Guest Coaches Get A Behind The Scenes Look At Maryland Football

Maryland Athletics is always looking for ways to strengthen the student-athlete experience for the Terrapins. The Guest Coach program is helping to give Maryland faculty a look at what goes into a game day and who some of the athletes they see in class are off the field. 

“It puts the athletes in a different light and helps faculty to understand them better,” said Devon Frieson, associate director at the Barry and Mary Gossett Center for Academic and Personal Excellence. “We want to win games, but we want to get degrees, too.” 

A handful of University of Maryland faculty will be invited to various events to experience a game day from the perspective of a Terrapin athlete. Several were in attendance — and the locker room — for the Terps contest against Washington on Oct. 4. 

“This is a program to give them a behind the scenes look at student-athletes,” Frieson said. “We want to build relationships on campus. We’re all in higher education, some of us are in the classroom and some on the athletics side.”

The Guest Coach Program enables Maryland Athletics to foster relationships with its campus partners while establishing new connections between athletics and on-campus faculty.

“That athlete that they have sitting in their classroom, they don’t know what they have going on outside academics,” Frieson said. “This program gives them a light into the preparation that goes into getting them ready for a game.”

Each advisor who was invited to the program was able to spend the day with the Maryland football team. They toured the academic facilities in the Barry & Mary Gossett Center for Academic & Personal Excellence, rode the bus with the team, sat in on offensive and defensive meetings and even joined the players for their pregame meal.

“A lot of them haven’t seen athletics or come to a football game,” Frieson said. “It’s definitely a wild experience. They’re not just on the sidelines for the game, they feel like they’re in it.”

The criteria for selection was two-fold, Frieson explained. 

“We want to reach out to the people who work with our athletes the most,” he said. “If we have a lot of sociology majors, that’s the department we want to invite to be here. The ones that are fans of our teams, we want to give them that experience, too.”

As the athletic year rolls on, Maryland Athletics will continue to provide UMD faculty with exclusive and special looks into the lives of the athletes they see every day in class, continuing to build the bonds off the field between student-athletes and their professors and advisors.