Editor’s Note: Theo Moll is Sports’ Senior Columnist for the 2026 spring semester. His columns are published biweekly.
As the final hours of 2025 ticked away, Virginia basketball faced the impossible. A hurried heave was all that stood between Coach Ryan Odom and a New Year’s Eve loss to rival Virginia Tech. Down two points with a mere 3.6 seconds remaining in double overtime, the Cavaliers were set to inbound from the opposing baseline. The clock above Virginia’s far-away basket would soon begin ticking — its fateful buzzer likely the death knell for a Cavalier team that had come so close to victory.
Odom’s team wasted no time moving the ball to half court — with a soaring pass that looked more like it had been thrown by Virginia baseball’s Harrison Didawick than graduate forward Devin Tillis. An abridged game of hot potato then sent possession from freshman forward Thijs De Ridder to graduate guard Malik Thomas. With what little time remained on the clock, Thomas let loose an unbalanced jumper from the right wing. What would have been a “long two” missed the basket entirely.
Enter freshman guard Chance Mallory. Mallory, abandoned by his defender with Thomas’ seemingly game-ending field goal attempt, had cut towards the hoop. He jumped. Soaring through the air, Mallory caught the errant shot, laying it in for a game-extending buzzer-beater. The play resembled a drawn-up alley-oop, rather than a last-ditch acrobatic effort.
Embraced by senior guard Dallin Hall, Mallory was a superhero — the emblem emblazoned on his chest not a red “S” but an orange “VIRGINIA”. Saved by their freshman phenom, the Cavaliers were headed to a third overtime. And though Virginia would go on to lose that contest, it was clear that the fit between Mallory, Odom and the Cavalier program had begun to pay dividends.
Chance Mallory’s name frequently fluttered around the Charlottesville basketball scene long before Virginia’s now-freshman took the floor at John Paul Jones Arena. The guard is a product of local private school St. Anne’s-Belfield, the alma mater of Cavalier legends Chris Long, Connor Shellenberger, Kymora Johnson and others. Watch Mallory’s high school highlights, and it is easy to see why Virginia sought him out. There, the Charlottesville native topped the program leaderboard in career points, assists, steals and wins. But Mallory’s journey to Virginia was not free of obstacles.
The guard committed to the Cavaliers for the first time — yes, the first time — in September of 2024, pledging his allegiance to a then-Tony Bennett-led Virginia team. But in the whirlwind following Bennett’s retirement, Mallory elected to reopen his recruitment. Months later, the No. 65 recruit in the class of 2025 reannounced that he would stay in Charlottesville.
A student-athlete’s decision to play for their local school is a victory for any program and its fanbase. Supporters relish the opportunity to cheer on a hometown hero, while the athlete has a chance to play in front of family and friends. In Mallory’s case, however, that choice meant even more. His recommitment represented a vote of confidence in a freshly-hired Odom — a much-needed affirmation to a fanbase still grieving the loss of its beloved former captain. But the quick walk from Mallory’s high school court to his college one is not all that makes his coupling with Odom and the Cavaliers ideal.
There has long existed one large — or perhaps quite the opposite — disclaimer that will follow Mallory through his basketball career.
He stands well below six feet tall.
Mallory is listed at 5-foot-10 on the Cavalier roster, good for the shortest men’s basketball player in the ACC. He often shares the court with Virginia’s seven-foot centers in freshman Johann Grünloh and senior Ugonna Onyenso, and he stands five inches shorter than the Cavaliers’ next-smallest rotation player — graduate guard Jacari White. Because such height exists across college basketball, some systems are simply incompatible with the undersized guard.
Odom’s is not one of them.
In fact, few coaches have a track record commensurate with that of Virginia’s helmsman when it comes to working with small guards. Look no further than Odom’s tenure as a head coach at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
In Odom’s final two years at UMBC, the team featured 5-foot-2 guard Darnell Rogers — believed to be the shortest scholarship player to ever play Division I basketball. And Rogers was far from a benchwarmer. Before suffering a 2019 season-ending injury, the guard logged over 14 points per game. The campaign following, Rogers started every matchup, earning an All-Defensive conference nod in the process.
The peerlessly undersized Rogers is far from Odom’s only undersized guard, though. Jason Nelson, a 5-foot-10 guard, served an important bench role throughout the 2023-24 season at Virginia Commonwealth. Phillip Russell, a guard standing at six feet, started for Odom’s 2024-25 VCU team. The undersized guard is not new to Odom — nor is the phenomenon new to the Cavalier program.
Before there was Chance Mallory, there was Kihei Clark. Clark, a guard listed at 5-foot-10, became a starter for the Cavaliers halfway through his 2018-19 freshman season — a title he would not relinquish in any of the following four campaigns. Through those five seasons, Clark received All-ACC Third Team, All-ACC Defensive Team and All-ACC Honorable Mention honors.
Perhaps just as importantly, Clark provided Virginia with a sense of continuity. The guard was one of just two players to spend all five of those seasons with the Cavaliers. Through Clark’s 2018-23 tenure, this minimized the number of players relearning Bennett’s packline defense. Under Odom, it could mean something much different — but equally important.
Amidst the revolving door of student-athletes spurred on by college sports’ transfer portal, Mallory has an opportunity to become the epitome of stability for a program that entirely lacked it as recently as last summer.
Virginia’s roster currently holds four graduate students and a senior, the five of whom constitute a majority of Odom’s traditional nine-man rotation. Grünloh and De Ridder, two of the remaining four, both project well to the NBA — at least in coming seasons, if not this one — such that their tenures in orange and blue may be limited. Junior forward Sam Lewis exhausted two years of eligibility at Toledo, leaving him with just one remaining following the 2025-26 campaign.
That leaves Mallory — the Cavaliers’ undersized hometown hero.
If the fateful Virginia Tech contest were not evidence enough, the guard has put to rest any height-related concerns in his first season of Virginia basketball. Mallory — currently third in the ACC in steals — has already become a problem for opposing players on defense. The guard, too, is the Cavaliers’ fourth-leading scorer, providing a spark off the bench.
Most surprisingly, Mallory has made his presence known on the glass, standing at No. 5 in both total rebounds and offensive rebounds for the best rebounding team in the ACC. Undersized as he may be, the guard has earned such a position, not through size, but through effort on both ends.
Virginia may reap the benefits of such effort for more than just this season. Through hundreds of roster spots across 30 NBA teams, there exists exactly one player listed at Mallory’s height or shorter. Impressive in-game numbers aside, it is thus unlikely that he departs Charlottesville for the professional level any time soon — especially with the advent of NIL now providing student-athletes a financial incentive to remain at the college level.
This potential for continuity is highly important for the Cavaliers in the long run. What matters right now, though, is that Mallory can cut to the basket with time expiring to finish an unplanned, game-saving alley-oop — and he can do it as a freshman.
The results of Mallory’s marriage with Virginia and Coach Odom speak for themselves. If Virginia is lucky, it could be a multi-year union.
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