Home UVA Basketball: Tony Bennett passes the torch to right-hand man Ron Sanchez
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UVA Basketball: Tony Bennett passes the torch to right-hand man Ron Sanchez

Chris Graham
bennett uva staff
Photo: Mike Ingalls/AFP

Tony Bennett said at his retirement press conference on Friday that leaving the UVA Basketball job three weeks before the season wasn’t “premeditated,” but conceded that he’d been thinking about his future in college basketball for the past three years, coinciding with the advent of the NIL/transfer portal era, and his internal struggle to adapt.

I’m here to tell you that the thinking about his future actually goes back a little further than Bennett is letting on.

It actually starts with Ron Sanchez, his right-hand man since his days at Washington State, where they both served on the staff of Dick Bennett, Tony’s father, and Sanchez’s sojourn in 2018 to take the head coach job at Charlotte.

The heir apparent: Ron Sanchez


ron sanchez
Photo: UVA Athletics

Ron Sanchez is the guy who flew from Pullman, Wash., to Charlottesville with Tony Bennett when UVA was wooing the young coach, the 2007 national coach of the year, and agreed with Bennett that they could do something with the infrastructure in place.

After nine years as Bennett’s top assistant, Sanchez left the nest, taking over a Charlotte program that had won six games in the 2017-2018 season, and had posted .500 or better records in just three of its previous 10 seasons, got it back over .500 in Year 2, and won 22 games in his final season there, in 2022-2023.

And then Sanchez returned to the UVA Basketball program, taking a pay cut to give up a head coach job to become an assistant again, in the summer of 2023.

The reason he came back is simple: he’d finished apprenticeship as a head coach, learned what it’s like to be the CEO of a D1 program, having to hire and manage his own assistants, having to recruit players to fit the style of play, being the point man to schmooze donors and alums.

Tony Bennett reckons with himself


tony bennett
Photo: Mike Ingalls/AFP

When Ron Sanchez returned last summer, Tony Bennett was working into the fifth year of an amendment to his contract that he’d signed after winning the national title in 2019, and that with an automatic rollover year tacked on in 2020 had extended, and was set to expire, on April 30, 2026.

Bennett had signed his second contract with UVA in 2015, with amendments made in 2017 and 2019, meaning, as of the summer of 2023, it had been four years since he’d last addressed his contract status.

Bennett and his boss, Carla Williams, the athletics director at UVA, both gave the “three years” timeline to Bennett beginning to express questions about his future in college basketball, in this new NIL/portal era, so that would date back to 2021.

Based on his previous schedule of contract amendments, 2021 was the next year Bennett was due for an update there.

Bennett’s 2021-2022 UVA Basketball team, with a rotation that was a mix of holdovers and transfers, would be his first since 2013 to miss out on the NCAA Tournament, though the program rebounded in 2022-2023, spending several weeks in the Top 10 of the national polls on the way to a 25-8 finish.

That 2022-2023 team, though, would get bounced out of the NCAA Tournament by #13 seed Furman on a dramatic late three.

The 2023-2024 season was a slog. Virginia suffered early blowout losses to Wisconsin, Memphis, Notre Dame, NC State and Wake Forest, and even with an eight-game winning streak in the heart of the ACC season, the Cavaliers were given one of the last spots in the NCAA Tournament field, which required a trip to Dayton for the First Four.

The 67-42 loss to Colorado State was embarrassing for all involved. Virginia missed 19 consecutive shots from the field over a 13:43 stretch, was 5-of-29 from the floor in a 14-points first half.

After the First Four game, Bennett conceded it was time to “look in the mirror,” and we thought at the time that what he was saying there was, yeah, I need to rethink the slow pace.

Back-and-forth in the spring, summer


uva bennett carolina
Photo: Mike Ingalls/AFP

As it turns out, Tony Bennett was actually thinking about stepping down, but he talked himself into hanging on, threw himself into trying to get things in place for the 2024-2025 season, and after a late start on the transfer portal, landed a solid five-player class that could include four new starters for the coming season.

This is where I injected myself into the story. The information about Bennett’s contract coming up on April 30, 2026, now two seasons away, became public in May because I pursued the details of his contract from the University of Virginia through public-records requests, through which I also discovered that Ron Sanchez was operating on a four-year deal signed in the summer of 2023 that had him under contract a year longer than the guy he was supposed to be working for.

Trying to clarify what was going on there, I reached out to Bennett and Carla Williams, who declined my requests for an interview, ahead of the June 13 announcement that Bennett had signed a new extension tethering him to the UVA Basketball program through the end of the 2031 season.

Nothing changed, though, after the extension with Bennett and his inner struggle about his ability, and maybe also his willingness, to adapt to the requirements of the NIL/transfer portal era.

Word got out from the program in the summer that Bennett had ceded a lot of the day-to-day basketball stuff to Sanchez, who was implementing a more up-tempo style.

Bennett expressed excitement last week at the ACC Basketball Tipoff media event in Charlotte at seeing that change through, but we can see now, in retrospect, that it was more that he was trying to convince himself than it was genuine.

Bennett, with 364 wins in his exactly 500 games as the head coach at Virginia, won every one of those games the Bennett way – not just the Tony Bennett way, but the way that he’d inherited from his father, who rose through the ranks from D3 ball to D1 by controlling the tempo and playing tough Pack Line D.

Sanchez has done most of his coaching work under the Bennetts, but he did have that five-year run down at Charlotte, and was able there to tweak what he learned from the Bennetts to make things work the way he prefers.

His 2022-2023 team averaged a Bennett-like 60.4 possessions per game, but his group the year before averaged 65.5 possessions per, and averaged 70.0 points per game.

That pace is basically middle-of-the-pack, so, no, not Loyola-Marymount from the early 1990s, but you get more easy buckets in fast breaks and secondary breaks, and quick hitters in the halfcourt.

In good hands


uva tony bennett ron sanchez staff
Photo: Mike Ingalls/AFP

Tony Bennett tells us that the decision to step down on the eve of the 2024-2025 season wasn’t premeditated, but he couldn’t have planned it better if it was.

Ron Sanchez, his hand-picked successor, was the point man in the transfer portal in the spring, selling the talented group of recruits that UVA was going to push tempo, which he knew would be the case, because he was going to be the guy in charge of overseeing that.

And Bennett, as he took a step back and let Sanchez take more of the reins on the basketball stuff, was signaling to the players that Sanchez was going to be taking on a bigger leadership role going forward.

Stepping down when he did, then, Bennett gives the coaching staff and the roster three weeks to get acclimated to Sanchez being the guy, where he has been the de facto guy for the past several months.

That should ease the transition, as should the fact that the rest of Bennett’s staff, which includes three assistants with at least seven years tenure, and three of Bennett’s former UVA Basketball players, so, a host of guys who have been around for a while, is still intact.

“I’m excited. I’m excited for these players. They’ll have to grow together. They have a very tough schedule coming up, but they have a chance to be good. The staff, with Coach Sanchez leading it, and the rest of the staff, have a chance to take this group and do the job,” Bennett said on Friday.

Earlier this week, the ACC released the preseason media poll for the 2024-2025 season, which had Virginia pegged to finish fifth in the now-18-team conference race.

That should translate into 23-25 wins and another NCAA Tournament berth for Sanchez, who will coach this season with an interim tag.

If Sanchez and his team can play up to the expectations, that interim tag will be lifted after the season, though that’s not the focus in the here and now.

The NCAA Tournament tip is five months away, which can seem like forever and can also feel like it’s flown by in an instant.

Bennett has all the confidence in the world in the new head guy, interim or not, but then, he should.

They’ve known each other for what seems like forever.

“He, they, how they relate, how they are, the way their minds are in this landscape, is what’s needed. So, I’m so grateful. I just want it to go so well for these guys. I’ll stop there, because I’ll probably get choked up,” Bennett said.

Chris Graham

Chris Graham

Chris Graham, the king of "fringe media," a zero-time Virginia Sportswriter of the Year, and a member of zero Halls of Fame, is the founder and editor of Augusta Free Press. A 1994 alum of the University of Virginia, Chris is the author and co-author of seven books, including Poverty of Imagination, a memoir published in 2019. For his commentaries on news, sports and politics, go to his YouTube page, or subscribe to his Street Knowledge podcast. Email Chris at [email protected].