Henry Follows Winding Road to Charlottesville

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

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — Growing up as an avid hoops fan in the Washington, D.C., area, Matt Henry followed the Big East closely and pulled for the powerhouse John Thompson oversaw at Georgetown University. The ACC program down the road at the University of Virginia? Not so much.

“My clearest recollection of Virginia basketball, interestingly enough, is not Virginia men’s basketball, but Virginia women’s basketball,” Henry recalled.

When he was 10 or 11 years old, Henry said, he took a day trip to Charlottesville with this family. “We were just driving around Grounds, and we parked at University Hall and walked in, and the women’s team was practicing in there. It was that incredible era of UVA women’s basketball where they were one of the best programs in the country, and I remember standing up on the top of U-Hall with my dad and watching them practice for 15 minutes.”

Some 35 years later, U-Hall is only a memory, and John Paul Jones Arena is the home of UVA’s basketball programs. And that’s where Henry can be found these days.

He’s an assistant on head men’s coach Ryan Odom’s first staff at Virginia. They’ve been colleagues since the summer of 2018, when Odom hired Henry as an assistant coach at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.

“Matt Henry is somebody that has been a steady hand for me personally and somebody that is a great basketball coach, a great communicator, a hard worker,” Odom said. “He’s excellent in-game, in terms of offering timely suggestions, tremendous in pregame preparation in getting our team ready for the opponent, excellent in player development. And so he’s just a well-rounded coach.”

When Henry went to work for Odom, UMBC was about five months removed from its historic upset of UVA in the NCAA tournament’s first round.

“Do not give me any credit for that, or, in this town, don’t give me any blame for that,” Henry said, laughing.

In 2021, Henry went with Odom to Utah State. Two years later, most of Odom’s staff, Henry included, followed him back across the country to Virginia Commonwealth University.  After two successful seasons in Richmond, Odom was hired at UVA, and Henry found himself at a school to which he hadn’t considered applying as a senior at Sidwell Friends in D.C.

“I was looking for a smaller school,” Henry said, “and, full disclosure, I was a bad student with good test scores at Sidwell Friends. I was more of a theoretical student than in practice.”

He enrolled at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. As a sophomore, Henry joined the Trinity men’s program as a student assistant, starting his slow, steady ascent in the profession he’d long wanted to pursue.

“I knew I wanted to be a coach from the time I was in middle school,” said Henry, a Maine native who moved to Alexandria with his family when he was 4. “That’s all I ever really wanted to do, for better or for worse, and I haven’t been able to shake the bug.”

Before Henry had his driver’s license, his father would take him to high school games in the D.C. area. “Once I was able to drive and I had access to a car, I would drive all over to see any game,” Henry said, “and I would do that in the summers when I was in college.”

He smiled. “In some ways I haven’t progressed as a man or a person very much. I’m still going to basketball all summer long, but I just enjoy going to games, and I have since I was 12, 13.”

After graduating from Trinity in 2001, he spent three years as a men’s assistant at his alma mater. “As a Division III assistant coach, it’s part-time pay and full-time work,” Henry said. “At least the way I wanted to do it was full-time work.”

To supplement his meager income, Henry took a job at a golf course in San Antonio. “At the time it was one of the best courses in the state of Texas,” he said. “So everybody else on the cart staff was working there because they wanted the free golf, and I was working there because the head pro was buddies with [Trinity’s] AD and gave me a schedule where I could work the mornings. I’d get up at 5:30 in the morning, go set up the range, set up the carts, all that. And then around 1 o’clock or so, I’d go do the basketball stuff.”

Henry returned to the D.C. area in 2004 to become director of basketball operations at Georgetown, where he spent six years on head coach John Thompson III’s staff.

“So I went from a part-time Division III assistant to a couple years later being on the bench for a Final Four team and winning Big East championships and stuff like that,” Henry said.

His first job as a Division I assistant coach was at Mount St. Mary’s in Emmitsburg, Md. He spent two seasons there, finishing his second as the Mountaineers’ acting head coach. Then came a year of unemployment, during which Henry went to great lengths to stay connected to the college game. He could have taken another job in basketball operations, but he wanted to coach.

“And so that year I helped out with some AAU stuff,” Henry said. “I worked out a few kids who ended up being Division I players. I ran a high school tournament for a high school coach who was a friend. I just tried to like act like I was coaching. I went to NBA practices, college practices, college games.”

One of his visits in the summer of 2012 was to JPJ, where Tony Bennett was preparing his UVA team for its upcoming trip to Europe.

“I kept this calendar of all the different things I did,” Henry said. “I didn’t want anybody to look at me and say, ‘You’ve been out for a year, you haven’t really been involved in this.’ ”

His efforts paid off. In 2013, Henry landed an assistant’s job at Saint Peter’s University in New Jersey. He spent five years at Saint Peter’s and then several months at Marist University before joining Odom’s staff at UMBC, where Henry and his wife, Lee, who’s from High Point, N.C., were much closer to their families.

The Henrys have three children: sons Will, 10; Gus, 7; and Robbie, 5. They live near Grounds off Rugby Road, and Henry rides his bicycle or walks to JPJ most days.

Odom calls Henry a “tremendous family man,” and there’s a family vibe at JPJ, too. Many of Odom’s staffers have been with him since his tenure at UMBC, if not longer. They trust Odom, Henry said, and Odom trusts them.

When the group was leaving UMBC for Utah State, Henry recalled, “Ryan said to us, ‘I’ve got a lot of people telling me you need this on your staff, you need that on your staff, when you’re moving out to a new region. I’m going to have an entirely new roster; I don’t need an entirely new staff.’ ”

In this era of player movement, staff stability can be a significant asset, Henry said. “It’s no longer, ‘Hey, we’re going to get a new job at school X and we’re going to inherit eight great players.’ It doesn’t exist anymore. You’re not only going to have new players for the coach, but you’re going to have new players for the university. So I think it certainly helps in transition, just knowing each other and being able to slide into certain roles pretty quickly.”

Henry and fellow assistant coach Darius Theus have overseen the installation of Odom’s defensive principles. The Wahoos will press at times, and they no longer play the Pack Line defense that was the trademark of Bennett’s teams. But Odom’s teams at VCU were strong defensively, and excelling at that end of the court is a priority for the Hoos.

“I think the biggest thing is just having adaptability and having a defensive structure that is right for the group and that’s right for your opponent as well and that can operate in failure mode,” Henry said. “You’re going to make mistakes, you’re going to have breakdowns, and when things break down you’ve got to be resilient.”

The challenge in this era, Henry said, is determining what is “the best defense we can put together using the least amount of time to do it. And I think that’s the balance of coaching and the art of coaching: How do we get exceptional at that while committing the least amount of time?

“And that’s not in any way a commentary on what’s happened in the past. For us, it’s the same thing with offense. There’s a cost benefit to spending too much time on anything. You’re trying to balance [offense and defense], generally speaking, and when they were hitting these incredible heights previously here [under Bennett] they had an awesome offense and awesome defense. So we’re always trying to find that balance of the equilibrium of getting those things aligned, where you’re putting in as much time as needed, but no more.”

His boss is grateful that Henry is still by his side.

“He certainly is ready to be a head coach,” Odom said. “If that time comes for him, or when that time comes for him, he’ll be ready. But right now I know he’s really excited about UVA and the opportunity to raise his family here in Charlottesville and compete at the highest level.”

When he’ll take over his own program, Henry said, is “kind of the million-dollar question. Here’s what I do know: I’m not really interested in moving any time soon. We’ve been moving a lot. My 7- and 10-year-olds, they’re on house five, and my 5-year-old is on house four.”

That said, Henry is realistic.

“The challenge of this business is there’s a finite number of jobs,” he said. “It’s not one of these things where the economy’s good and there’s more head coaching jobs, or the economy’s bad and there’s less. There’s the same number. So you can’t really put yourself in a position where you’re like, ‘Well, I’m not interested.’ You have to be interested when they’re interested in you.

“But I think, generally speaking, my approach career-wise has been: I do the best job I can for these current players, I do the best job I can for my boss and for the institution, and we win games and good things happen. I think if you try and go the other way, you’re generally worrying about things you can’t control. What we can control right now is how good of a job we do with these young people and how good of a job we do for Ryan and how good of a job we do for the University of Virginia.”

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