Aly Khalifa planned it all out. The words, the phrasing. He had a script, written out on his phone, rehearsed with a close friend.
Then he walked into the meeting room.
It all drained away.
“As soon as I got into that room, I forgot everything,” Khalifa said. “I just spoke out of my heart.”
Khalifa cried that day in March 2023 as he informed Ron Sanchez, then Charlotte’s head coach and now Virginia’s interim head coach, that he was transferring. After three years in the program, and after helping Charlotte reach a high-water mark in the fifth year of Sanchez’s tenure, Khalifa had decided, completely understandably, to seek a better opportunity. The meeting lasted an entire hour.
Khalifa left the school not long after. He journeyed to BYU, played for a year under Mark Pope and then departed for Louisville this offseason after Pope’s relocation to Kentucky.
That is how he ended up over there, in John Paul Jones Arena on Jan. 4 as everyone stood for the national anthem. One line of players and coaches, wearing red and black, fanned out along one free throw line, and another line, in blue and white, spread along the other. As they will do Saturday at the KFC Yum! Center when Louisville and Virginia meet again, they clasped their hands behind their backs or placed them across their hearts.
The anthem played, and Khalifa looked across the expanse of hardwood. His eyes found the man who, even now, he calls an “older brother.” Sanchez smiled back at him.
Khalifa, big and bespectacled, wandered among his teammates during the timeouts of that game. He is rehabbing an ACL injury, working through it well ahead of schedule, but he still was forced to redshirt his first year at Louisville. Nevertheless, the 6-foot-11, 275-pound player is an infectious presence on the sideline.
He stood at the fringes of the huddle during timeouts, looking at Louisville Coach Pat Kelsey. Forty feet away, at the center of the other huddle, sat the coach who helped him get here.
“It’s kind of weird just standing on different sides now,” Khalifa said. “Me and him obviously have a long relationship. He recruited me since high school. He’s like an older brother.”
In the recruiting process, though, Charlotte’s coaching staff faced a dilemma. Khalifa’s high school in Egypt was not exactly acquainted with the NCAA’s academic standards, and, through no fault of his own, the player would have to redshirt a year to catch up academically.
The coaching staff was all sitting at home, in the middle of the pandemic, trying to decide whether to make the investment. They were not sure whether to “roll the dice” on the big man, in the words of assistant coach Vic Sfera.
But Sanchez was building a program. He needed someone to build it around.
“It was, ‘Man, do we try to find another one?’” Sanchez said. “‘Or do we take a long-term guy that could help us?’”
They took him, and the dice roll landed. Pair of sixes. Khalifa redshirted and then started all but one game in the 2021-22 season. He started every game in 2022-23, leading the team in rebounding and averaging the second-most points. He also shot 38.1 percent from the three-point line on 126 attempts.
Most of all, he passed. Behind the back, through tight windows, out of double-teams. The radio announcers and fans called him the “Egyptian Magician” before long, for his creativity in finding teammates. The team’s Princeton offense revolved around Khalifa catching the ball on the elbow and making things happen. Few things angered Sanchez more than another player failing to cut. If you cut, you would score. Khalifa would find you.
Khalifa played on the scout team in 2020-21 while he redshirted, simulating opponents’ looks. Charlotte played a packline defense, carted over from Virginia with Sanchez after his nine years as an assistant, and one of the defense’s principles is trapping the post. So the starting defense would practice trapping the post against Khalifa, the scout team center. This posed a problem.
“It’s supposed to be some seven-footer from UAB who’s a very limited passer,” Sfera said. “And Aly’s throwing it behind his back, around the post trap, or, like, over his head. We’re like, Aly, he’s not gonna do that.”
Sfera called it a “sixth sense,” and Sanchez dubbed it “point-guard vision,” an unteachable something. It was there from the beginning.
Not everything was. Khalifa grew tremendously as a three-point shooter during his redshirt year and his two seasons playing games. That made him a more complete player, “a college basketball version of [Nikola] Jokic,” in Sfera’s words.
In the 2022-23 season, with the first postseason tournament title in the program’s history, Khalifa’s growth — and Charlotte’s build under Sanchez — culminated. The College Basketball Invitational rests a couple rungs down on the ladder of college basketball’s postseason, below the NCAA Tournament and the National Invitation Tournament. Charlotte went and won it.
The 49ers won four games in five days to take the title. Khalifa scored 20 points and had four assists in the championship game, a 71-68 defeat of Eastern Kentucky.
“We had a very special group of guys, and it was actually very special just to end the season on a win,” Khalifa said.
He was at the center of it all, a 6-foot-11 building block in the program’s rapid ascent from train wreck to respectable mid-major.
“Aly definitely was a huge piece for us,” Sfera said, “and one of the players that helped turn this thing around.”
He gave so much to the program, with his skill and his demeanor. The program gave so much to him, by offering him a spot and nurturing him over time. But the coaching staff also, one time in his second season, decided to do something special for him.
In retrospect, thinking about the moment again, Khalifa should have known. He should have figured there was a reason for this, deduced that something was up.
Charlotte was gearing up for a game against Western Carolina in December 2021, and the team, the day before the game, had shootaround. That was normal. What happened afterward was not.
“Coach Sanchez gathered us together after shootaround,” Khalifa said. “He never does that.”
The topic? Family. Christmas was approaching, and Sanchez wanted to impart a message about family, how important it was. Khalifa remembers it so vividly, even now.
He was listening intently, with Sanchez talking at the center of the huddle, and he felt a tap on his shoulder, almost imperceptible through his practice jersey. Khalifa, still listening, turned his head briefly sideways and then faced forward again.
Then, wait. What? Something had registered.
Khalifa started smiling, one of those disbelieving smiles of something not fully sinking in yet, and went to hug his sister. He had not seen her in a year and a half. He wiped away a tear after a moment, brought it into the huddle to chant “1, 2, 3, family,” and then returned to his sister.
“If you were to ask if anyone [Khalifa] knew would be a role model or his hero,” Kenny Williams, a close friend and then a student manager, said, “that was his sister.”
These were the things Sanchez would do. Sanchez helped make Khalifa feel at home, people say. He showed the Egyptian player around Charlotte, introduced him to people, welcomed him for holidays when he could not go back home. He organized that visit from his sister, Nesma Khalifa, who played basketball at Tallahassee Community College in 2018-19 before transferring to Cincinnati.
“[Khalifa] is one of the nicest human beings you’ll ever meet,” Sfera said. “And so is Coach Sanchez. It was like a pair made in heaven.”
That is what made it so difficult to leave.
“It was very emotional,” Khalifa said. “It was very awkward. When I went to Charlotte at first, I didn’t imagine myself leaving. And when this moment came, when I wanted a better opportunity somewhere else, it felt weird.”
He felt like he was letting down the coach who trusted him, who built such a close relationship with him, who built a program around him. Who rolled the dice on him.
As Khalifa tried to make the decision, there were voices all around, tugging him in different directions. He needed someone to help him think clearly. So he turned to Williams, who used to stay back at school with him when the team went on road trips his freshman year, when Khalifa was redshirting and Williams had not yet made the traveling squad of managers.
Williams said he played “devil’s advocate" on every point. He balanced Khalifa. Made sure he saw every side. What he would be giving up and what he stood to gain. The nagging prospect of a better opportunity, unavoidable in this era of college sports, had weighed on Khalifa. He held two more years of eligibility and the ability to transfer anywhere, unimpeded by a now-outdated transfer penalty.
When Khalifa made the decision, Sanchez understood.
“I understood also that the opportunities that he was looking for where we were, we couldn't provide,” Sanchez said. “So I was very understanding of it. We talked through it.”
“He was not even trying to make me stay in Charlotte,” Khalifa said. “That's when I knew he really cares about me as a person, like he didn't care about basketball. He just said, ‘I'm scared you're gonna go to one of those coaches that's gonna treat you bad, very bad, and you're gonna hate basketball.’”
Khalifa was also not the only one to go. Leaving that meeting, he passed Brice Williams, the team’s leading scorer, in the hallway. Williams was walking toward the office to tell the coaches he was leaving.
Leaving meant leaving more than just the program, especially for Khalifa.
“Once Aly made the decision to leave he also knew that he would be saying goodbye to Coach Sanchez,” Kenny Williams said. “Which I think was the hardest part of the decision.”
Sanchez never coached another game at Charlotte. The last game he spent pacing the sideline in green ended with him and Khalifa hoisting a trophy together.
Khalifa started 26 of 29 games at BYU the following season, averaging 5.7 points, 3.7 rebounds — and 4.0 assists, with far and away the team’s best assist-to-turnover ratio. Sanchez, meanwhile, returned to Virginia as an assistant under Tony Bennett. That placed him in the same conference Khalifa joined this offseason at Louisville.
Before Virginia’s first game this season against Louisville, Sanchez emerged from the tunnel and beelined for Khalifa. He gave him a big hug. They talked for a few minutes.
They told each other they missed each other. Khalifa asked after Sanchez’s family. Sanchez asked after Khalifa’s sister. It was their first time seeing each other, outside of text messages checking in or asking for advice, in over two years.
“It was pretty emotional for me,” Khalifa said.
Louisville beat Virginia in that game — beat them good, 70-50 — and so the pair never got the chance to talk more afterward. Sanchez is the head coach now, of course, and with that comes responsibility and things to attend to.
Khalifa hopes they will have more time Saturday. Virginia plays Louisville at noon at the KFC Yum! Center, Khalifa’s new home.
“Hopefully we catch up a little longer after the game,” Khalifa said. “Maybe I’ll go back to their locker room and say hi to him after Saturday’s game. That would be cool.”
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