Toburen Well Prepared for New ChallengeToburen Well Prepared for New Challenge
Jamie Holt

Toburen Well Prepared for New Challenge

The UVA men's basketball program's new director of sports performance is Luke Toburen, whose mentors include his predecessor in that position, Mike Curtis.

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

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — The staffers had already been informed, so their shock had faded, but the announcement that Mike Curtis was leaving his alma mater floored the players on the University of Virginia men’s basketball team.

Curtis, who has three degrees from UVA, including a doctorate, had been head strength and conditioning coach for Cavalier men’s hoops since 2009, when then-head coach Tony Bennett lured him back to Charlottesville. A towering figure in his profession, Curtis left Virginia last month to become head of player health and performance for the NBA’s Memphis Grizzlies.

“It was hard for the players,” Virginia forward Thijs De Ridder said after a recent practice at John Paul Jones Arena.

De Ridder, who joined the program last summer, said he and his teammates marveled at Curtis’ history “with the Cavaliers. He played here, and he was here for so many years. He’s probably the best [sports performance coach] in the world. We're going to miss him, but I think Luke is a great one.”

That would be Luke Toburen, whom UVA head coach Ryan Odom hired last month to succeed Curtis as director of sports performance. Toburen is a former Virginia graduate assistant (2020-22) who worked at JPJ with Curtis during that period.

“MC was the first big-time influence on me as a coaching practitioner,” said Toburen, who spent the past four seasons as Longwood University’s head strength and conditioning coach for men’s basketball.

“A lot of what I do, and the way that the shape that my coaching took and my philosophies and methodologies took, were highly influenced by MC and the way he sees the world through an athletic lens with regard to basketball.”

Curtis served as the Grizzlies’ head strength and conditioning coach from 2002-08. When he learned Curtis was returning to the NBA, Odom said, he wanted to find “someone who understands the UVA culture, has been here before and operates in a similar way to Mike, but at the same time had gone out on his own and done it on his own.”

Toburen, who has a master’s degree in exercise physiology from UVA, qualified on every front.

“Luke has really just hit the ground running,” Odom said. “He understands Virginia, understands what it means to be a part of this program, and understands the responsibility that he has in terms of the shoes that he has to fill, and he's done a great job.”

Curtis, in a statement, said Toburne is “one of the most gifted strength and conditioning professionals I have encountered in my 28 years in human performance. He has an uncommon combination of high technical skill, passion and caring. His familiarity with UVA Athletics, its resources and the quality of its student-athletes will allow for a seamless transition ... He is the perfect fit.”

Toburen’s boss for his first three seasons at Longwood was Griff Aldrich, who was Odom’s associate head coach at UVA in 2025-26. Aldrich left Virginia in March to become head coach at Pepperdine University, and Toburen followed him to the West Coast.

His stay in Malibu, Calif., was a short one. Toburen had been working with Pepperdine’s players for about two weeks when Odom called to see if he’d be interested in returning to UVA.

“It was the dream job for me to be able to come back here,” Toburen said.

His decision wasn’t ideal for the Pepperdine program, but Aldrich didn’t want to hold Toburen back professionally.

“Griff is just incredible,” Toburen said. “I think I'm a better coach and a practitioner and a basketball mind because of the time I got to spend with him, but he's also just been an incredible friend and mentor to me, and he’s someone who knows so much about me and my family.

“I'd always told him, I always told everybody, that the dream was either Ohio State, because I'm from Cleveland, Ohio, and that's where half of my family went, or going back at some point to UVA. And UVA always had the edge, because I'd already been a part of the program. I'd been a part of what the legacy of Virginia athletics within higher education looked like. There’s something special about it, the way in which we go about trying to do things the right way.”

For UVA’s players, De Ridder said, the transition from Curtis to Toburen has been seamless. Their philosophies are “really similar,” De Ridder said, “and of course Luke was doing an internship as a student with MC, so you see a lot of similarities in the exercises that we do. Luke’s a great guy. He knew the system. He was here before, so he knew the gym as well. So it was really easy for us as a group.”

Luke ToburenLuke Toburen

Toburen earned a bachelor’s degree in exercise science from Grove City College in Pennsylvania, where he played on the lacrosse team. After graduating from Grove City in 2016, Toburen wasn’t sure if he wanted to coach a sport or work in strength and conditioning. He did both for a while and found he “loved the strength and conditioning side way more than the sport coaching,” Toburen said.

He served as director of sport performance at Cuyahoga Valley Christian Academy in Ohio from 2018-20, working with the school’s 23 varsity teams. “And then after two years, I was like, ‘Man, I really want to do this at the highest level and really challenge myself with the highest level of athletics,’ ” Toburen recalled.

“At that point, I didn't know I wanted to do basketball. I didn't know anything like that. And so I just started cold calling and emailing every single coach I could possibly think of at the D-1 level for an opportunity.”

One of the lacrosse players he’d coached at Grove City, Luke Ritchie, had interned with Curtis at UVA and helped connect Toburen with him. Curtis told Toburen that if he got into a master’s program at UVA, he could help as a graduate assistant in the men’s basketball program.

“My wife is a teacher, and we both basically just decided to take a leap of faith and kind of say yes without really knowing where we were going to land,” Toburen said.

His wife, Michaela, landed a job at St. Anne’s-Belfield School, where she served as a dorm parent and taught and coached Kymora Johnson, now an All-America candidate on the UVA women’s basketball team. The Toburens lived on the STAB upper school campus, not far from JPJ.

“It kind of just all fell into place for us at a very volatile time during COVID,” said Toburen, who met current UVA men’s players Chance Mallory and Carter Lang when they were STAB students.

The family is thrilled to be back in Charlottesville. Toburen and his wife have two children: daughter Hadley and son Hayes.

That Curtis recommended him to Odom is gratifying to Toburen. Before his hiring was announced, Toburen said, Curtis had “talked me up to the team and basically said, ‘This is the perfect guy to replace me. A lot of what he's going to do are things that I would do.’ And so I think that the foundation for that trust was already laid because of him saying those things.”

Toburen has several GAs helping him, “and I told them day one, ‘Don’t expect me to be MC, because I'm not.’ I have a different way of viewing things. I would say MC is brilliant. I'm kind of smart, and that's not like a self-deprecating way of saying it. I use the data and it informs what I do, but I don't see things the same way that MC does as far as how technical he's able to get because of how his brain thinks. My brain just wasn't gifted in that way.”

Toburen said his strength is “being extremely relational with the guys and developing trust and then letting that kind of move into other parts.”

As a strength and conditioning coach, Toburen said, he has three main rules, “and I basically stole these from MC, I think. My No. 1 thing is do no harm. I'm not going to have an athlete do anything that's going to remotely put them in a position that's going to hurt their chances of playing on any given day.

“No. 2 is, as much as possible, make them available. The more I can make our best players available, whether that's for practices, individual sessions with coaches, games and for lifts, that puts us in the best position possible to win more games. And so that's how I can impact wins and losses, and that's kind of how I'm going to judge myself.

“And then the last thing is, once those two things are met, let's move the needle as far as [improving] their deficits. What do they need to get better at? Do they need to become faster? Do they need to become more agile? Do they need to move better and handle themselves in space and body awareness better? Do they need to get stronger? Do they need to put on size? Do they need to build robustness, because this is an injury-prone athlete that's dealt with a lot of stuff in the past? That's when you kind of get into the nitty-gritty of how we actually assess this person and then move them forward in strength and conditioning and athleticism for their sport.”

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Luke Toburen (right)Luke Toburen (right)