge’s kick could have made it a one-point game in the fourth quarter. UVA ended up losing 35-31 to the Wolfpack.

“I just mishit it,” said Bettridge, whose career long is 47 yards. “I didn’t really dwell on it. That’s what I’m most proud of after a miss: just being able to bounce back.”

Drew Meyer, a former All-Big Ten punter at Wisconsin, is Virginia’s analyst for special teams and oversees the kicking specialists.

“Historically, Will’s done a really good job over his career of, after he misses, putting a string together of successful kicks,” Meyer said. “He’s also done a really good job of approaching each rep as its own individual rep, of learning from it, flushing it, moving on to being excited about the next opportunity, rather than looking at the past and dwelling on a poor performance or a poor kick and holding on to that for too long.”

As the Florida State game approached, Elliott said, he repeatedly pumped up Bettridge. Elliott said he envisioned Bettridge “kicking a 50-yarder to win this game, and I told him that throughout the course of the week. And he prepared, and he believed … The protection wasn’t great on that kick, but the operation was intact, and he hit it when we needed it.”

Right before Bettridge went out to attempt the field goal, Elliott said, “I gave him five, and, man, he hit my hand pretty hard. That let me know that he was ready to go.”

Running out with the field-goal unit, Bettridge said, “I was just proud of our offense for putting us in that situation and our defense for making some amazing plays that game. That was just the one time my number was called. All the other times were extra points with the offense making great plays. That was my opportunity. That was the biggest time that they’d called my number throughout the game, so just had to make it happen like everyone else did.”

Bettridge is on track to graduate in December, “so it’s coming up fast,” he said. He’s majoring in foreign affairs, with a minor in entrepreneurship. He had a two-week internship over the summer in New York City with former UVA football player Barry Simmons, who works in wealth management at Wells Fargo.

Wealth management is a potential career path for Bettridge. Law school is another possibility, he said. For now, he’s focused on helping to turn around a program that hasn’t had a winning season since 2019.

As memorable as the victory over FSU was for UVA, Bettridge said, he invoked the “24-hour rule. You can only be so happy for 24 hours or down for 24 hours. So on Saturday I was back to work watching film on Louisville.”

For the Hoos to continue their rise in the ACC, Bettridge said, they need to focus “on the details. We learned what we did right and what we did wrong from the [FSU] game, and you just move on and fine-tune the details and just sustain success. You can’t get too high, you can’t get too low. We just gotta be neutral and do what we do best and do what we’ve been doing for five, six months on end.”

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