Basketball
John Paul Jones Arena opened in the Fall of 2006 and is the current venue for the men's and women's basketball teams. At its recent height in the 1980s, the men's basketball team was better than perennial power Duke and second only to UNC in that decade's cumulative ACC standings. The 1990s and 2000s have seen a bit of a slide for the program to the middle of the pack in the conference, but the hiring of coach Dave Leitao along with the 2006 opening of John Paul Jones Arena led to a short return to prominence, with the 2006-2007 team winning a share of the ACC regular season title and making it to the second round of the 2007 NCAA Tournament. The new arena is one of the three largest on-campus facilities in the Atlantic Coast Conference, with the only bigger arenas belonging to universities with far greater student populations. Dave Leitao was fired following the 2008-2009 season, and Tony Bennett, who had been the head coach of the Washington St. Cougars, was hired. The previous facility, University Hall, was the smallest in the ACC until the addition of Miami (FL) to the conference.
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Famous quotes containing the word basketball:
“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
—Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)