Robert Friddell

Intangible: the Story Behind Virginia's Bigger-than-basketball Program Robert Friddell

Think somewhere between a sneeze and a seed.




The form, emotion, and pace feel like a sneeze: impulsive, frenetic, comforting, and starts and stops on dimes. The seed is the content solely derived from twenty-six first-person accounts of Virginia Men's Basketball from 2009, when head coach Tony Bennett and his staff arrived in Charlottesville, until 2019, when the program won its first National Championship, and after it became the first #1 seed to lose to a #16 seed in the NCAA Tournament the year prior.




Back in his coaching days, Dick Bennett, Tony's father, created a value system known as the Five Pillars (Humility, Passion, Unity, Servanthood, and Thankfulness). Tony continued the tradition at Virginia and gradually transformed the culture of the cellar-dwelling program he inherited into an elite, sustainable family that develops men of character, patience, potential, and tenacity to unlock that potential in basketball and beyond.




I spent a year-plus gathering video interviews averaging 45 minutes, and the initial transcriptions spanned over 225,000 words. I took myself out, culled for quality, humor, adversity, and wisdom, and edited the remnants for clarity while keeping them raw enough to mimic natural conversation. From there, I broke them into paragraphs and lines arranged in sections, themes, and years, and proceeded to stitch them together to form a collective memoir organized into an oral history of a decade.




The resulting 90,000 words let the players, coaches, staff members, and student managers tell their own tale. After the National Championship Game in 2019, journalists from all over the country hammered the two-year turnaround from the biggest upset in college basketball history in 2018, but that comeback story doesn't happen without the previous eight seasons' teams building upon one another and providing the platform for the National Championship to occur.




So, I made this: intangible.