This is paywalled so I copied the text below. (The summer training Franklin did (red paragraph) really seems to be paying off.)
Virginia plays inspired, purposeful basketball in beating Baylor and Illinois
LAS VEGAS — On the evening of Nov. 12, Reece Beekman, a 6-3 junior guard on the Virginia men’s basketball team, went with his teammate, Armaan Franklin, to the Alamo Drafthouse theater in downtown Charlottesville to see the new “Black Panther” movie. When they got there, they ran into some Virginia football players. The group included D’Sean Perry, a junior linebacker whom Franklin and Beekman knew from a Spanish class they all took together over the summer. When the movie got underway, Perry was sitting directly to Beekman’s left.
Some 24 hours later, Beekman received an email from the university that had been sent to all students indicating that there was an active shooter on campus and instructing everyone to stay at home. Word traveled quickly through text messages and social media that the shooting involved the football team, but Beekman went to bed around 3 a.m. without knowing who had been involved. The following morning, he learned that Perry was one of three players who lost their lives when a former teammate opened fire on a bus that had just returned from a field trip. Beekman’s mind immediately flashed back to the night before, when he and Perry had cheered and chuckled their way through a movie, just like college kids are supposed to do.
“It was just surreal,” Beekman said. “The night before, he was all cool and shaking hands. Then the next day, he’s gone.”
Beekman recalled those events Sunday afternoon in a back hallway at T-Mobile Arena. Just 20 minutes earlier, he had been named Most Valuable Player of the Main Event, where No. 16 Virginia emerged from a field of four teams ranked in the AP’s top 20 to claim the title. During Friday night’s semifinal, the Cavaliers used a 3-point barrage in the second half to beat No. 5. Baylor, 86-79. On Sunday, Virginia knocked off No. 19 Illinois, which had upset No. 8 UCLA two days before. This time, the Cavs used a 13-3 run over the final three-and-a-half minutes to clinch a 70-61 victory.
It was a remarkable display of drive and cohesion for a group of young men who had been through the worst kind of emotional wringer. Yet, there is also little doubt that the tragic events fomented the very qualities that enabled Virginia to prevail. Asked after Sunday’s game whether he believed there was a connection between the shooting and the way Virginia played in Las Vegas, Illinois coach Brad Underwood did not hesitate. “I’d have been disappointed if there wasn’t,” he said. “I told our team, these guys are playing for a cause. When something like this happens, you get a deeper appreciation for what we do. I hope maybe it will bring a little joy to the 20,000 or so people who were at the (memorial) service yesterday.”
Virginia coach Tony Bennett said several times that the trauma his team had endured was small compared to what their football counterparts were experiencing, but he still had to manage his guys through a whirlwind of shock and emotion. The first thing Bennett did Monday morning when the news broke was to arrange a team Zoom call. “I needed to see everyone,” he said. The team was supposed to play a home game against Northern Iowa that night, but that was canceled. So Bennett invited the players and their families over to his house for dinner. They ate, they talked, they prayed, they cried. “You could feel the intensity of the moment,” Bennett said. “I don’t know if healing is even the right word. It was just being together. If you’re going to grieve, grieve together.”
While it wasn’t easy to pivot to basketball, the opportunity to gather on the court provided a welcome distraction and sense of purpose. The Cavaliers knew the trip to Las Vegas was important. Last season, Virginia finished sixth in the ACC and ended up in the NIT, where it lost in the quarterfinal. The Cavaliers brought back all five starters, and Bennett added four quality freshmen as well as Ben Vander Plas, a 6-8 super senior transfer from Ohio. The Cavs opened the season with easy home wins over North Carolina Central and Monmouth, but the competition awaiting in Vegas was a major step up.
The players took the court Friday night wearing long-sleeved warm-up shirts with “UVa Strong” printed on the front and the names of the three fallen football players on the back. When the public address announcer asked for a moment of silence moments before the start of the game, Bennett wiped a tear from his eye. Then his Cavaliers went out and played their best game in a long, long time, turning a three-point halftime deficit into a 62-40 lead with 9:38 to play, and then fighting off an attempted Baylor comeback. When Bennett addressed his players in the post-game locker room, he pointed at the orange “V” on his shirt and tried to tell them what the game meant to the folks back home, but he couldn’t get the words out.
Sunday’s final was a back-and-forth affair, with all the tension and crowd energy one would expect from a Sweet 16 game. Virginia’s experience over an Illinois team with eight new players, including four freshmen guards, was the difference down the stretch. Beekman finished with 17 points, four rebounds and three assists to win the MVP award, and the Cavs outscored the Illini from the foul line 25-4. Their advantage from the stripe was 27-12 against Baylor. It was vintage Virginia basketball.
Franklin was the star on Friday, when he had 26 points on 3 of 6 3-point shooting. He, too, had to overcome the haunting image of seeing Perry at the movie theater the night before he was killed. Three-point shooting was a major weakness for Virginia last season, largely because Franklin shot just 29.6 percent from behind the arc after making 42.4 percent as a junior at Indiana. Two days after he decided to transfer to Virginia, Franklin underwent surgery on his right ankle. He was sidelined for three months, which cost him vital time to hone his skills and strengthen his body. That, combined with the unfamiliarity of playing for a new team in a challenging system, led to the shooting woes. “It weighed on me mentally, because I felt like I wasn’t doing the job they brought me in to do,” Franklin said.
Healthy and determined, Franklin got to work over the summer. His aunt, Coquese Washington, who is the head women’s basketball coach at Rutgers, arranged for him to work with former NBA legend John Lucas in Houston, where Franklin’s family had just moved. He also spent two weeks working in Indianapolis with a trainer, and then spent another week in Miami. “Five straight weeks of training and nothing else,” he said. Franklin made a small mechanical change, delivering the ball more from his right side, but the main benefit was time and repetitions. Through his first four games this season he is making a career-best 45.5 percent from 3. “The main thing was just getting confidence,” Franklin said. “I needed to get mentally right and back to who I was when they recruited me.”
Virginia’s other main issue last season was depth. The Cavs ranked 350th in the country in bench minutes, according to KenPom.com, so Bennett went into the transfer portal and landed Vander Plas. Bennett was familiar with Vander Plas, to put it mildly. Not only did Vander Plas play for the Ohio team that beat Virginia in the first round of the 2021 NCAA Tournament, but his father, Dean, played with Bennett at Wisconsin-Green Bay. Vander Plas is named for Bennett’s father, Dick — his full first name is Bennett — who was the coach of that team. “I thought, if I can’t recruit the kid who was named after my father, and his mom and dad were at my wedding, then I can’t recruit anybody,” Bennett said.
This being Virginia, defense will always be the calling card, and Bennett was not pleased that Baylor scored 42 points over the final 12 minutes. “Defense is going to be key for us, because you can’t always rely on your offense,” Bennett said. The Cavaliers showed their usual efficiency in Las Vegas, but this team has the potential to be more disruptive than many of Bennett’s past editions. The Cavs got eight steals in each of the two games, after averaging just 5.7 per game last season, which ranked 265th nationally.
It remains to be seen whether Virginia can keep this momentum going, but there is no doubt that this team, which was already older and more experienced than most, acquired a heavy dose of wisdom over the last seven days. The Cavaliers left Las Vegas confident that they can compete for an ACC championship and play deep into the NCAA Tournament. In the meantime, they can take heart knowing their success served as a brief salve for a community that is hurting very badly. “We went through so many different emotions this week,” Beekman said. “Having all of that in the back of our minds was a real motivation. We know that the fans and all the people back home look to us for a lot of things. We want to continue to shine for them.”
Virginia plays inspired, purposeful basketball in beating Baylor and Illinois
LAS VEGAS — On the evening of Nov. 12, Reece Beekman, a 6-3 junior guard on the Virginia men’s basketball team, went with his teammate, Armaan Franklin, to the Alamo Drafthouse theater in downtown Charlottesville to see the new “Black Panther” movie. When they got there, they ran into some Virginia football players. The group included D’Sean Perry, a junior linebacker whom Franklin and Beekman knew from a Spanish class they all took together over the summer. When the movie got underway, Perry was sitting directly to Beekman’s left.
Some 24 hours later, Beekman received an email from the university that had been sent to all students indicating that there was an active shooter on campus and instructing everyone to stay at home. Word traveled quickly through text messages and social media that the shooting involved the football team, but Beekman went to bed around 3 a.m. without knowing who had been involved. The following morning, he learned that Perry was one of three players who lost their lives when a former teammate opened fire on a bus that had just returned from a field trip. Beekman’s mind immediately flashed back to the night before, when he and Perry had cheered and chuckled their way through a movie, just like college kids are supposed to do.
“It was just surreal,” Beekman said. “The night before, he was all cool and shaking hands. Then the next day, he’s gone.”
Beekman recalled those events Sunday afternoon in a back hallway at T-Mobile Arena. Just 20 minutes earlier, he had been named Most Valuable Player of the Main Event, where No. 16 Virginia emerged from a field of four teams ranked in the AP’s top 20 to claim the title. During Friday night’s semifinal, the Cavaliers used a 3-point barrage in the second half to beat No. 5. Baylor, 86-79. On Sunday, Virginia knocked off No. 19 Illinois, which had upset No. 8 UCLA two days before. This time, the Cavs used a 13-3 run over the final three-and-a-half minutes to clinch a 70-61 victory.
It was a remarkable display of drive and cohesion for a group of young men who had been through the worst kind of emotional wringer. Yet, there is also little doubt that the tragic events fomented the very qualities that enabled Virginia to prevail. Asked after Sunday’s game whether he believed there was a connection between the shooting and the way Virginia played in Las Vegas, Illinois coach Brad Underwood did not hesitate. “I’d have been disappointed if there wasn’t,” he said. “I told our team, these guys are playing for a cause. When something like this happens, you get a deeper appreciation for what we do. I hope maybe it will bring a little joy to the 20,000 or so people who were at the (memorial) service yesterday.”
Virginia coach Tony Bennett said several times that the trauma his team had endured was small compared to what their football counterparts were experiencing, but he still had to manage his guys through a whirlwind of shock and emotion. The first thing Bennett did Monday morning when the news broke was to arrange a team Zoom call. “I needed to see everyone,” he said. The team was supposed to play a home game against Northern Iowa that night, but that was canceled. So Bennett invited the players and their families over to his house for dinner. They ate, they talked, they prayed, they cried. “You could feel the intensity of the moment,” Bennett said. “I don’t know if healing is even the right word. It was just being together. If you’re going to grieve, grieve together.”
While it wasn’t easy to pivot to basketball, the opportunity to gather on the court provided a welcome distraction and sense of purpose. The Cavaliers knew the trip to Las Vegas was important. Last season, Virginia finished sixth in the ACC and ended up in the NIT, where it lost in the quarterfinal. The Cavaliers brought back all five starters, and Bennett added four quality freshmen as well as Ben Vander Plas, a 6-8 super senior transfer from Ohio. The Cavs opened the season with easy home wins over North Carolina Central and Monmouth, but the competition awaiting in Vegas was a major step up.
The players took the court Friday night wearing long-sleeved warm-up shirts with “UVa Strong” printed on the front and the names of the three fallen football players on the back. When the public address announcer asked for a moment of silence moments before the start of the game, Bennett wiped a tear from his eye. Then his Cavaliers went out and played their best game in a long, long time, turning a three-point halftime deficit into a 62-40 lead with 9:38 to play, and then fighting off an attempted Baylor comeback. When Bennett addressed his players in the post-game locker room, he pointed at the orange “V” on his shirt and tried to tell them what the game meant to the folks back home, but he couldn’t get the words out.
Sunday’s final was a back-and-forth affair, with all the tension and crowd energy one would expect from a Sweet 16 game. Virginia’s experience over an Illinois team with eight new players, including four freshmen guards, was the difference down the stretch. Beekman finished with 17 points, four rebounds and three assists to win the MVP award, and the Cavs outscored the Illini from the foul line 25-4. Their advantage from the stripe was 27-12 against Baylor. It was vintage Virginia basketball.
Franklin was the star on Friday, when he had 26 points on 3 of 6 3-point shooting. He, too, had to overcome the haunting image of seeing Perry at the movie theater the night before he was killed. Three-point shooting was a major weakness for Virginia last season, largely because Franklin shot just 29.6 percent from behind the arc after making 42.4 percent as a junior at Indiana. Two days after he decided to transfer to Virginia, Franklin underwent surgery on his right ankle. He was sidelined for three months, which cost him vital time to hone his skills and strengthen his body. That, combined with the unfamiliarity of playing for a new team in a challenging system, led to the shooting woes. “It weighed on me mentally, because I felt like I wasn’t doing the job they brought me in to do,” Franklin said.
Healthy and determined, Franklin got to work over the summer. His aunt, Coquese Washington, who is the head women’s basketball coach at Rutgers, arranged for him to work with former NBA legend John Lucas in Houston, where Franklin’s family had just moved. He also spent two weeks working in Indianapolis with a trainer, and then spent another week in Miami. “Five straight weeks of training and nothing else,” he said. Franklin made a small mechanical change, delivering the ball more from his right side, but the main benefit was time and repetitions. Through his first four games this season he is making a career-best 45.5 percent from 3. “The main thing was just getting confidence,” Franklin said. “I needed to get mentally right and back to who I was when they recruited me.”
Virginia’s other main issue last season was depth. The Cavs ranked 350th in the country in bench minutes, according to KenPom.com, so Bennett went into the transfer portal and landed Vander Plas. Bennett was familiar with Vander Plas, to put it mildly. Not only did Vander Plas play for the Ohio team that beat Virginia in the first round of the 2021 NCAA Tournament, but his father, Dean, played with Bennett at Wisconsin-Green Bay. Vander Plas is named for Bennett’s father, Dick — his full first name is Bennett — who was the coach of that team. “I thought, if I can’t recruit the kid who was named after my father, and his mom and dad were at my wedding, then I can’t recruit anybody,” Bennett said.
This being Virginia, defense will always be the calling card, and Bennett was not pleased that Baylor scored 42 points over the final 12 minutes. “Defense is going to be key for us, because you can’t always rely on your offense,” Bennett said. The Cavaliers showed their usual efficiency in Las Vegas, but this team has the potential to be more disruptive than many of Bennett’s past editions. The Cavs got eight steals in each of the two games, after averaging just 5.7 per game last season, which ranked 265th nationally.
It remains to be seen whether Virginia can keep this momentum going, but there is no doubt that this team, which was already older and more experienced than most, acquired a heavy dose of wisdom over the last seven days. The Cavaliers left Las Vegas confident that they can compete for an ACC championship and play deep into the NCAA Tournament. In the meantime, they can take heart knowing their success served as a brief salve for a community that is hurting very badly. “We went through so many different emotions this week,” Beekman said. “Having all of that in the back of our minds was a real motivation. We know that the fans and all the people back home look to us for a lot of things. We want to continue to shine for them.”
