Tony Bennett had his Five Pillars. The new UVA Basketball coach, Ryan Odom, has a guy from the evangelical movement for that.
“We are thrilled to add Michael to our men’s basketball staff,” Odom said, per a press release from UVA Athletics, announcing the hiring of Michael Crowder to the position of “director of culture formation and alumni engagement.”
Crowder, a 2014 UVA alum, comes to the basketball program from a stint at Longwood, where he worked under the head coach there, Griff Aldrich.
Aldrich, you may know, is, for now, the associate head coach on Odom’s staff, though Odom himself seems to be hinting that Aldrich will eventually be the basketball program’s general manager.
I wrote about that over the weekend.
ICYMI
Anyway.
At Longwood, Crowder had the job title “managing director–culture formation and program development.”
Per the press release from UVA Athletics, Crowder “connected with Longwood’s men’s basketball in 2020 and spent time as a character coach over the next three years, providing mentorship and guidance for players and coaches to help balance athletics, academics and personal matters. In that capacity, he helped the coaching staff integrate character-building initiatives into the basketball program.”
“He made a significant impact at Longwood, transforming the lives of student-athletes, coaches and support staff over the past seven years with his expertise in leadership, mentorship, character and team building, guidance and culture,” Odom said in the release.
This all sounds just peachy keen.
Per the release from UVA Athletics, Crowder hooked up with the Longwood Basketball program in 2020 after serving in a mentorship role with the team while also working with Young Life programs in Southside Virginia.
This is where things get dicey here – that is, the part of the story involving Young Life, a multimillion-dollar evangelical Christian ministry based in Colorado Springs that Crowder has worked with since 2016.
This Young Life outfit is, to me, quite the oddball thing to have involved with your college basketball program.
The About page of the Young Life website states that the organization’s mission is to “introduce adolescents to Jesus Christ and help them grow in their faith,” which seems innocent enough.
Do two minutes of research on the Google machine, and you’ll learn that Young Life has faced criticism for its policy of not allowing LGBTQ+ students to volunteer or take leadership roles in its organization, and for formally treating homosexuality as a “lifestyle” that is “clearly not in accord with God’s creation purposes.”
You’ll also learn that Young Life pressured a 30-year volunteer to quit her post because she refused to take down a Facebook post showing support for the gay teenage son of a friend.
And then, as is the case with a lot these days, there are the allegations that, “for decades,” the ministry actively covered up, “complaints of sexual assault and harassment involving members, staff and volunteers,” and Young Life has also been under investigation by the federal EEOC for alleged racial discrimination.
If you want a side of MAGA with your favorite basketball team, well, here you go.
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Chris Graham
