Tommy McNeal was unfamiliar with the custom. The sink? Really? He knew little about the convention heading into his Lawn tenancy. Once he moved in, though? Well, that trek from the top bunk to the bathroom hardly makes anyone eager.
It is perfectly natural. Naval cadets, one of his friends informed him, do it all the time. So McNeal, like other Lawnies, joined in and started doing it.
“Anyone who tells you they’re not is lying to you,” the fourth-year said, through laughter.
The time-honored tradition became one thing McNeal, a defenseman on the men’s lacrosse team, learned early in his residency of 36 East Lawn. It was far from the only new thing, though, for the only athlete presently living on the Lawn.
Most of the lacrosse team lives together, and some of the players live distant from Grounds. Practice is constant, and schoolwork takes hold. Games are mind-consuming.
“It's very easy to get in a bubble,” McNeal said. “Going to practice, going to class, living off-Grounds with your teammates. It's very easy to get secluded.”
But McNeal loves new experiences. They’re “what I want in life,” he said, and a big reason why he ended up submitting that Lawn application, the one that eventually unlocked an incredible new opportunity.
He has played every lacrosse game this season, a year after appearing in every game and two years after appearing in every possible game. But he knew there was more to this school, beyond lacrosse.
From the beginning, a voice counseled him to never lose sight of that.
Dr. Robert Zura, the department head of orthopedic surgery at LSU Health, graduated Virginia in 1990 and played a couple years of lacrosse at the start of college. He provides mentorship to McNeal from afar through the men’s lacrosse program, just like he mentored Jackson Appelt, a 2021 graduate and the last men’s lacrosse player to live on the Lawn.
Zura emphasized one piece of advice.
“Enjoy lacrosse,” Zura said. “Work like mad at it, and it’s a full-time job. But in your free time, try to experience as much of the school as you can.”
McNeal listened. But even with all that, his first three years of school, stocked with lacrosse and schoolwork and extracurriculars, left little time for some fundamental University experiences. A lot of it — Lighting of the Lawn, Trick-or-Treating on the Lawn — was new when he first moved onto the Lawn.
“People were like, ‘You haven't done this yet? You haven't done that?,’” McNeal said. “And I'm like, ‘No. Most of my day is practicing or doing work or catching up on what I couldn't do during the day.’”
McNeal is majoring in kinesiology and wants to go into global health. He founded Student Athletes in Medicine and serves as an editor at UNCUT, helping other athletes tell their stories. He interned in Kenya in 2023. He is taking the MCAT in June and is going to Tanzania this summer. A John Green book sits on his coffee table.
He likes listening to audiobooks, he said, because they teach him about the history absent in his science classes.
It can all be a lot, of course. He feels, like many college students, like he should be doing more. But he has to crash sometimes. He recently has taken to watching the show White Lotus with a fellow Lawnie.
Living on the Lawn? It’s like being a first-year all over again, with events to attend and patterns to grow accustomed to. There is a row of rooms behind which sleep people you’ve never met. It is exactly like first year. Except it’s outside — and the bathrooms are around the corner.
McNeal had never seen a Lawn room when he applied for one of the school’s most prestigious honors. He didn’t know anyone else applying. He saw two rooms before his selection time came up, and then had his opportunity to pick during a Zoom call on a bus ride to Duke — a bright moment before the latest loss in a five-game losing streak he picked one of those rooms.
Now he is convinced it is the best spot on the whole Lawn. Unlike higher up, toward the Rotunda, you don’t get people at night streaking the Lawn. It’s not as loud.
“I think is a perfect location,” McNeal said.
It was still new to him when, on his second or third day on the Lawn, a woman stopped by. She asked him if he lived there. Yes, he said. Her father lived in that room, she told him, a 1963 graduate. The school, in the more than 60 intervening years, has changed dramatically. The appearance and specialness of the Lawn have not.
“You live in the heart of the University,” McNeal said. “So you’re around everything. You’re talking to people. You’re seeing your teachers and your professors and stuff, and so you really get to understand a lot more about what’s going on behind the scenes and different U.Va. things.”
This year, the University’s annual holiday video opened with CavMan, sitting in a chair in a Lawn room, holding a slightly ripped Ralph Sampson Sports Illustrated cover. They filmed it right there, on McNeal’s chair. They outfitted the room differently, of course, the Tommy McNeal NCAA lacrosse championships sticker camouflaged, hidden out of view. But that was the room, and that was the chair.
It is pretty cool for McNeal. Zura knows this too — he lived on the Lawn himself.
“It really makes the school yours,” Zura said. “The opportunity to wake up every day and see the Rotunda, to be on the Lawn, and it just brings it closer. And it really makes the school uniquely special.”
Things have not been quite so rosy for McNeal and his teammates this season, as the team struggles through a 5-7 season. Senior Day is Saturday against Lafayette. A win next week against Duke is required just to squeeze into the ACC Tournament.
McNeal’s career, on Grounds and at Klöckner Stadium, may be over soon. But not without a few more visits to the sink.
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