Carla Williams took the athletics director job at the University of Virginia without having set foot on Grounds.
What she saw on her first tour of the athletics facilities almost made her pull a Rick Barnes.
“When I got here and took the tour, I’ll never forget it,” Williams said. “I saw Bronco (Mendenhall) in his office, and he’s like, Hey, what are you doing? And I said, I’m going over to see all of the facilities. He was like, Oh, boy, OK, I’d love to talk to you afterwards. And so, then I saw him afterwards, and he said, You look sick. I said, I am sick.”
Williams told that story in the first installment of a new podcast series, “Inside Virginia Athletics with Carla Williams,” hosted by John Freeman, the play-by-play voice of UVA Athletics.
ICYMI
- What does the Jim Ryan news mean for Carla Williams? I’ll tell you what it should mean
- UVA Athletics finishes 12th in 2024-2025 Learfield Directors’ Cup
- Did the UVA Football money people really give Tony Elliott $30M to build a roster?
- Scott German: Carla Williams, after losing Brian O’Connor, got her man
- We have our guy: UVA Athletics formally names Ryan Odom new hoops coach
So, this was 2017. Football was still operating out of a building that it shared with Olympic sports, with a $22.7 million budget – Virginia Tech spent $32.5 million on football that year, Clemson $46.3 million, Florida State $57.5 million.
“When I got here, we had two strength coaches for 130 guys, and everybody else in the country had five strength coaches,” Williams said. “Bronco didn’t have a full-time nutritionist just for football, and so we added a full-time nutritionist for football. And so, all of those little things that that, those things are required to build championship football programs – facilities, nutrition, strength and conditioning – all of these things come together to build a championship program.”
Priority #1 would be a football-only operations center, which finally came online last spring with the grand opening of the $80 million Hardie Operations Center, a 93,000-square-foot facility with strength and conditioning space, nutrition spaces, meeting rooms, coaches offices, video operations and sports medicine areas.
Williams was joined on the podcast by Gerry Capone, who has been a fixture within UVA Athletics dating back to the George Welsh days.
Capone talked about how the athletics department had intended the McCue Center, which opened in 1991, to be then what the Hardie Center is now, the home base for UVA Football – the problem being, the plan to build an ops center for the Olympic sports across the quad never came to fruition.
“When we first came, there was this dream of building this facility that was going to be all-football, that we would have a weight room, that when you walked in there was, you know, it was a football weight room. That weight room became everybody’s weight room,” Capone said. “And what people don’t realize is that when recruits come, and they walk into a weight room, and there’s the swimming team working out in the weight room, they look at us and say, I thought this was a football building. For some who, you know, one side of the fence is, it doesn’t make a difference, but for those young kids, it’s all about the impression you make when they when they visit, when they go to the, you know, the Alabamas of the world, they’re seeing a totally different picture, that everything is totally invested in football. And we never really had that until now.”
Capone told a fun story about Welsh sending him on the road in 1984 to visit top programs to get a sense of what the big boys had in terms of facilities and operations, and not wanting to tell Welsh, when he’d get back to Charlottesville, just how far behind the UVA Football program was.
“When I went to Alabama, they actually had a dining hall for their players, football players. Now we have one, and that’s how many years later? You’d say, well, why did it take us so long to get there? And that’s part of the problem. We are on the right trajectory, we’re just about 30 years behind, and we have a lot of time that we have to make up, and it just doesn’t come overnight,” Capone said.
“We’re starting to build something very special,” Capone said. “I think, you know, when you look at those practice fields, the stadium, things are really starting to come together. And really, when you look at our whole athletic complex, I think when athletes show up here, even football recruits, they go, Wow, this is they care about athletics in general, and now, while we walk into a building like this, football is important. Prior to this, no one, I can’t say that kids really felt that football was important.”
So, infrastructure, check.
Operations – Williams has beefed up the support staff for fourth-year coach Tony Elliott, so, check.
The money people put a huge amount of money into the coffers for NIL in the offseason, and Elliott used the largesse to land a Top 20 transfer portal class.
“We’re making strides,” Williams said. “I’d say that the ACC, you know, we probably, as a conference, need to ensure that we never forget to invest in football. Like Jerry said, it’s ongoing, like you can never feel like, Oh, we’re there, we don’t need to invest anymore in football. That’s what happened before at Virginia. So, it’s continual. You have to invest in the sport, because that sport drives the revenue for the entire department.”
Share
Chris Graham
