Virginia players bonded while stuck on a Paris elevator for 45 minutes
Of all the teams who traveled abroad this summer for an exhibition tour, few got closer than Virginia during its August trip to Europe.
Twelve Cavaliers players spent more than 45 minutes stuck between floors on an elevator at a Radisson Hotel in Paris until a maintenance crew finally freed them.
It wasn't entirely the Virginia players' fault since the listed capacity on the elevator was 13 people. What they failed to take into account was that 12 college basketball players weighing a total of more than 2,400 pounds probably overloaded the elevator more than 13 average-sized Parisians.
"Twelve of them is probably the equivalent of, I don't know, 15 normal people," Virginia coach Tony Bennett said in a video of the incident posted on the Virginia athletics site Tuesday. "I think they learned their lesson. We talked about team bonding and being close. I think that's as close as you can get for an hour in that tight a spot."
The elevator mishap wasn't the only adversity Virginia faced during its trip to Belgium, the Netherlands and France. The Cavaliers lost three of five games, including one game in which the official scorekeeper awarded the French team an extra third-quarter bucket to the dismay of Bennett.
"Two points in a game like that, that changes the whole game, and that's frustrating, because we were there for the win," Bennett told VirginiaSports.com. "I don't care if you're international or in the states, you gotta keep the right score."
Between that and getting stuck in an elevator, don't expect Virginia to travel to France next time it's eligible for a foreign trip. Perhaps the Cavaliers are better off remaining on American soil.
(Thanks, College Basketball Nation)
