Family Bragging Rights at Stake at JPJFamily Bragging Rights at Stake at JPJ

Family Bragging Rights at Stake at JPJ

At 6 p.m. Saturday, No. 23 UVA meets former ACC rival Maryland at John Paul Jones Arena. The Cavaliers' director of operations is Kelsey Knoche, whose father, Chris, is the Terrapins' radio analyst.

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

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — The visiting radio crews no longer sit courtside for men’s basketball games at John Paul Jones Arena, and so Kelsey Knoche won’t see her father, Chris, when she looks to her right Saturday night.

“It’ll be harder to make eye contact with him up top,” Kelsey said, “which is probably a good thing.”

The Knoches don’t often find themselves on opposing sides, but that’ll be the case when No. 23 UVA (9-1) hosts Maryland (6-5) at JPJ. Kelsey is in her first year as Virginia’s director of operations, and Chris is in his 26th year as the analyst on radio broadcasts of Maryland games.

That’s not the only Knoche-related storyline in this match-up of former ACC rivals. Kelsey, who grew up in Northern Virginia, served as a ball girl at Terrapin home games in the early 2000s and later attended (and graduated from) Maryland. She still hasn’t forgiven her parents for not letting her attend the Terps’ final game at Cole Field House, a 112-92 win over Virginia on March 3, 2002.

The game started at 9 p.m., which was too late for someone her age, her parents decided.

“The lines you draw are arbitrary, I suppose, but I drew a line there and didn't let her go,” Chris said. “And she’s still chafed about that.”

Kelsey’s boss at UVA, Ryan Odom, lived in Charlottesville for seven years as a boy. Odom’s father, Dave, was an assistant coach on Terry Holland’s staff, and Ryan spent many happy hours in the company of players like Ralph Sampson, Jeff Jones, Jim Miller and Ricky Stokes.

“How Coach Odom talks about the guys who were here when he was a kid is how I feel about a lot of those guys [at Maryland],” Kelsey said, “like Steve Blake and Juan Dixon. There are multiple pictures of me as a kid with Steve Blake.”

Before leaving in 2021 to become director of operations and external relations for Odom at Utah State, Kelsey spent 10 years working for head coach Mark Turgeon in the Maryland men’s basketball program: the first four as a student operations assistant and the next six, after her graduation in 2015, as assistant coordinator.

Her ties to her alma mater, then, run deep, and she’s heard from Maryland partisans this week about the game at JPJ. But it’s been five-plus years since she left College Park, Md., and that can be an eternity in college athletics.

“I think the big thing now is I've been gone for so long,” Kelsey said.

Maryland has changed head coaches twice since she left in 2021, Kelsey noted, “and so there are so few people left in the department from when I was there. But I've heard from the people who are. I've heard from donors. I've heard from some of those folks and just kind of my general group chat of people that I used to work with.”

When UVA and Maryland announced in September 2024 that they would meet four times this decade—in Charlottesville in 2025-26 and 2027-28 and in College Park in 2026-27 and 2028-29—Kelsey was director of operations for Odom at VCU, and the news didn’t affect her personally.

But when Odom left VCU for UVA after the 2024-25 season, bringing most of his staff with him to Charlottesville, the renewal of the rivalry took on new meaning for the Knoches.

“It was definitely one of the first things that crossed my mind,” Kelsey said.

“It just meant a little more trash talk,” Chris said, laughing.

Maryland joined the Big Ten in 2014-15—Kelsey’s senior year of college—and this will be the programs’ first meeting since Nov. 28, 2018, when UVA won 76-71 in College Park. The series dates back to Jan. 24, 1913, when Virginia defeated Maryland 65-1 in Charlottesville, and they’ve met more than 180 times in all.

“I think that the whole notion of border wars in college, you don't see them anymore,” Chris said. “I’m all for the resumption of the rivalry.”

The Wahoos have won eight of their past nine games with the Terps, a stretch that started late in the 2010-11 season.

“My actual tenure working at Maryland was very much dominated by Virginia,” Kelsey said.

Kelsey Knoche (center)Kelsey Knoche (center)

Chris Knoche, who played for Gary Williams at American University in Washington, D.C., later spent seven seasons as head coach at his alma mater. His daughter, though, never seriously considered following her dad into coaching.

“I love basketball,” Kelsey said. “I loved playing. I understand the game. But I don't see it at that level that coaches do. That's just a little bit higher, and it’s too much for me. I don't have much interest in that.”

Growing up around basketball, Kelsey couldn’t help learning about the sport. “Just being in the car with me,” her father said, “going to Maryland games where I would be on the phone doing a radio interview or talking to the other radio teams or coaches about Maryland and the personnel and what they run and things like that. And I think there's a certain amount of osmosis that comes with those car rides. When you're young like that, you just sort of absorb all that.”

Chris was still at American when Kelsey was born, “but she would have no recollection of me coaching [there],” he said. “In fact, the only recollection she would have of me coaching would be of me coaching her travel teams and her AAU teams, which I did. And I went into it begrudgingly, and it was probably the most fun I ever had coaching basketball. She's got some stories, very few of which are actually true. She recollects—or she will tell you that she remembers—me getting thrown out of a game. I don't remember that at all.”

Her father “started coaching us when I was in fifth grade,” Kelsey said. “So he coached fifth through eighth grade. He won coach of the year when I was in fifth grade, and then I think all of the other coaches in the league figured out what he used to do. And they were like, ‘Wait, we shouldn't have voted for him.’ But it was a lot of fun. There were definitely nights where we came home from practice not speaking to each other. It was an adjustment for him coaching girls.”

The team was called the Turnpike Terps.

“My friends still tell stories and laugh about things my dad did,” Kelsey said, “and the biggest story that we disagree on is when he was ejected from a summer league game. I remember it like it was yesterday. I couldn't tell you the name of the gym, but I could tell you what it looked like. I could tell you what happened, all of that. It was toward the end of the game, so the [official] was like, ‘You're out.’ ”

Kelsey, who played basketball through her junior year at Annandale High School, said her dad “definitely taught us all some new words. You just can't turn it off. It's just how he is. I still have to convert them, but I have some old VHS tapes of him coaching those teams. We watched them a couple years ago. It's funny just to watch him on the sidelines. You can't turn it off when you coach, and so it's so serious.”

Kelsey met Odom when he was head coach at UMBC and would bring his sons to summer basketball camps at Maryland.

“I ran all of our registration, all the back-end stuff,” she said, “and so we would always talk and go through everything. He was just a super nice guy. This was probably three summers in a row, but it was never one of those things where when I was talking to him I was thinking that he might give me a job some day. He was coach at UMBC, and I was at Maryland.”

In July 2021, however, one of Kelsey’s former colleagues called to see if she would be interested in working as director of ops for Odom at Utah State. “I was like, ‘Where’s Utah State?’ ” she recalled, laughing. “That was my first reaction.”

When she spoke about the position with Odom, he invited her to visit the campus in Logan, Utah. She figured she had nothing to lose. “I was just at a point where there was nowhere for me to go at Maryland. Or as my dad told me when I was debating it, I was dating a guy who wouldn't propose. So I ended up going out there, and it was beautiful. I mean, unbelievable.”

Professionally, “it was probably a no-brainer, but I debated it,” Kelsey said. “There were a lot of agonizing days of back and forth, and I asked Coach for some extra time multiple times.”

Everyone she talked to about Odom “had really positive things to say about him,” Kelsey said, and she took a leap of faith and accepted the position. “Once I committed to it, I think I probably felt a little bit better than I did in the beginning of the decision period. But ultimately, I would have never guessed that taking that job would lead me to two jobs in my home state. That part's crazy.”

After two seasons at Utah State, Odom and most of his staffers moved to VCU, where his first team went 24-14 and his second finished 28-7.

For Chris Knoche, a basketball lifer, it’s rewarding to see his daughter working with a coach for whom he has such great respect.

“I met Ryan initially when he was on Jeff Jones' staff at AU,” Chris said, “and obviously, I've known Dave, his father, for a much longer time than that. But Ryan and I crossed paths.”

When Odom’s UMBC teams played Maryland, “I would interview him for our pre-game show and things like that,” Chris said. “It’s funny. [Last weekend] I was talking with Dusty May from Michigan in the Michigan locker room, and I had the same vibe from Dusty May that I get from Ryan Odom. They are both refreshingly human for college basketball coaches. They've got the right perspective, and they certainly have the right command.”

As for his daughter, “I think that it's really cool the job she's got,” Chris said. “She's one of the select few women in the country who have positions like this. And I know I'm not objective, but she's incredibly capable.”

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