My trip to UVA
In 2016, right after I turned 16 years old, I had the opportunity to go play for the NBA Global Academy in Australia to develop both my life and basketball skills. I made this decision to put me one step closer to pursuing what I have always wanted since I started playing basketball, which is to be the best player I can be. When my time with the Academy was coming to an end, I had to start thinking about what I wanted to do next to keep pursuing my goal. Many options could be pursued, and one of them was going to play college basketball in the United States. At the time, I had no idea about college basketball, what it was like, or what any of the universities were like. However, I knew that if I ended up at the right place, it would be a great path for me to pursue what I want. Since I didn’t know anything, my coaches from the Academy helped me a lot in the process. Together we selected four “top” schools for me to visit and kept one visit open just in case another opportunity that would be a good fit for me came up.
During the last day of my last visit, I got a message from Kody Stattman, who I had been living around and practicing with for the last 6 months at that time, asking me what I was doing in America. I told him that I was doing my college visits, and shortly after he got back to me saying that his coach from the college he had committed to was interested in me, but he didn’t know I was an incoming freshman for the 2018-2019 season. I told him I was tired of my visits and didn’t wanna deal with any of that myself, especially because I didn’t know if it would be the right fit for me. So, I sent him the contact from one of my coaches and told him to get in contact with them about it. About 10 minutes after that conversation, my coach called me very excited telling me that we left one spot open just in case an opportunity of this caliber came up and that if I wanted to, I could go visit the University of Virginia the very next day. At that moment, I was ready to go back to Australia because I was very exhausted from all my visits and traveling. However, I trust these people with everything, so I listened to their advice and went to visit UVA.
The coaches from the Academy told me that I was going to a place that is built with really nice and genuine people, and had one of the most liked coaches in college basketball. I believed every bit of what they said, but before I could say that, I had to see and experience it myself. During my visit, I saw that UVA was everything my Academy coaches said it would be and more, so it made me very excited. Coach Bennett and the whole coaching staff were very nice and genuine, but weirdly enough, what I liked the most was the fact that they were very honest with me. Why is that weird? You may ask, and it is because Coach Bennett looked me in the eyes and told me that in my first year I would not play much, and I might even redshirt (which he had to explain what it meant because as you could probably guess, I didn’t know what it meant). As a basketball player or as an athlete, you never want to hear your coach telling you that you will probably not compete, but for me, it made me gain a lot of trust in him right away. I was eager to get to work, and he told me that if I was ready to start soon, we would have even more time to work on areas that needed improvement and get better at my strong suits. At the end of this visit, I felt very content and excited about the experience because I could tell the coaching staff were really good people and very honest with me. Furthermore, they were not “pushy” with me about making a decision, like some of the other places were. Ultimately, all of these factors led me to tell Coach Bennett the good news during my last night on the way back to the hotel from his house: I had decided to commit to the University of Virginia.