Rebuilding the Terps: Wishing on a Star
6/21/1999 8:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
December 19, 1998
In the spring of 1990, Maryland men's basketball coach Gary Williams wondered whether his career might be over.
He had left as coach at Ohio State less than a year before, knowing that Maryland's program - the one for which he had played in the 1960s - faced penalties for NCAA rules violations that occurred under his predecessor, Bob Wade. Williams, and nearly everyone else at Maryland, had not anticipated the severity of those sanctions: a two-year ban from the NCAA tournament and a one-year ban from live television.
Now, in addition to the challenge of attracting new players despite the sanctions, he had a new problem - the prospect of losing players because of the sanctions. In April, he met with sophomore guard Walt Williams, a rising star from a local high school who was considering a transfer. Gary Williams made his pitch, then waited and worried.
Walt Williams didn't make up his mind until August, but when he did, it became Maryland's first step toward regaining a place among the nation's college basketball elite. Tonight, when the Terrapins bring a No. 5 national ranking into their game against Princeton at Baltimore Arena, a sellout crowd will be watching current stars such as Steve Francis and dreaming of Maryland's first trip to the Final Four.
For Gary Williams, this season is about much more than that. It's about players who have long disappeared from the spotlight, and key moments on and off the court that only the most passionate fans can remember.
There were the meetings the coach had with players such as Evers Burns, Kevin McLinton and Vince Broadnax to persuade them to stay with the team through the dark years of sanctions. Those players' workmanlike efforts, Walt Williams's individual brilliance and Gary Williams's absolute determination produced upset victories and many other exciting games that kept bringing fans to Cole Field House when it seemed there was nothing to cheer for.
All of that kept Maryland a viable option for the more talented players who arrived when the sanctions were lifted and took Maryland to the NCAA tournament round of 16 in 1994 and '95. The program didn't fully mature then, as Gary Williams had hoped, but those quicker-than-expected achievements helped put this season's team in position to finish the journey Walt Williams helped them begin.
Now that fans are publicly congratulating him on the team's success, Gary Williams said: "It's great. I really appreciate people doing that. But at the same time, you have a memory. You remember how it was, and it gives you the motivation that you don't want to go back to that . . . . I thought there was a chance that the move I made coming to Maryland would cost me my coaching career."
Although it is overly simple to attribute all of Maryland's subsequent success to Walt Williams's decision to stay, it set a tone.
"They gave guys a chance to transfer, but we looked at Walt," said Burns, a forward in 1989-93 who now plays professionally in Uruguay. "He stayed . . . so we made a commitment of loyalty to Gary and the program."
Having Walt Williams on the team also gave the Terrapins national exposure at a time when the sanctions kept them off television and out of the postseason. Although Maryland went 14-15 during the 1991-92 season, Williams scored 30 points or more in seven consecutive games - events that were chronicled on highlight shows across the country and helped make him the No. 7 overall pick in the 1992 draft.
"Walt was the most important - not just because he was a great player, but he played with a great deal of flair and he became well-known throughout the country even though we weren't on television," Gary Williams said. "That enabled Maryland to still get its name out there a little bit. We were desperate during that time just to try to get involved with really good players. The ability to do that, eventually, was a direct result of Walt having stayed four years."
During the two years of sanctions, then-assistant coach Art Perry said, the Terrapins failed to land several top players, such as Randolph Childress, who went to school elsewhere rather than commit to a Maryland team on probation. (Childress not only spurned Maryland, he also chose one of its Atlantic Coast Conference rivals, Wake Forest.)
The players Maryland did attract - such as Garfield Smith, Mark McGlone in 1990 and Wayne Bristol and Chris Kerwin in 1991 - might not have been the most talented, but Gary Williams challenged them to work hard and not believe the negative talk that surrounded the program while it was on probation.
Before the team's final game of the 1990-91 season, Williams told his players that, although the team would not be eligible for the postseason, they could accomplish something that only one NCAA tournament team does each year: win its final game. The Terrapins went out and beat Virginia, 78-74, in overtime.
"Gary simply doesn't accept defeat," said former Maryland athletic director Andy Geiger, now the AD at Ohio State. "I don't think I've ever known a fiercer competitor. His personality carried the program."
Williams refused to change his coaching philosophy of using a pressing, up-tempo style, even though he now concedes that a more tempered style might have produced more victories. It wasn't just that he was stubborn - he believed the up-tempo style would attract the type, and number, of top-flight high school players who eventually would give Maryland the talent and depth it needed to succeed.
"We tried to keep pressing and keep running, even though that might not have been the best way to play because it was a style that could sell some recruits" on playing for Maryland, Gary Williams said.
Walt Williams, now with the NBA's Portland Trail Blazers, believes this move paid off.
"You talk to any player, and they'll tell you that out on the court he gives his players the freedom to play the game," he said. "He's definitely a player's coach. He does not try to hold players down. Players respond to that."
So, it seems, did the fans. While the Terrapins struggled to a 14-15 record in 1991-92 and 12-16 in '92-93, they still drew an average of more than 11,000 fans per game to 14,500-seat Cole Field House.
"Even though we were on probation, they still come out every game," Burns said. "Gary made us believe we could win every game, and we always kept the games close. That's what kept fans coming."
Among those fans was Duane Simpkins, who in 1992 was a star point guard at powerful DeMatha High School in Hyattsville. Simpkins played pickup games with Walt Williams and other Terrapins.
During the sanction years, Maryland's coaches focused much of their recruiting efforts on players who would be entering college in the fall of 1992 - the year the sanctions ended. Simpkins and fellow local products Johnny Rhodes and Exree Hipp were among the players they targeted.
While recruiting the three, "we had to play on the fact that they could be local heroes and take a lot of pride in taking a program like Maryland and rebuilding it," said Perry, a Maryland assistant from 1990 to '96 and now head coach at American University.
"That was definitely a big push to use that incentive, to have them help us turn the program around. And we knew that once the program got started and had some success, it would open doors nationally for us."
Rhodes signed first, then Simpkins, then Hipp. Maryland's 1992 recruiting class, which also included forward Mario Lucas of Memphis and forward Nemanja Petrovic, was heralded as the group that would turn around the program.
"The timing was perfect," Simpkins, who recently returned from a two-year professional stint in Belgium, said from his parents' home in Fort Washington. "My freshman year was our first year off probation, and I had always wanted to go to Maryland."
Although the team bottomed out during Simpkins's freshman year, going 2-14 in the ACC, the coaches used the publicity surrounding the talented freshmen to help land two of the nation's top recruits for the fall of 1993: center Joe Smith of Norfolk and forward Keith Booth, the first big-name Baltimore player to select Maryland since Wade, a Baltimore native, had been fired.
In their first game of the 1993-94 season, the Terrapins won a much-anticipated game against 15th-ranked Georgetown on a last-second shot by Simpkins. They went 18-12 (8-8 in the ACC), and beat No. 22 Saint Louis and No. 9 Massachusetts to advance to the NCAA tournament's round of 16. The following year, 1995-96, they reached a No. 5 national ranking and again advanced to the NCAA tournament round of 16.
"I was concerned that [because of the NCAA sanctions] we wouldn't be able to get the players necessary to move back up the ladder," Gary Williams said. "That's why that team with Joe Smith, Johnny Rhodes and Keith Booth and those guys had such an impact. It dramatically changed."
But it wasn't just the big-name players who pushed Maryland back into prominence. Kurtis Shultz, a walk-on who was a junior on the 1993-94 team, remembers talking to fellow junior Wayne Bristol and realizing that they were going to be overshadowed by the younger players. But Shultz says he thinks his class contributed something valuable to the program, too.
"Our class, we had to deal with guys like Walt Williams and Garfield Smith and Vince Broadnax," Shultz said. "Those guys were tough. I remember learning from Evers Burns. He would beat up on me and I would beat up on him, and the next thing you know we're screaming at each other. We brought that to the new class. We got a lot of confrontations going because everybody was [practicing] hard."
However, in the current era of college basketball, success on the NCAA level brings opportunity for early riches on the NBA level. And when Smith chose to leave Maryland for the NBA after his sophomore year - he was the No. 1 pick in the 1995 draft - , Williams and the Terrapins were left to rebuild again.
"If Joe would have stayed his junior year, we could have been as good as we are now, because we probably had more experience than this team does now," Williams said.
In each of the two seasons after Smith's departure, Maryland lost in the first round of the NCAA tournament. From a recruiting standpoint, the second rebuilding wasn't as difficult as the first, but there were some unpleasant moments, such as when Williams fired Perry and replaced him with Dave Dickerson.
But the two consecutive trips to the NCAA tournament round of 16 gave Maryland so much national attention that it landed three out-of-state recruits for the fall of 1995: forward Laron Profit from Dover, Del., guard Terrell Stokes from Philadelphia and center Obinna Ekezie from Worcester, Mass. The Terrapins then returned in state for top recruits Terence Morris (Frederick) in 1997 and Steve Francis (Takoma Park) this year.
"You want to constantly keep improving the team, and having the best program possible," Gary Williams said. "That's what we're doing. We're not all sitting around smiling and happy, 'Wow, we're No. 5 in the country!' We're actively recruiting still. We've signed three guys [for next season], and we still want to recruit some more people. We're still trying to get better."
But the program now appears to be back to a point where it can perpetuate itself at a relatively high level and increase the frequency of potentially special seasons such as this one. As for the former Terrapins, many of whom stayed with Maryland despite knowing they had virtually no chance of accomplishing what this team is accomplishing, they say they feel a sense of pride and ownership in the current success.
"When I go back in the summer and play against the guys, and see how much they've improved and how much they've achieved, it amazes me," Burns said. "
By C. Jemal Horton and David Nakamura
Washington Post Staff Writers
