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In the summer of 2014, the path to the truth about Ben Vander Plas started in the middle of Wisconsin and ended 900 miles to the east. He’d enjoyed a promising freshman year at Ripon High School, and his coach thought a trip to Virginia basketball’s elite camp could put his talent in context. This was no dart thrown at a map. Vander Plas’ father, Dean, was his coach. And Dean played college hoops with Tony Bennett. He set bone-bending screens for Bennett, attended Bennett’s wedding and stole Bennett’s principles for his own program. They were teammates, and teammates have unsparing eyes.

The truth went something like this: After the camp ended, Dean asked what Bennett thought about his kid. The Cavaliers coach said there was something to him. Ben Vander Plas looked like a Division I prospect. Just maybe not the sort of prospect who could play at Virginia. But who knew? So Ben took a picture with Tony Bennett and headed home. No hard feelings left behind. “That would be hard for a friend to say to a friend,” Dean says, “but a true teammate can tell you that, right?”

Eight years later, a return visit went a bit differently. The start of a tour to find a transfer destination for Ben Vander Plas, coveted 6-8 wing who’d scored more than 1,500 points in four seasons at Ohio, effectively ended where it started — in Charlottesville. There was a spot and a role for Vander Plas at Virginia, demonstrated by Bennett via meticulous film cut-ups. There was a plan for Vander Plas at Virginia, outlined by the program’s strength coach. There was, in all, a need for Vander Plas at Virginia.

As for the old teammates? No hard truths this time. All they had left to discuss were food recs in town. “Going into the portal, it was really, really open,” Ben says, a few minutes after an early December practice with the nation’s soon-to-be No. 2 team ends. “But I think we all kind of knew that after that first one: This is where I was meant to be.”

It sure looks like a bolt of basketball kismet, hitting ground in Albemarle County this winter. Almost deserves to be, when a kid is named after his dad’s college coach and winds up playing for that coach’s son, instantly stiffening the backbone of a national title contender. Vander Plas hasn’t started a game for the 8-0 Cavaliers, who welcome No. 5 Houston to John Paul Jones Arena on Saturday. He doesn’t lead Virginia in any significant statistical category. But he is, as Bennett puts it, a “connector.” Carbon fiber, with a headband and a ’stache. A strand without which the whole thing doesn’t hold together as well.

Still, this is more like two separate stories with a shared chapter. Happy synchronicity for a few more months. Everyone smiling because it happened, and because it’s not close to over yet.

Tony Bennett and Dean Vander Plas both knew each other before they really knew each other, introductions mostly made by way of high school games viewed from the bleachers. As Dick Bennett continued the early stages of his build at Wisconsin-Green Bay in the late 1980s, he told his son about a strong 6-5 kid from Oostburg, and how he was excited to bring the kid aboard even if the offers weren’t exactly flooding in from other schools, and how Tony had to see him play in the state tournament. “I remember being like, man, that guy’s good,” Tony Bennett says now. “A winner all the way, and better than people realize.” Once Dean Vander Plas committed to Green Bay, his future inevitably included having Bennett as a teammate, which called for a bit of light research. Vander Plas connected with Keith Wall, the legendary coach at Bennett’s high school, Green Bay Preble, to get connected with Bennett. He tracked Bennett’s senior year, even making the trek to watch a heated state tournament semifinal showdown between Preble and Stevens Point — Bennett’s previous high school before his father switched coaching gigs.

Dean Vander Plas’ first impression of Tony Bennett, it turns out, would be a lasting one. “Gym rat on steroids,” is how Dean puts it now.

Across the three seasons they played together, Wisconsin-Green Bay won 62 games and cracked the NCAA Tournament bracket for the first time in 1991, very nearly making more noise after that: A first-round loss to mighty Michigan State was decided by merely two points. But, as ever, the winning was a symptom of relationships built across time, and what each player took from them. Dean Vander Plas still remembers a five-point win at then-woeful Valparaiso to close the 1990-91 regular season, one of those victories that feels like a loss. The result and a less-than-pleased Dick Bennett made for a long and dolorous bus ride back to Green Bay in the middle of winter … immediately after which Tony Bennett hit the gym and got shots up at 4 a.m. “I learned from him and others like him that you can determine the outcome of the day,” Dean says. “You don’t have to let the day determine the outcome for you. Tony is in charge of the reaction, and he gets the outcome.”

They’ll probably debate whom Dick Bennett was harder on forever. Either way, depending on the day, Dean Vander Plas and Tony Bennett agree they were targets 1 and 1A for the head coach’s ire. So they took turns sanding down the message for each other. “My dad coached me very hard — like, he was ruthless,” Tony says. “(Dean) would come alongside and be like, hey, man, I know it’s hard, but I’m here for you.” The symbiosis extended to game days. If the team’s high-scoring but smallish guard — “The only thing I think he’s ever lied about in his life is that he’s 6 feet tall,” Dean says of Tony — got pushed around and cheap-shotted by defenders, his bulkier, vengeful protector came to his aid.

Screen and re-screen, Tony. Bring him twice.

“And I was going to make sure he got the hip and the shoulder,” Dean says, “and slow the guy down a little bit.”

“Took care of me many times,” Tony says with a laugh. “I heard more spines crack when he’d set a blind back screen. It would be legal, but for real, I’d hear this ‘Oooh,’ this moan as the breath got knocked out of a guy.”

In the years after, Dean Vander Plas and Tony Bennett did what good college friends often do, weaving in and out of contact with each other, sending a note or making an appearance at the important times — the Vander Plases driving from Wisconsin to Baton Rouge, La., for the Bennetts’ wedding, or Dean making sure to be there to apply a bearhug at the funeral for Tony’s grandmother. (Sometimes nobody realized how important the times were; during the wedding trip, the Vander Plases discovered they were going to have their first son, Sam.) Some years later, when it came time to brainstorm names for their second boy, Dean and Mary Vander Plas settled on an homage to the coach whom Dean always said he often didn’t like, but always loved. The man who demonstrated the value of humility, who doubled down on the kid from Ootsburg at times Dean might not have been interested in learning the lesson. “He was hard on me, but he was patient with me,” Dean says of Dick Bennett. “He had expectations of me that I couldn’t see, but he got them out of me. I do not look like a basketball player. I look like the first baseman on your rec league softball team. And I probably looked like that in high school. But Coach saw my heart, and he used it.”

But Dean Vander Plas had a high school program to run in Ripon, and Tony Bennett wound up with college programs to lead in Pullman, Wash., and Charlottesville. Teammates? Eternally. Unconditionally. Life just precluded anything like daily check-ins.

It’s the reality scrubbing against the idea that the last few months is something like predestination: The very first time Ben Vander Plas met his father’s old running buddy from Wisconsin-Green Bay, the scion of his namesake? It was the day he walked into Virginia’s gym for that camp his dad brought him to, looking for honesty from a man more likely than anyone else to deliver it.

Their second in-person interaction was when Tony Bennett slung an arm around Ben after 13th-seeded Ohio stunned No. 4 seed Virginia and bounced the Cavaliers from the 2021 NCAA Tournament, asking Ben to point out his parents in the crowd and making sure he gave them a wave, because family relationships supersede the bitterness of a loss. The third was last summer, during Vander Plas’ visit at the tip of a consequential college tour. A family reunion, kind of. Or at least one where there is a lot to catch up on. “I didn’t know Ben super well,” Bennett says. “It wasn’t like this was a slam dunk. I joke about it — I say if I can’t recruit a guy who was named after my father, then I’m a bad recruiter. But Ben had a ton of good schools recruiting him. They really wanted him. So we tried to recruit Ben for Ben. We talked about some of the stories with our families and all that stuff, but it was (more about) opportunity and how we can help him.”

After playing more than 3,800 minutes at Ohio and starting every game in his last three seasons, with a hard stop to his college career dead ahead, it would’ve been understandable if Ben Vander Plas sought clarity on roles and minutes and all that, wherever he wound up.

He did not. Not exactly. He was calculated only in that he wanted to play professionally, somewhere, and his next destination had to demonstrate the capacity to improve him in ways to make that happen. “I was never looking for someone to be like, you’re going to play 25 minutes a game, you’re going to play 30 minutes a game,” Ben says. “I was looking more for an opportunity explained to me. This is how they could use me. This is where a team would be able to utilize what I can bring. This is where a team needs me to fill this spot. It was never just looking for a number. From the jump, I knew that wherever I was going to go, I was going to have to earn it.”

Since Virginia doesn’t do guarantees, for anyone, this put the Cavaliers’ pitch on the front foot. But the 24-year-old version of Vander Plas wanted proof of concept, not just a tour of nice facilities. He had enough self-awareness to prioritize a strength program that could get him moving more fluidly while showing him ways to prevent injuries before they happened. “I’m not the most athletically blessed person ever,” he says. Virginia strength and conditioning coach Mike Curtis checked that box with a presentation about the individualized programs he creates for each member of the roster, how it could make Vander Plas look more like a viable wing at this level and some version of the next.

The basketball staff leaned heavy into show-don’t-tell. Throughout the process, Vander Plas absorbed film clips with three stages: what he did at Ohio, how Virginia practices the same movement or concept, and how that movement or concept has been applied productively in games. The Cavaliers’ “chase shooting” drill, for example, involves managers or GAs, outfitted with long arm pads or sticks, following shooters around the perimeter. The shooter has to catch and release quick enough to avoid the block. During their sales pitch, coaches rolled clips of Vander Plas shooting off the move at Ohio … followed by video of the drill … followed by film of former Cavaliers wing Sam Hauser sinking the same type of looks in game flow.

In fact, for all the talk about the Bennett-Vander Plas connections, Hauser might’ve been the most critical name drop and reference point in this process. “He did the homework with Sam Hauser,” Dean Vander Plas says. “He bounced things off of us, but I think his respect for Sam Hauser, and that Sam verified what he was feeling, was probably more important to Ben.”

My favorite Bennett’s 😊 pic.twitter.com/u2At3ASmqI

— Dean Vander Plas (@coachdvp) October 10, 2022

Vander Plas was sold. The follow-through has helped buttress Virginia’s rotation to date. Vander Plas played at 245 pounds in his final year at Ohio. With an improved diet and a regiment that included resistance bike and medicine ball routines on top of regular training and practices, Vander Plas trimmed down to 230 by the first day of the season. It’s enabled him to be a viable option to guard upper-shelf college threes and fours. “There were a couple times in practice where we would be doing one-on-one drills or three-on-three drills, and after a segment I would just think to myself, ‘I’m definitely a lot better at that than I was when I first got here, or that had been in the past, this is definitely paying off,’” Vander Plas says.

Meanwhile, Bennett and the staff fine-tuned Vander Plas’ shot all summer, coaching him to keep his shoulders forward and his elbow in and his follow-through straight. The results early on? A true shooting percentage (.588) and offensive rating (120.2, per KenPom) that are career-best and both second to Kadin Shedrick among Virginia rotation regulars. His turnover rate (8.8 percent) is the lowest in that cohort, too. The raw numbers (7.6 points, 4.4 rebounds, 1.6 assists per game) are modest, but fit and efficiency are the critical variables in whatever minutes he logs. Vander Plas has delivered on both counts. Put another way: On a per-40-minute basis, he’s essentially the guy he’s always been.

Which, this time around, is precisely what Virginia needed. “He’s just a really good player,” Bennett says, sounding suspiciously like the high schooler who evaluated another Vander Plas decades ago. “He can stretch the defense and knows how to play. I didn’t realize he was as good of a passer as he is. He steadies the ship. There’s not necessarily a stat for that, but some guys just steady things.”

The rest is measured in degrees of enjoyment from here.

Vander Plas’ assimilation, as a teammate and new celebrity in Charlottesville, has been hiccup-quick. He doesn’t need much interpretation of the new coach’s directions; they sometimes sound exactly like his dad’s, and Dick Bennett’s before that. He quickly found an “Apex Legends” partner in Kihei Clark and a “Valorant” compatriot in Shedrick and fellow “Fall Guys” aficionados in those two and forward Jayden Gardner. He has found willing companions on trips to the thrift store. The first week he was in town, a kindly old lady approached him at the grocery store and inquired: “You’re that Vander Plas kid I saw on Facebook the other day, aren’t you?”

“The mustache and the hair definitely help a little bit,” Vander Plas says of the recognition and the photo requests and so forth. “Some people think of it as a chore, but it’s just like, you grow up wishing you could be in a situation like that. It’s something I’m really, really thankful for.”

And while the new house way up in Eagle River, Wis., remains a work in progress, Dean and Mary Vander Plas have made north central Virginia their temporary home, determined to miss as little as possible. Arguably in every sense.

As Dean sat with his old teammate during the recruiting process, Tony Bennett advised him that Charlottesville is a sneaky good food town. He then dispensed recommendations Dean Vander Plas has been only too happy to verify. He’s partial to Aberdeen Barn Steak House and the Italian food at Tavola, but the deep-fried Oreo at Jack Brown’s might transcend all. “It was amazing,” Dean says. “The head coach, yeah, he’s picky when it comes to food, but he’s got a wide palette. He hasn’t led me astray yet.” There’s also, you know, the basketball. And the confluence of previous lives with the one his son lives now, and the surreality of all of it.

At a dinner in Las Vegas following Virginia’s two-win weekend there in November, a former Green Bay teammate in attendance noted that Dean Vander Plas was very lucky to have Tony Bennett coach his son.

Dean considered that an understatement. “​​It’s been an amazing thing for his mom and I to watch, how Ben is learning from Tony, how Tony is investing in Ben,” Dean says. “It is really cool for me. But I’m glad we went about it the way we did where it was Ben’s decision, and Ben needed to do what was right for him.”

Dad has offered one nudge along the way, though.

On Dean’s office desk sits a picture of his wife and his older son at the Final Four in 2019, smiling in the aftermath of Virginia’s redemptive national championship with the scoreboard in the backdrop. Notably absent is Dean himself. He couldn’t convince his then-employer to excuse him from an executive retreat in Colorado. Dean wound up watching his old friend Tony climb a ladder and cut down nets from a bar in Denver, reveling in his first title celebration.

So he’s let Ben know: He doesn’t want to miss the second one.

(Illustration: Sean Reilly / The Athletic; Photos: G Fiume, Ryan M. Kelly / Getty Images)