A Reflection at the End of Clergy Appreciation Month, 2024

New wine must be put into fresh wineskins.

Luke 5:38

From 2005 to 2014, I had the immense blessing of serving as the pastor of Crozet United Methodist Church. Crozet is situated in Albemarle County, about a dozen miles from the grounds of the University of Virginia.

One of the wonderful things about serving in that particular community was its connection to UVA. In fact, I quickly realized that if I could schedule my pastoral visitation just right, I would see most of the men’s ACC basketball tournament in March. In every home and hospital room, the games were on the television and at some point, they would inevitably become part of the conversation.

And to be clear, no one ever turned off these games simply because the pastor was in the room.

 In March of 2009, the Cavaliers received a new head coach, a thirty-nine-year-old man named Tony Bennett. His previous position had been as the head coach of the men’s basketball program at Washington State University. He was humble and kind with a magnetic personality that immediately brought out the best in everyone around him, attributes that would quickly win over the notoriously hard-to-please UVA faithful. He would need this support as he took this position. The last time the Cavaliers had a men’s basketball team as bad as the one he inherited was two years before he was born.

“He’s too good,” a parishioner told me one afternoon. “We will never be able to keep him.”

Yet keep him they did. Bennett coached at Virginia for fifteen years, winning just under 73% of the 500 games his team played during that time. He coached the Cavaliers through the humiliation of becoming the first number one seed to lose to a lowest-ranked number sixteen seed in the men’s NCAA tournament in 2018, and he coached them to redemption as they won the national championship the following year. 

I remember his first words when he was interviewed immediately after that victory in 2019. With confetti still falling from the rafters, Bennett leaned into the microphone and said, “Coaches tend to receive too much blame when teams lose and too much credit when they win.”

Humble and kind, bringing out the best in everyone around him. 

And now it is all over. 

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