When Leon Bond announced his commitment to play basketball at Virginia, he was sure to include a picture of himself with a big smile, one arm around Tony Bennett and the other around Dick Bennett, the father of the Cavaliers’ head coach.
The photo was taken during Bond’s early June visit to Charlottesville. It immediately got the attention of people in Bond’s native Wisconsin, where both Bennetts are notable figure.
“The Bennett name still runs deep in Wisconsin,” Bond told CavsCorner with a laugh during a phone conversation this weekend.
The truth is that the 6-foot-5 Bond has wanted to play for the younger Bennett at UVa for years. When he was in ninth grade, he made a list of the top three schools he hoped to get offers from, including Virginia. That same freshman year, he watched the Wahoos win the school’s first-ever NCAA Tournament. He's long been aware of the program’s reputation for developing both basketball players and young men.
"The biggest thing was probably the type of people they are,” Bond explained, “and that’s not knocking any other program or any other school or staff. It’s amazing what type of people they are and what they stand for, and some of the core values that I stand for are some of the core values that they stand for.”
It didn’t take long for Bond to pop up on the radar of the UVa coaching staff. He first heard from the Hoos by mail after they saw him play as a sophomore. Two minutes after coaches could contact juniors in the 2022 class, Bond got a call from Virginia.
But as that recruitment spilled into this summer, Bond began to grow anxious that he wasn’t a priority for the Virginia staff. Other schools had come through with offers but he had yet to get one from the Wahoos. When he visited UVa the first week in June, Bond was reassured by Bennett that the staff was holding off on an offer until they got to see him play in person, something they were unable to do for more than a year because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
That opportunity—and the subsequent offer—came in July at an AAU tournament in Atlanta. A few weeks later, Bond and his family were on a Zoom call with Bennett and UVa assistant Kyle Getter. They discussed the high standard Bond would be held to both on and off the court.
“We talked about what it would look like, me at Virginia," he recalled. "How this recruiting class is gonna look and how my development is gonna look. That’s when I knew that yeah, this is the place I want to be.”
Bond took a few days before picking up his phone to make that decision official, choosing the Hoos over a list of a half-dozen other schools that had made offers, including finalists Marquette and Cincinnati.
“I FaceTimed Coach and I told him that after a lot of thinking and I prayed on it, this is the spot for me,” he said. “It was real genuine how Coach reacted and he said they’re really excited. Now it’s the time to get to work. Now this is where we start to lock it in.”
Bond has spent this summer trying to improve his handle and become a more consistent shooter, and has been working with a trainer on staying locked-in at the defensive end. At 6-foot-5 and 190 pounds, Bond is slightly smaller than former UVa wing De’Andre Hunter but he believes he has the tools to be a similar two-way force for the Hoos.
“Coach Bennett and I talked about defensively, I’m gonna have to play a big part of it,” Bond said. “I have to be an elite on-floor defender, see myself guarding the best player every night. As I start cleaning up my shot—Coach Bennett will do an amazing job with cleaning up my shot—and really the flow, I can play a stretch four, I can go post up smaller guys, but then with my speed I can take on bigger guys. I think my game perfectly fits in. I’m just gonna have to pick up on the defense side of it.”
Bond played four years with the same AAU team, JH1 Elite, spurning offers from teams on the shoe circuit out of loyalty for the squad that had originally shown confidence in him. This winter, he’ll try to help Wauwatosa East win its second straight state title. He has been talking with fellow 2022 UVa commit Isaac McKneely about the potential of their incoming class and with UVa fans who have been preparing Bond for his time in Charlottesville.
“I’ve already had people telling me some of the lingo,” he said. “It took me a while to find out what a Wahoo was. It took me a minute. But it seems like they’ve really accepted me now.”
Bond chose Virginia because he believed Bennett’s program will give him the best opportunity to get where he’d like to be in five years.
“He told me there’s gonna be days where we’re pushing you hard and it’s gonna be like, ‘Man, maybe I should have taken a different route,’” Bond recalled. “But he truly believes everything happens for a reason.”
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