Maryland's first Final Four appearance marks a new high for coach Gary Williams and his never-say-quit seniors.
Before the start of the men's basketball season, The Sun newspaper in Baltimore ran a special section that featured a cover shot of the Terps' starting line-up and this headline: "With the deepest, most talented team of the Gary Williams era, the Maryland Terrapins are ranked high and aiming higher, with sights set on the Final Four."
It was a rave review, but then reality set in. The season sputtered early with two losses in the Maui Classic tournament in Hawaii, then got back on track with five of six regular-season wins, followed by a devastating overtime loss to Duke at home and, even worse, a 74-71 loss at home to Florida State, the last-place team in the Atlantic Coast Conference.
"I thought that after the Florida State game, the one thing we had to do was get our confidence back," says Williams. "That's my job as a coach to make sure that the players knew that I was confident in them because that has to take place first before your players can get confident."
A 12-year coaching veteran and Maryland alumnus, Williams '68 turned to another coach who knows something about comebacks: Brian Billick, coach of the 2001 Super Bowl champs, the Baltimore Ravens.
Williams says that Billick talked to the Terps about the disastrous November of their championship season when the Ravens didn't score a single touchdown. They took that low and used it as a motivator for the rest of the season. "It applied to our situation, and it's always good to get a different voice as long as the players respect it," says Williams, noting that it's particularly tough to be a college athlete in a region dominated by pro sports. "You're treated like pro athletes even though you're in college. In other words, you're criticized like the Redskins or the Orioles," he adds.
But the Terps were a team with inner strength and senior leadership that didn't believe it should give in to the critics. Soon things turned around, and basketball analysts and sideline pundits began to talk about a changed Gary Williams--a calmer, gentler coach. Williams doesn't buy it.
"I've been a head coach for 24 years and coaching for over 30 years. You don't change your style when you've been coaching that long. You adjust each year to the team. I may have adjusted to the team, but I didn't change my style. There's a big difference in that. ... You have to have a philosophy as a coach or else you wind up not being confident in anything that you do. And the one thing about coaching is you have to be confident that you can compete."
If the loss to Florida State was a season low, the 91-80 win on Duke's home court Feb. 27 had to be the season high. What made it all the sweeter was that each win was a true team effort. "We played nine out of 10 guys every game, and I'm glad we did because getting to the Final Four makes this the best team ever in the history of the University of Maryland," says Williams, who himself played the guard position for the Terps from 1965 to 1968.
"We had great senior leadership--Terence Morris, LaRon Cephas, Mike Mardesich. All were leaders in their own ways. The year before, we won 25 games, but there were no seniors on the team. We didn't have that resource to draw upon and I think that [leadership] really made a difference this year."
The road to the Final Four included wins over George Mason, Georgia State, Georgetown and finally top-seeded Stanford in the Elite 8, 87-73. The season came to a close in a Final Four game that pitted Maryland once again against arch-rival Duke.
One thing that can't be denied is the level of national exposure a Final Four appearance gives to a university. Says Williams, "Every living alumnus of the University of Maryland, whether they're basketball fans or not, heard about it. They heard the University of Maryland. Applications go up, the pool [of talent] gets greater, freshman class grade scores will be higher, fundraising is at an all-time high at the university."
Williams is particularly proud of the way members of the team handled the media attention. "I've had a lot of compliments from people nationally that I don't know who talked about how well our players did in interviews," he says.
When asked if cutting down the net following the Final Four game was as great as he had anticipated, Williams replies: "I really tried to enjoy the moment, but that's not easy to do in coaching.
"I've always judged each season not in terms of wins and losses but the players you have--the hand that you're dealt--and how well you do," he adds. "You can win 17 or 18 games and have a great year because you've maxed out with the players you have. Other times, you win 25 games and it didn't necessarily mean that you did as well as you could. So as a coach I judge it differently than the public does, which I guess helps keep my sanity."
Looking ahead to next season, one that includes four returning starters and another deep bench, the outlook looks rosy. "We'd like to get back to the Final Four, but there's never any guarantee," says Williams. In the NCAA tournament, if you don't shoot the ball well or have one player hurt, the season's over. "That's it. You go home," says Williams. "I always laugh at the NBA when it's the seventh game and each team has won three games. Now, they're playing that one game to see who advances and they talk about how tough it is and the pressure. Every game we play in the NCAA Tournament is like that."
Traditionally, the National Basketball Coaches Association Convention meets at the site of the NCAA Final Four. Williams remarks that he had attended 23 of the past 24 years. Each year he wondered what it would feel like to look down at the tournament floor, knowing your team was a part of the experience. Now he knows.
--DB
Buck Williams Gains "M Club" Honors
Twenty years ago, Buck Williams distinguished himself as a Maryland basketball star, earning first-team All-American honors in 1981 and two-time All-ACC honors during his junior and senior years.
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New "M Club" inductees: Basketball All-American Buck Williams '81, football and lacrosse great Sam Silber '35, and soccer and baseball standout Andy McDonald '58.
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Last May, Williams--who went on to play 18 seasons as a professional, racking up more than 16,000 points and 13,000 rebounds--received yet another honor from his alma mater as he was inducted into the university's Athletic Hall of Fame.
Williams was one of seven former athletes honored for their contributions to the university at the 50th annual "M Club" awards banquet. Other inductees included golfer Deane Beman, track and field standout Nick Kovalakides, soccer and baseball player Andy McDonald, lacrosse and football player Sam Silber, field hockey player Kim Turner and rifle standout Alice Orton.
A 1960 university graduate, Beman won the British Amateur title in 1959, followed by two U.S. Amateur titles in '60 and '63. As a professional, he won five major events in six years of Professional Golf Association play. He also served as commissioner of the PGA from 1974 to 1994 and was elected to the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2000 for lifetime achievement.
Nick Kovalakides '61 was a five-time ACC track and field champion who went on to win a medal in the Pan American Games. As an international coach, Kovalakides was involved in the World Games for the Deaf and was Maryland's track coach before serving as the director of the Campus Recreation Services and Campus Director of Visitor Services.
Andy McDonald '58 was inducted to the Hall of Fame for his baseball and soccer accomplishments at Maryland, which include playing on three ACC championship soccer teams and earning four-time All-ACC honors in baseball.
Sam Silber '35 was inducted posthumously for his contributions as a lacrosse and football player. Silber was a two-time All-American lacrosse player and also lettered in football. He was also chairman and a charter member of the Maryland Athletic Hall of Fame.
Kim Turner '88 was inducted for her role on the field hockey team at Maryland. Turner was a four-time All-ACC player and made the All-American first team three times during her college career.
Rounding out the inductees, Alice Orton '30 was posthumously named to the Hall of Fame for her outstanding career on the Terrapin rifle team.
Throughout her four years at Maryland, Orton scored 3,435 shooting points out of a possible 3,500. --AD
Irish, Terps to meet in 2002 football opener
The Terrapins football team will make history on Aug. 31, 2002, when it plays its first-ever game against Notre Dame in the nationally televised Kickoff Classic XX at Giants Stadium.
The matchup will break one of the longest scheduling droughts in NCAA Division I history, as Maryland and Notre Dame have played a combined 235 years of football without going head-to-head. It will also be the Terps' first trip to the highly anticipated season opener for college football. A win by the Terps would also make them the Classic's final victors. The game, to be televised by ABC Sports from East Rutherford, N.J., will be the last Kickoff Classic due to new NCAA rules prohibiting preseason play, officials say. Although the Terps have never played in the Classic, the Irish have, defeating Virginia 36-13 in 1989.
"This is an outstanding way to start our 2002 football season," says Terps coach Ralph Friedgen '69, who took part in the the '91 Kickoff Classic when he coached at Georgia Tech.
Athletic Director Debbie Yow says she expects a substantial turnout of alumni to watch the Terps do battle with the Irish. "With a sizable alumni base within a three-mile radius of the Meadowlands, the Terps will be supported by thousands of fans," she says. Yow says she is optimistic about what the national television exposure will mean for the university's recruiting efforts.
In its 18 years, the Kickoff Classic has donated more than $7 million in proceeds to the National Football Foundation and the College Hall of Fame, much of which has gone directly to post-graduate scholarships for scholar-athletes. --AD
Terps Set Record for Academic Achievement
The university last May named 409 student-athletes to the Scholar-Athlete Honor Roll for 2000-01, its largest-ever group of academic high performers.
The number represents an 18 percent increase from the previous year and a 54 percent increase since 1998. Honorees must play an intercollegiate sport while achieving a 3.0 average in one of the two prior semesters to earn Scholar-
Athlete status.
Terrapin track-and-field member Vanessa Jones exemplifies the high-caliber athletes that Maryland's programs draw. Jones, an Atlantic Coast Conference champion high jumper, is a three-time Scholar-Athlete. She excels as chemistry major and was a finalist at the 2000 Olympic Trials in Sacramento, Calif., in 2000.
The ACC Honor Roll also contained a record number of Terrapin athletes last year, up 51 percent from six years ago.
Athletic Director Debbie Yow credits an enhanced budget for the Academic Support unit, a talented athletic department staff and careful selection of athletes by coaches for the proliferation of Terp scholar-athletes. "We are committed to academic achievement as a foundational building block for the athletic program," she says. --KP
Seventh heaven FOR WOMEN'S LACROSSE
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Lacrosse players celebrate their seventh consecutive NCAA championship in May. |
The women's lacrosse team won its seventh consecutive NCAA Championship in a 14-13 double overtime win against Georgetown University in May. The win, in front of more than 3,500 fans at Homewood Field on the campus of Johns Hopkins University, was a Terp-style finish to an incredible 2000-01 season.
The Terps, led by senior Jen Adams, never saw an end to the team's winning streak that dates back to early in the 2000 season and now stands at 43 games. The Terps did see Adams break record after record, many of them her own from previous seasons.
At the streak's 35-win mark, which came in the Atlantic Coast Conference title game, Adams became only the second player in NCAA women's lacrosse history to surpass the 400-point mark.
Four minutes into win 40 of the streak, Adams became the most prolific scorer in the history of women's collegiate lacrosse, claiming the title from Delaware's Karen Emas, whose record had been uncontested for 17 years.
"All good fairy tales have happy endings," says Adams. "I feel like a five-year-old kid now; I can't stop smiling and I don't know what to do. It is the greatest feeling when you have a team that is so strong... and they all put it out on the field for each other."
While Adams dominated for much of the season, the Terps' 43rd win belonged to senior Allison Comito, who scored the winning goal in overtime to win the national championship. Comito received a pass from senior Tori Wellington, who says, "Before she shot it, I knew it was going in."
It's that kind of confidence that carried the women Terps through the game, and through their string of championship seasons. --AD
