By Jeff White (jwhite@virginia.edu)
VirginiaSports.com
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — Very few coaches have experienced both sides of the rivalry that links the University of Virginia and Virginia Tech. The new head of the UVA men’s basketball program is one of them.
For seven years as a boy, Ryan Odom lived in Charlottesville and had the run of University Hall, where his father, Dave, worked as an assistant coach in the program led by Terry Holland. Odom remembers watching not only the UVA men’s team, but the women’s team coached by Debbie Ryan. Dawn Staley’s visit to Grounds last week brought back happy memories for Odom.
“I used to watch her practice pretty much every day when she was a [freshman] here,” Odom said Tuesday at John Paul Jones Arena.
After graduating from Hampden-Sydney College, where he played guard for Tony Shaver, the younger Odom followed his father into coaching. He made stops at South Florida, Furman, UNC Asheville and American before joining Seth Greenberg’s staff at Virginia Tech as an assistant coach in 2003.
It was a little awkward initially, Odom acknowledged, to work for a program he’d spent part of his childhood rooting against. But he’d left Charlottesville in 1989, when his father became head coach at Wake Forest, and that separation “made it a little bit easier,” Odom said.
He spent seven years in Blacksburg before continuing his coaching career at Charlotte. And now, more than 35 years after his father left Charlottesville for Winston-Salem, N.C., Odom is back on Grounds, leading a team that’s ranked No. 21 in the latest Associated Press poll.
𝗚𝗮𝗺𝗲 𝟭𝟯 𝗣𝗿𝗲𝘃𝗶𝗲𝘄
— Virginia Men's Basketball (@UVAMensHoops) December 30, 2025
🆚 Virginia Tech
📆 Dec. 31
🕑 2 p.m.
📍 Blacksburg, Va.
🔶⚔️🔷 #GoHoos https://t.co/rY4hJV27X4
Odo’s first ACC game with the Wahoos, as chance would have it, will be against the Hokies. At 2 p.m. Wednesday, in a game to air on ACC Network. UVA (11-1) meets Virginia Tech (11-2) at Cassell Coliseum in Blacksburg.
It’s an arena and a town Odom knows well.
“It was a fun time in our lives,” he said. “I was a young assistant coach and just kind of learning, and Seth gave me an opportunity to get into what I thought was going to be the Big East. And then it flipped pretty quickly to the ACC, which surprised us all.”
The Hokies joined the ACC in 2004, and that move “obviously turned out really well for Virginia Tech,” Odom said. “That’s changed the trajectory of the athletics program and helped the university in a lot of ways.”
His boss at American was former UVA head coach Jeff Jones, with whom he remains close, and leaving Washington, D.C., for Blacksburg “was a tough decision,” Odom said. “But it certainly was a big opportunity for me to go up a level there and have some more responsibility from a recruiting perspective. I learned a lot during the seven years there.”
He wasn’t the only one at Cassell with ties to UVA. Greenberg had been a graduate assistant on the Cavalier team that reached the Final Four in 1984, and he and Odom reconnected after Odom got into coaching.
Odom has been back to Cassell Coliseum once as a head coach. That was in 2016-17, his first season at UMBC. The Retrievers lost 87-70 to the Hokies, then coached by Buzz Williams. (Williams is now at Maryland, which UVA defeated Dec. 20 at JPJ.)
“It was good to see friends and people that I had spent a lot of time with there,” Odom said. “I think one of the cool things about when I was coaching there was the connection to the other sports, and specifically football. Our offices were side by side, and so we were together all the time.”
Frank Beamer, then the Hokies’ head football coach, “was great not only to us, but to everybody,” Odom said. “He and his wife were very welcoming and supportive. It was a fun time. Seth did a great job. He inherited a tough situation and then moved up in leagues from a basketball perspective. Going into the ACC at that time was a daunting task, but it was really helpful for the program to move into that league.”