Ryan Odom figured, during the interview process, that the question was coming. It seemed logical, of course. So he prepared. He enlisted his wife to print out a couple pictures, and he had them in his back pocket.
So when the moment came, when Athletic Director Carla Williams and University President Jim Ryan sat across the table from him and asked “why Virginia,” all he had to do was take out the picture. Slide it across the table.
“I just put it right in front of them,” Odom said, recounting the story. “Why Virginia? That’s ‘why Virginia.’ That’s the starting point of ‘why Virginia.’”
Odom unspooled the tale Monday from a podium on the court at John Paul Jones Arena, flanked by balloons and fronted by a bouquet of flowers, with donors and media in the seats before him and a few hundred hardy fans in the stands beyond.
Odom, 50, left VCU after two seasons to take the Virginia job, having come to VCU from Utah State, and Utah State from UMBC, amassing a 201-117 record and making three NCAA Tournaments in nine seasons. By the end of his opening remarks at the introductory press conference Monday, everyone listening could see his childhood — and his lifelong connection to the Virginia men’s basketball program — preserved in amber.
Odom opened by talking about his father, Dave Odom, and a meeting at a truck stop that led to Dave joining Terry Holland’s staff at Virginia in 1982. He described his elementary and middle school years in Charlottesville — the house two doors down from the Hollands’, the movies at Jim Larrañaga’s house, sitting on Ralph Sampson’s knee at practice, hanging out with Jeff Jones on the sidelines, his years as a ball boy.
And he talked about his excitement for what’s to come.
“Can’t wait to walk out of that tunnel with our team, to a packed house on that first night,” Odom said. “Then when the victory happens, to get the old song going and put our arms around one another and get ready for the next one.”
Moored to his past as his opening remarks may have been, Odom happily waded into questions about the future during the nearly hour-long press conference. He is taking over a program coming off a 15-17 season, and taking over at the beginning of the college basketball season’s annual cycle of chaos.
One undercurrent of tension, from his first words, seemed unavoidable. Here was the coach on the podium, speaking to the masses but also watched intently by the group of players in the front row on the left, six of whom have already reportedly entered the transfer portal.
Odom, after taking the microphone from Williams following her opening statement, gestured to the players and invited them to rise for the crowd’s applause. He met with them Saturday night, he said, and earlier today they worked out with some members of his VCU staff.
“One thing that I told these guys is there's no judgment,” Odom said. “There's no judgment if you put your name in the portal. That's okay. Because I made this decision, because this situation is what it is, they have to figure out what's best for them.”
Odom also fielded a question about building his coaching staff. Much of the same staff, he stressed, has followed him around to many of his previous coaching stops. Two of them, VCU assistants Darius Theus and Bryce Crawford, populated the crowd Monday, as did Griff Aldrich, the former Longwood head coach reportedly coming to Virginia as Odom’s associate head coach.
Odom made one concrete mention of Virginia’s existing coaching staff, saying that strength coach Mike Curtis “is going to get us there” in terms of conditioning. He also mentioned that Kyle Guy, Isaiah Wilkins, Chase Coleman and Ethan Saliba were present at the workout but said nothing further about them.
At the very least, he will have one new thing. Virginia is hiring a general manager, Odom said, becoming the latest member of a proliferating cohort to have hired someone to help with roster management.
“We have to sit in a room and go at it and figure out who's available, what do we need, and then start to attack the recruiting,” Odom said. “We're playing at an elite level, a top-10 level. In order to compete with the best of the best, you have to recruit well.”
Williams, speaking to the media after the press conference, said that Wally Walker, whose official title is Deputy Athletic Director, served as the program’s general manager this season.
That job, of course, is simpler when players simply stay in place, and Odom emphasized the importance of retention. That jibed with the theme of family that suffused his remarks.
He talked a lot about family. The family sitting in the front row. The basketball family he seems primed to import from VCU. The family that always existed for him here.
“As the search came to a conclusion,” Williams said in her opening remarks, “there was one deeply rooted value remaining to address — who can we entrust with the legacy of this program that has been shaped by the blood, sweat and tears of so many who made this one of the nation's premier men's basketball programs?”
Ryan Odom, they decided.
“Sometimes we wonder in life,” Odom said. “The door closes on you, and we wonder, why on earth did that happen .... I'm so glad this door opened.”
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