Truitt Sunderland leaned on his lacrosse sticks. He glanced up at the empty metal bleachers as he spoke.
This had been his last regular-season game ever at Klöckner Stadium. His Senior Day. Before the game, he had walked out with his parents, Athan and Kate, hugging the coaching staff, smiling for a picture.
After four full years, he might never again play lacrosse in this stadium. His coach knew what it meant.
“It’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is it,’” Coach Lars Tiffany said.
Senior Day, for the most part, still carries a heavy impact in non-revenue sports like men’s lacrosse. But it is no longer such an emotional night for all basketball and football players honored. Many still have a graduate year. Or they are walking out representing a school they only moved to this year. Or they have been at the school four or five years and yet, most of their fellow seniors have not.
Senior Day? Try ‘Senior and Graduate Student Day.’ Or try ‘Here for a Year Day.’
Virginia football honored 56 players this season — 31 of them were graduate students. The men’s basketball team honored five players, and four of them were graduate students. They had all already had, at some other place, a Senior Day.
Of the 56 football players, 36 of them were transfers, and of the five men’s basketball players, all of them had first touched Grounds less than a year before their Senior Day.
“With the new style of college basketball, everybody bouncing around from place to place, you never get that connectivity,” graduate guard Malik Thomas said after his Senior Day.
The connective tissue — between a player and his teammates, a player and his school and the fans — never fully forms in the revenue sports. It renders Senior Day, once a stirring culmination of four years, a little flat. It can still be nice. But it is not the same.
“I couldn’t imagine one or two years,” Tiffany said. “That feels so different. I don’t want that model. I love the four to five year model.”
The old model is still visible at Virginia, down the road from John Paul Jones Arena and Scott Stadium, at places like Klöckner and Palmer Park.
The softball team held its Senior Day April 26. It honored five players with framed jerseys and flowers in a ceremony at the intimate Palmer Park. All of them came here as freshmen. They joined a program two seasons removed from a record of 15-33, then stayed and shepherded it to the national rankings and new heights. This meant something.
“The senior class is why we are where we are,” Coach Joanna Hardin said. “There’s no question about that. They committed here. They stayed really faithful.”
It is possible that a similar atmosphere can be restored to revenue sports, that the stratification is not forever. Men’s basketball Coach Ryan Odom is trying. His team last season, constructed from a raid of the transfer portal, formed an unusual bond in just one year. Odom and his staff worked hard to make it. But as Odom knows, one bonded year can never be the same as four.
At his introductory press conference last spring, he described a core philosophy.
“Retain your players,” Odom said. “There’s nothing more important than retention. Because they understand the culture.”
He is doing it. He is retaining his guys. All 10 players with eligibility remaining are returning, a feat almost unheard in modern college basketball. And so maybe it is the next step in thickening that connective tissue and making a more meaningful Senior Day.
Maybe in March 2029, freshmen Chance Mallory and Martin Carrere and Silas Barksdale will lift their framed jerseys on a packed Senior Day. The gym might be stuffed with orange and blue and maybe some crimson for Mallory from St. Anne’s-Belfield School, and it will be the culmination of four years.
For now, Senior Day is most poignant at programs like men’s lacrosse, where most of the team’s players have spent four years together. They moved into first-year dorms together. They grew up together.
“Us all going through all the hard stuff, first, second year, whatever,” senior defenseman John Schroter said. “And kind of all uniting together, Senior Day, last night of the season. It's pretty special.”
On the team’s Senior Day, a few players stopped their warmups to stare across the grass at the video board. It showed messages from parents and friends, recorded from homes, from office buildings, shot from close up and far away, all to the gist of, “We’re so proud of you. What a ride.”
The ceremony featured underclassmen applauding the seniors and their flower-toting parents. Tiffany’s tradition is to start all his seniors, and backup goalie Kyle Morris’s saves triggered cheers louder than for any goal — except the one scored in the fourth quarter by senior attackman Burke MacFarlane.
Even still, the day lacked some of the finality of old. Of the 11 players the men’s lacrosse team honored, three of them, and maybe four or five, will return next season.
Not Sunderland. That’s why it meant so much. Maybe that is why he was so patient.
He emerged from the locker room postgame and did an interview with one reporter. Then he waited calmly to do another interview, off to the side, while Tiffany held court.
He leaned on those sticks. His gaze floated around the field. Finally the head coach wrapped up, and Sunderland greeted the second reporter.
He fielded a question about Senior Day.
“Taking it all in,” Sunderland said.
Cierra Lyles contributed reporting.
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