UVA Basketball needs a GM: And that GM needs to be Wally Walker

UVA Athletics needs to create a GM position for the UVA Basketball program, and, no, Ralph Sampson should not be anywhere near that job.

We don’t need a name; we need somebody who can build a front office on the model of what they have in the NBA, NFL and MLB.

Think: Wally Walker, the former UVA hoops star and Stanford MBA who ran the Seattle SuperSonics for 12 years as that franchise’s GM, president and CEO.

Walker returned to UVA in 2023 as the deputy athletics director under Carla Williams, and there was thought when he came back that he may be in line to succeed Williams as the AD in the event that Williams might move on.

Williams signed an extension in December, and is now under contract through 2030.

It would only make sense to have somebody like Wally Walker with the skill and acumen to be running the whole department to be in charge of creating a new basketball administration operation from the ground up.

You might think, at first glance, that a GM would be akin to a glorified recruiting coordinator, but if you set the job up that way, you’re doing everybody a disservice.

Recruiting in the NIL/transfer portal era isn’t what it was pre-2021, where the focus was on the prep recruiting trail, and building relationships with players and coaches early in a recruit’s high-school career.

Now there are two separate and distinct personnel streams – the preps and the college game.

The way it’s always been done, the head coach and his staff worked the prep game hard in the offseason, and did what they could on the side during the season to maintain contact with signees and the high-school underclassmen on their radar.

As much as you can still do that with preps, that approach can’t possibly work with respect to the acquisition of talent from the transfer portal.

The way to go there would be to have in place a wholly separate scouting department that could create lists of players to watch, do the necessary vetting and watch prospects in person, so that you’re ready to pounce the moment a kid puts his name in the portal in the offseason.

Walker would have overseen a full-fledged scouting department while running the SuperSonics; he also would have overseen the business side of running a front office, which involves the establishment and adherence to budgets, and setting priorities, including assigning dollar values, for the acquisition of free agents, retaining existing players and mixing in players from the high-school ranks.

Wally Walker would instantly be the most-qualified general manager in all of college basketball, with his extensive background in the NBA, in the business world, and over the past two years working inside UVA Athletics.

The timing is right to be making this move, too, to think about getting a GM in place, with UVA Athletics about to hire a successor to Tony Bennett, the long-time head coach who had great success in the previous model, before stepping down last fall, conceding that he may not be the right guy to lead a college basketball program in this new era.

It almost feels, when you think through what has happened within the UVA Basketball program over the past four months, that this has been something that has been in the works.