UVA Basketball: We flew the women’s team to the Sweet 16 on ICE Air

Literally a day after I told you that UVA Athletics did, in fact, have a history with GlobalX Airlines, a charter airline that operates detention and deportation flights for ICE, the UVA women’s basketball team flew out west on a GlobalX Airlines charter to get to the Sweet 16.

Can’t make this stuff up, folks.

The tone deafness over there, it’s profound.

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ICYMI

• Turns out, UVA Football flew on GlobalX Airlines, which we know as ICE Air
• The NCAA uses an ICE Air charter company to fly teams to March Madness

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An AFP reader who was flying out of the Charlottesville-Albemarle Airport on Wednesday tipped us off, noting the presence of a GlobalX plane in the charter ramp area on Wednesday morning, with a scheduled departure time of 1:15 p.m.

We were able to verify that a GlobalX plane left CHO at 1:25 p.m. EDT headed to Sacramento, the site of two of the four regionals in the Sweet 16, and that the plane landed in Sacramento at 6:51 p.m. EDT.

I reached out to spokespeople for the women’s team and UVA Athletics last night to confirm that this was the plane that ferried the UVA team to Sacramento.

It took 13 hours to get the confirmation.

I wouldn’t have rushed to get to me on this, either, personally.

“Yes. This is the flight the NCAA provided to our women’s team,” a spokesperson for the athletics department wrote me by email.

Which comes across to me as a copout. I know women’s basketball doesn’t make money, because the NCAA undersells the sport’s TV rights – dirty little secret to college athletics: TV is what pays the bills – and so a charter flight on an Airbus 320, which can run you $100,000 for a one-way flight, can be prohibitive, bottom line-wise.

You can’t tell me that they couldn’t have gone to Alexis Ohanian, the Reddit guy who made the big multi-year commitment to the women’s hoops program back in 2024, and said:

Hey, Alexis, we’d really rather not fly our women’s team to the Sweet 16 on a plane that just got back from taking deportees, including kids, in shackles to a gulag in Central America, can you and Serena maybe help us out here?

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ICYMI

• Alum Alexis Ohanian donates millions to UVA Women’s Basketball program

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It’d be one thing if nobody over there was aware of the connection between GlobalX and ICE, but we know that they know.

They know over there so hard that they tried to tell me last week that UVA Athletics had never used GlobalX, before a FOIA request revealed to us otherwise.

I wrote about that on Tuesday.

On Wednesday, UVA Athletics puts the women’s basketball team on one of those flying prisons to send the group off to the Sweet 16.

I know, stick to sports.