Virginia basketball player profile: Thijs De Ridder is ready to carry the load

A year ago, Thijs De Ridder was not sure he belonged.

He had spent five seasons as a professional in Belgium and Spain, and he was the last piece of Ryan Odom’s first roster in the summer of 2025, spending much of it waiting on NCAA clearance. He had not been in a classroom in four years. Home was no longer a one-hour flight away. And he had no idea how his game would translate.

Advertisement

“I was just scared, really nervous in the beginning a little bit,” De Ridder told the Associated Press at ACC Tipoff this month. “I didn’t even know that my style of basketball would fit in the college basketball part.”

It fit. De Ridder started all 36 games, led Virginia in scoring and rebounding and became the first Cavalier to make the All-ACC first team since Sam Hauser in 2021. This month, the league’s media voted him ACC Preseason Player of the Year with 30 of 48 votes, and he was the only unanimous pick for the preseason All-ACC first team. The last Cavalier to win the preseason award was Malcolm Brogdon, who shared it with North Carolina’s Marcus Paige in 2015-16. De Ridder is the first Cavalier to win it outright.

Now the workload will get even heavier. Virginia is ranked No. 9 in the AP preseason poll and was picked second in the ACC, but Ugonna Onyenso and Devin Tillis are gone from the frontcourt, and Odom does not have much behind his top two bigs. De Ridder was already one of Virginia’s go-to options last year. This season, he will likely be asked to do it for more minutes than ever, in his final college season, with an NBA future riding on it.

Advertisement

This is the ninth installment of Streaking the Lawn’s preseason profile series. Our profiles of Chance Mallory, Christian Harmon, Jurian Dixon, Kalu Anya, Sam Lewis, Elijah Gertrude, Martin Carrere and Johann Grünloh can be found here.

Year one: Virginia’s go-to scorer

De Ridder did not take long to answer his own question. In his college debut against Rider, he had 21 points and 10 rebounds, team highs in both.

By the end…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/virginia-basketball-player-profile-thijs-000339657.html

Author :

Publish date : 2026-10-27 00:03:00

Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source.