Mad About U
Chris Graham and Patrick Hite are in the finishing stages of their first joint book project, Mad About U: Four Decades of Basketball at University Hall. It's a look back at the history of University of Virginia basketball in U-Hall, which closed to basketball after this past season.
The book will be available in early October, but visit the link above for more information about the book, including several excerpts. One of those excerpts is below. Enjoy.

Five - Starting from Scratch
The first game Dan Bonner coached at Virginia was at Mary Washington. It was Dec. 2, 1975, and Bonner, a 22-year-old graduate student, was leading the Virginia women into battle in the program’s third season as a varsity sport.
At halftime Virginia trailed home 13-12.
"I thought I was going to kill myself," said Bonner.
Virginia went on to win 41-19, but Bonner doesn’t give himself credit for some inspiring halftime talk or a great adjustment that allowed his team to prevail. Instead, in his mind, he wasn’t a very good coach at all that first season. His technical knowledge of basketball was fine. And the offensive and defensive schemes he employed worked well enough to keep the Cavaliers competitive, even win a few games. Virginia won the first five games that season and finished 12-9 overall. But Bonner admits he had things to learn as a head coach.
"I think that the biggest problem the kids had to overcome was that I was an absolute lunatic on the bench," Bonner said. "I was cursing and swearing and it was just awful."
Once the season was complete, Bonner began dating his former player and future wife, Terry Israel. He’s clear that the two never went out until the season was over – "I would have been fired on the spot" – but since Israel was a senior, when the season finished, so was her time at UVa. and the two were free to date.
During the offseason, Israel gave her former coach some advice. She told him that everyone was excited that he was the coach and they appreciated that he was taking the time to teach them the finer points of the game.
"But your mouth …" she told him.
So, the next season Bonner implemented a rule – no cursing.
"The rule was if you cursed you had to run. And if the coaches cursed they had to run. So it was just as hard for Debbie (Ryan, Bonner’s assistant) as it was for me, but we never ended up doing that."