Ron Sanchez learned everybody’s name at Charlotte. Not just the players and coaches and support staff. He knew them all — janitors, custodians, cafeteria workers.
“Everybody,” former graduate assistant Montay Brandon said. “He spoke to everybody. Nobody was beneath him.”
The interim men’s basketball head coach ascended to his new role Oct. 17, when Tony Bennett retired. Sanchez steps in for a man with whom he shares many traits, at a program where he is loved. He served as an assistant at Virginia from 2009 to 2018 and returned to the program last offseason, after working as head coach at Charlotte from 2018 to 2023.
At Charlotte, he used to receive visits from his old players, the guys he recruited to Virginia in his first period as assistant coach. Nothing, minus a couple of people he brought with him, linked those players to Charlotte. Nothing but Sanchez.
Sanchez employed four graduate assistants during his time at Charlotte. They all know they can always call Sanchez. David Belfield, one of those graduate assistants, is now the head coach at Division II program Belmont Abbey College. The small liberal arts school rests way out of the spotlight, but Belfield still gets calls from Sanchez, checking in.
“Don’t matter what time it is,” Brandon said. “Don’t matter. Coach Sanchez is always available. Always.”
They gush, all of them. They insist Sanchez is a special person, that he changed their lives.
“He’s a people person,” former assistant Vic Sfera said. “He’s a connector. He’s a relationship builder … He lights up the room. That’s his ultimate strength, is the relationship side of things.”
This is Sanchez’s superpower, and the ability to connect trickles down to his players. Sanchez took Charlotte rafting one offseason, not long before the 2021-22 season began, as a team-building exercise.
But before hitting the rapids, the team talked, first about the week’s events and how practice went. Then they moved into the heavier stuff, splitting into groups and considering the most important aspects of a team, what characteristics make a team great or negative. Then they rafted down the river. That season the 49ers won 17 games, their most since 2013-14.
The preseason rafting trip is one of many things that link the two programs. Virginia bobbed along for the first time in those yellow tubes over the 2018 offseason.
The head coaches who sanctioned those trips — Bennett and Sanchez — are best friends and multiple-decades-long colleagues. They are also strikingly similar.
It invokes déjà vu, at moments, to hear people talk about Sanchez. It sometimes sounds remarkably like hearing people talk about Bennett. As the former takes over for the latter in Charlottesville, this is a passing of the baton. It is one man handing it off to another to run the same race, along the same track, maybe with a slightly altered stride.
Sanchez spent his first few days on the job scheduling meetings and making phone calls. He talked to the players, their families and other people in their orbit. He even talked, for advice and connection, to Coach Brian O’Connor of the baseball program.
At Bennett’s retirement press conference, Sanchez lingered in the background, dressed in coaching sweats. His mind rocketed back to Bennett’s introductory press conference, 15 years and an epoch ago.
“In that moment I realized how much energy has been invested into creating the basketball culture that’s at the University of Virginia today,” Sanchez said in his introductory Zoom conference Oct. 23. “And that culture was led by a phenomenal human being who was an amazing basketball coach.”
When Sanchez relocated from Virginia to Charlotte, he took Bennett’s five pillars with him. He installed them with great intentionality, infusing them into just about every team activity. They went up on the facility wall and were printed onto shirts.
The team got the message. Belfield, one of the graduate assistants, traveled to the 2019 Final Four in Minneapolis. He wore his Charlotte basketball shirt to games, the one with the five pillars on it. Virginia fans recognized it and told him they liked it.
Sanchez also brought a truckload of Bennett vernacular to Charlotte. He preached getting comfortable being uncomfortable. He stressed the importance of recruiting guys you can lose with.
There was one phrase, though, that Jalen Cannaddy, another graduate assistant, heard hundreds of times in his two years there — “First comes discipline, then comes freedom.” That line originated with Bennett’s father, Dick Bennett, whom Tony and Sanchez coached under at Washington State in the 2000s. Then it became a Tony phrase, and simultaneously became a Ron Sanchez phrase.
It is a guiding moral and a way to live life, but also a statement about playing style.
“We want to give you freedom, offensively,” Sfera said. “But there has to be boundaries. There has to be guardrails. Once you understand what those are, then play in freedom.”
Sanchez deserted Bennett’s traditional blocker-mover offense at Charlotte, despite using elements of it early in his tenure before he had the proper personnel. The 49ers eventually got to what Belfield called a “five-out hybrid Princeton” — a fusion of the well-known five-out and Princeton offenses.
Sanchez’s unique offensive proclivities may come into play at some point, if he survives his interim season. But for now, he will not tweak much at all beyond the changes the coaching staff had already crafted this summer.
“We’ll do some things that are going to be a little different, but not because I’m here,” Sanchez said. “Those are things that Tony and I and the staff discussed this summer.”
Sanchez does not have to rebuild anything this time. At Charlotte, inheriting a decrepit program, he experienced the worst of it. The 49ers rolled out walk-ons for significant minutes during his first season. The team struggled mightily, losing 21 games.
“But he was never demeaning,” Belfield said. “He was very demanding. He pushed us, took each opportunity as a chance for us to grow. How can we improve? How can we get better?”
High mid-major programs like Charlotte are, in Sfera’s opinion, the most difficult places to coach. The second a player excels in the American, or Conference USA, or the Mountain West, power-conference programs swoop in for poaching. Sanchez understands the dynamic as well as anyone.
“He kind of felt it from this level and really learned what this game was becoming,” Sfera said. “So I think he'll definitely use those experiences, now being in that seat at Virginia.”
Recruiting, after all, is one of Sanchez’s strengths. It is a natural extension of his interpersonal skills. Belfield remembers observing recruiting visits and walking away awestruck, amazed at the connection that had formed between Sanchez and a recruit in a short period.
But Sanchez’s aptitude for relationship-building has not prevented him from losing players in his first week. Senior guard Jalen Warley, a Florida State transfer, entered the transfer portal without ever playing a regular-season game. Then Chance Mallory, a four-star recruit from neighboring Saint Anne’s-Belfield High School, decommitted.
Keeping players is harder than just being a genuine guy. Sanchez will have to acclimate to the entire experience of being a head coach at a program like this.
But his essence as a people person is a strong foundation. Over fall break, he took Elijah Saunders out to the golf course along with assistant coaches Jason Williford and Orlando Vandross.
On the court, though, outside the peaceful confines of a golf course, Sanchez is serious, an intense competitor.
“There's no nonsense, there's no fluff, there's no fakeness with him,” Brandon said. “He is who he is. He truly cares about his kids. The program will always be first.”
He does things the right way, they all say.
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