The idea hatched in the mind of a middle-aged dad. Wouldn’t it make an awesome advertising project, Joshua Levitt thought, to have some Virginia football players attempt ballet?
Fourth-year Commerce student Sircia Levitt dismissed the idea. It sounded cool, but no. Totally ridiculous, out of the question, not feasible.
“I was like, Dad, I don’t know anybody on the football team,” Levitt said. “Whatever. Great idea, but that’s never gonna happen. Maybe I’ll keep it in the back of my mind.”
The idea lingered there for the next year. Then Levitt became a project leader in August 2023 with Enactus, a student organization that provides free consulting to local small businesses. She had already worked for a year as a senior consultant with the Charlottesville Ballet, but now, as project leader, she had more authority to implement ideas. The ballet, for its part, had a goal — to get people who traditionally would never sign up for ballet classes to give it a shot.
And lingering at the back of Levitt’s brain was that idea, about putting some football players in a ballet studio. With some help from an NIL collective, this idea was realized, and five football players took a field trip to the ballet studio in January 2024. The final product — a video — was released Tuesday.
The NIL collective
At the entrance to Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall, above the red brick walkway and the collection of restaurants and quaint shops, rests The CODE Building. Inside dwells the headquarters of Cav Futures, Virginia’s version of the NIL collectives which have recently sprung onto the college sports scene.
Cav Futures was established in 2022. It exists separate from the University but works closely with it, a non-profit that accepts donations and manages money. It assists athletes in capitalizing off their name, image and likeness by setting up partnerships and organizing appearances.
“We really are the boots on the ground,” Kellie Booth, the collective’s director of marketing, media and athlete engagement, said.
But NIL, to Levitt and the Charlottesville Ballet, provided a unique opportunity to connect with a new audience. The ballet, of course, instantly approved the idea back in late 2023. Emily Hartka, the ballet’s director and co-founder, loved the idea, even if she had no clue how to proceed.
“At first, I thought it was amazingly crazy that we would put football players with our young students and film them in a ballet studio setting,” Hartka said. “I was like, ‘Are you sure they’re gonna say yes to this?’”
They did. Levitt and her Enactus team cold-emailed the NIL collective. The person on the receiving end turned out to be Booth, who hopped on board without much convincing.
“I remember just immediately falling in love with the idea,” Booth said. “It’s obviously easy to visualize the story of these big, really strong, successful football players and the little ballerina next to them who works just as hard and is just as athletic and talented.”
Levitt had never really considered what to do next, how to turn an aspirational idea into some sort of tangible product. Money, specifically, presented a problem. The ballet had little of it to spare, and Enactus operates budget-less.
“You can’t just call up the football team and be like, ‘Hey, can you come and do this thing for an hour,’” Levitt said. “They get paid to do stuff now [with NIL]. So I was like, this is gonna be a barrier.”
But Levitt eventually discovered something curious about the makeup of Cav Futures. Alongside the more transactional side, in which players get paid to do sponsorships, there exists another arm — the Cav Futures Foundation, a 501c3 that, according to its website, “complements” Cav Futures. It facilitates community engagement, like sending athletes to nearby schools, working with organizations like HerSports, helping athletes plan for future life and, apparently, taking five football players to learn ballet.
Pages and a plan
Hartka started consolidating her planning in January with a document which was, at that point, a haphazard collection of bullet points, slapped down on a Google Doc. It was polished over the next 16 days and is now a veritable monstrosity, 11 full pages that bleed into a 12th. It is a casting directory and a production timeline and also a shot list, and Hartka designed it all in advance of the special day.
The document, titled “Charlottesville Ballet + UVA Football Video Shot List - Enactus,” draws a laugh from Booth. It prompts an almost incredulous smile from Levitt.
“Casting is what the ballet was calling it,” Levitt said. “That is so ballet. I’m like, this is not The Nutcracker.”
To the Charlottesville Ballet, it was.
The Keith Lee Dance Fund, established in 2023 by the Charlottesville Ballet, provides ballet scholarships depending on four categories: “financial aid,” “diversity in dance,” “boys scholarship” and “disabilities in dance.” Its tagline is simple. Dance, it insists, is “for everyBODY.”
“You don’t have to look a certain way to participate in the sport,” Levitt said. “...It has benefits for everyone, both mentally and physically.”
One way to emphasize this ideal of inclusivity? Putting football players, a breed more commonly renowned for brute strength than for nimble pirouettes, into a ballet class. It sounds about as complicated as it ended up being.
“It was so crazy, just back and forth, planning,” Levitt said. “What do we want them to do? What do we want them to say? Who’s going to be there? Who are they going to interact with? What are they going to wear?”
Levitt and the team deliberated, in the early planning process, about how to package the collaboration. They landed on a video. And thus footage of sophomore quarterback Anthony Colandrea and company doing ballet will live on for posterity.
Just about every possible thing, from the specific dances to a detailed timetable to the players’ individual ailments, earned a spot on the planning document. It amounted to an enormous undertaking for the ballet.
“That day, I made sure, was highly choreographed,” Hartka said.
‘A great time’
Five football players traveled down Route 29 to the Charlottesville Ballet that day late in January — sophomore quarterback Anthony Colandrea, senior safety Jonas Sanker, graduate defensive end Ben Smiley III, graduate defensive tackle Jahmeer Carter and graduate defensive end Chico Bennett Jr. The big names.
These players confront crushing pressure every week on the football field, managing somehow to appear unfazed while navigating all of it.
Then they walked into a ballet studio, a space with particular rules and traditions to which they were unaccustomed.
“I remember the guys starting off a little apprehensive,” Booth said.
It was similar for the ballerinas leading them, and especially the young students there that day.
“These young kids maybe were a little nervous about these big, strong guys,” Booth said. “But as they got to do these different ballet routines together, they both got more comfortable and really had a great time.”
Booth made sure the players stretched first. Ballet, after all, is hard work, and football players’ bodies are important. But after that, she turned it over to Hartka and her ballerinas.
It took some time for the football players to get comfortable. But once they did, the vibes were awesome.
“There was just a lot of laughter and giggling and fun and the colliding of these two very different worlds,” Booth said.
The best part was the interactions between the players and staff. A kid standing next to the 6-foot-4, 308-pound Smiley probably feels like he stepped into a hole. There was a “sense of wonder,” Booth said, that eventually turned into fun as everyone let their guards down.
Hartka emphasized that there is some similarity between football and ballet. It mainly has to do with footwork, at least on a technical level. But it goes beyond that, the shared ethos of performance and sport.
Colandrea and the ballerinas exchanged expertise. He taught them to throw a football. They taught — or tried to teach — him how to perform leaps. The kids taught the football players ballet moves. The football players taught the kids touchdown dances.
“We were trying to get our kids to be like, all right, I’m going to teach you, idol quarterback — you’re going to do this podaburee, right?” Hartka said. “Or, like, he’s gonna teach you this touchdown dance. It was cute that they had this interaction, and they shared what they loved with these amazing players.”
The football players even did postgame interviews. The kids and their parents brought their orange-and-blue gear, and the football players stayed, signing and taking pictures.
“Our people were game,” Hartka said. “And they were game.”
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