Rider freshman AB Coulibaly took the inbounds pass, and tried to get the ball to point guard Kristupas Kepezinskas, only, UVA freshman guard Chance Mallory was in the way.
Mallory, who played his high-school ball practically across the street from JPJ, at St. Anne’s-Belfield, and was the first recruit of the new Virginia head coach, Ryan Odom, a day after Odom took the job, broke up the pass, knocking the ball toward the endline, then dove to save the ball back inbounds in front of the ‘Hoos bench.
Kepezinskas recovered, got the ball past halfcourt, dished the ball out to junior guard Caleb Smith, then got it back as Mallory picked him back up on defense in the frontcourt.
Daniel Helterhoff, a 6’10”, 240-pound forward, tried to free Kepezinskas with a screen at the top of the key, but Mallory, listed at all of 5’10”, 186, fought through it, and hounded the living hell out of Kepezinskas, himself also a freshman, like Mallory, in his first college game.
Poor kid – Kepezinskas, that is – didn’t know what to do.
With no one to get the ball to, Kepezinskas – as the home crowd reached a fever pitch, realizing what was going on, that they were seeing something they’d seen before, and didn’t think they’d see again – took what ACC Network play-by-play man Kevin DiDomenico called a “circus shot” from the left elbow, about 14 feet out.
The shot hit the side of the backboard, missing the rim completely, and Mallory gathered the rebound.
Five seconds later, Thijs de Ridder connected from three, Rider called a timeout – and somewhere out there, I imagined Ty Jerome, now making millions in the NBA, recalling the time in practice in 2018 when another freshman listed at 5’10” hounded him so badly in a practice that Jerome grabbed the ball and flung it at his head in frustration.
Chance Mallory making life tough for Rider point guard
Kihei Clark never made it to the NBA – he’s bounced around as a pro, with stints in the G League and Japan – but there isn’t a national-championship banner hanging in JPJ if Clark wasn’t the pest on defense in a three-man backcourt with Jerome and Kyle Guy, taking the opponent’s point guard to free Jerome up to run the offense.
I remember Clark’s debut game – a 73-42 UVA win over Towson State on Nov. 6, 2018, in which Clark had four points and six assists in 24 minutes – and thinking, what the hell is this tiny kid doing on the floor with these future NBA dudes all around him?
You could almost ask the same with Mallory, even though he was a four-star recruit, with tons of P4 offers.
Odom worked the transfer portal hard for guards, and came up with some dudes – former BYU starting point guard Dallin Hall, a pair of grad students at the two, Malik Thomas and Jacari White, who, along with junior Sam Lewis, were all double-digit scorers at their previous stops, with a returning four-star, Elijah Gertrude, also in the mix.
It would be easy to slot Mallory in as the sixth guard in Odom’s rotation.
Based on his minutes in the Rider game, and the Oct. 24 exhibition win over a P4, Villanova, Mallory is the third man in that six-man group, and the backup to Hall at the point.
Odom is putting a lot of trust in Mallory early – as Tony Bennett did with Clark.
“Chance has played a lot of big games, you know, in his life. I know this is a different stage and all of that, but I thought he handled it really well,” Odom said after the Rider game, in which Mallory had 11 points, four rebounds, three steals and an assist in 24 minutes – 24 minutes, just like Clark got in his debut game as a freshman in 2018.
There’s a reason Bennett was high on Mallory – TB recruited and got a commitment from the hometown kid before suddenly stepping down as head coach on the eve of the 2024-2025 season.
Mallory pulled back on his commitment, but was still a priority for the coaching staff – getting regular updates from Carla Williams, the athletics director, as UVA Athletics worked its way through its search for a new head coach.
When Odom was introduced to the public at a JPJ press conference on March 24, Mallory was there with his family in the stands.
Monday night, he was on the floor, literally.
“It was just a lot of fun, just being able to play in front of my parents, they were out there, my aunts and my uncle. It was just cool to play in front of everybody, a lot of hometown people here, so that was a cool experience. It was definitely a surreal feeling, a lot of lot of emotions, nervousness, excitement, just wanted to be out there and play,” an understated Mallory said.
Kihei Clark was a tough one to get more than a few words out of, too, as I recall.
Chance Mallory reminds me of another 5’10
