Documentary series gives all-access pass to new era in UVA men’s basketball

When the well-produced segment debuts this week, just know it all began with a simple directive from the man sitting with a camera in the passenger seat of Ryan Odom’s SUV.

“Just tell me some stories,” Jonathan Hillyard told Odom before they embarked on a two-hour tour around Charlottesville that relived the first-year University of Virginia men’s basketball coach’s childhood.

With Ryan behind the wheel and his father, Dave, a Cavaliers’ assistant coach in the 1980s, in the back seat, Hillyard and another member of his video crew captured several trips down memory lane – from the Odoms’ old home in the Lewis Mountain neighborhood to where Ryan attended elementary school.

The adventure will be woven into the first episode of “Proving Grounds: Preseason with Virginia Men’s Basketball,” a four-part series that documents the start of the Odom era at John Paul Jones Arena. The show premieres Thursday at 6:30 p.m. on FOX Virginia in Charlottesville and across Virginia Athletics’ digital channels, including YouTube, with new 30-minute episodes coming each month as the Wahoos build toward their 2025-26 season-opening game in November.

🎥 COMING SOON: Proving Grounds - Preseason with Virginia Men's Basketball, Ep. 1
Presented by @CHOAirport
🗓️ August 21st
🕢 6:30 p.m.
📺 @FOXVirginiaWCAV
🖥️ All @VirginiaSports platforms

🔸⚔️🔹 #gohoos pic.twitter.com/VmiJtY944P

— Virginia Men's Basketball (@UVAMensHoops) August 12, 2025

Virginia Athletics partnered with Hillyard, the owner and director of the award-winning, Atlanta-based Connext Media, to announce the next chapter of Virginia men’s basketball in an all-access format inspired by “Hard Knocks,” the popular HBO series that annually covers an NFL team’s training camp.

Familiar to Grounds, Hillyard, an athletics video coordinator from 2011 to 2013, recently helped UVA with the launch of its “Our Place” campaign that illuminated the Wahoos’ excellence in women’s sports.

Hillyard’s crew arrived in late June for its latest assignment and began conducting more than two dozen interviews with UVA men’s basketball players, coaches and staff members, as well as Director of Athletics Carla Williams and broadcaster John Freeman, among other auxiliary characters.

UVA senior transfer guard Malik Thomas sits down with Connext Media’s Jonathan Hillyard during filming of the upcoming “Proving Grounds” documentary. The series’ intention is to introduce a new era of Wahoo men’s hoops to fans. (Photo by Jamie Holt, Virginia Athletics)

Cameras have rolled for both on-court activity – “When we’re there,” Hillyard said, “we typically have a player or coach mic’d up for practice” – and off-court stories.

“We went to Devin Tillis and Elijah Gertrude’s apartment to meet the cats they adopted from the local SPCA,” Hillyard said.

Tillis, a graduate transfer from the University of California, Irvine, is one of 12 additions to UVA’s roster, and Gertude, one of three returning Hoos, didn’t play last season while recovering from a torn ACL.

Among the main intentions of “Proving Grounds” is to introduce fans – many perhaps still adjusting to change after Tony Bennett’s sudden retirement last fall – to a brand-new team.

“It’s totally been top of mind for us,” said Mike Szlamowicz, UVA’s assistant athletics director of sport and broadcast production. “We’ve known we must be really focused and conscious of allowing our fans a look inside to what this is going to look like, who these players are, who these coaches are, and what direction the program is going.”

First-year UVA men’s basketball coach Ryan Odom grins during his team’s tour of Grounds that was captured by a film crew for the upcoming “Proving Grounds” documentary. (Photo by Olivia McLucas, Virginia Athletics)

While Hillyard has taken on similar projects – he won an Emmy for his role in “Gamecock Confidential,” which chronicled Will Muschamp’s first season as University of South Carolina head football coach – the context around “Proving Grounds” is unique, he said.

“I’ve never done a show where basically the entire roster and coaching staff are getting to know each other on camera,” he said. “So, to see the efforts of the coaching staff to get these guys to buy in to not only what they want to do on the basketball floor, but to buy into connecting with one another, and connecting with UVA, I think it’s pretty interesting just from a human-interest standpoint.

“And from my view, they seem to be doing a pretty good job of that.”

Thursday’s episode will examine UVA’s search for Odom and what attracted the parties to one another. Odom’s well-documented admiration for the University and its surrounding area is reaffirmed in the car ride with his father.

They, indeed, told some stories, Hillyard said.

“These guys don’t have trouble putting a thought together, especially when they’re talking about things they care about,” he said.