EDITOR’S NOTE: Due to a reporting error, this article incorrectly stated who the men’s basketball team played in the Final Four. The team played Kansas. The article has been changed to reflect this correction.
In an average year, it is rare for a university to have several defining events that shake it to its very core and leave the community and its members changed.
Although 2001 began an average year, it did not end one. From the first week of the fall semester, a series of tragedies struck the country and the campus – including a drug-related student death Sept. 5, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that killed university alumni and local residents and a tornado that killed two university students when it devastated the campus Sept. 24.
Former university President Dan Mote said the environment on the campus was tense as students, faculty and staff grappled with the year’s events. It took one team to lift the university community’s spirits.
University officials and former students said they were united by not one or two stars that season, but the entire Terrapins men’s basketball team and its coach, Gary Williams, when the players clinched the Final Four win from Kansas. Faculty and staff who had come to connect with each player watched the team reach “the mountaintop,” said alumnus Sammy Popat, as they swept into the NCAA national championship against Indiana and won, 64-52, 10 years ago last Sunday.
“You come to the realization that this actually happened, this is your institution, everyone’s eyes are on Maryland, and that’s where I am at this moment,” said Popat, who co-chaired the 2002 senior class gift council.
The team’s climb to the top, the program’s first and only NCAA championship win, was especially powerful in the wake of the fall’s events, Mote said.
“It’s the worst September in my memory,” he said. “I think looking at it in terms of the time, [the championship] was very significant, more significant than it might have been today. … The sports programs were strong, and the campus has a great sports culture, and they did a lot to bring the campus together.”
Many in the university community, such as Stamp Student Union Director Marsha Guenzler-Stevens, said they felt a special pride for Williams and the team as they soaked up stories about the players, their families, high school backgrounds and journeys to the university.
“You want to believe you’re going to win, and there were so many incredible stories on that team, friendships and personal stories, and you were cheering because you felt like you knew each and every one of them,” Guenzler-Stevens said.
Although officials planned to replace Cole Field House with Comcast Center the next season, they opened the stadium again to fans April 1 and aired the game playing in Atlanta.
“I think people believed somehow the energy in Cole would transmit itself way down to where the game was being played,” Guenzler-Stevens said. “So, I think in some ways, we believed we were part of the force.”
Linda Clement, serving her first year as Student Affairs vice president, said she watched the team from Cole, mixed in side by side with students.
“People were very proud of them and very proud of Coach Williams,” Clement said. “It was exciting, it was something new and different, and it was great to be part of a crowd like that – much more fun than being in your living room.”
However, Mote, caught up in the night’s victory, nearly missed another presidential duty – attending a 9 a.m. event the next day. The event was important – it formalized the University of Maryland-China Research Park – and it was in College Park. But Mote was hundreds of miles away in Atlanta.
“I found someone with an airplane, and we flew back that night,” Mote said. “But everyone there didn’t really want to talk about the agreement. … For the first half an hour, we just talked about the game.”
“Even after that, when I get off the plane at Beijing and go through customs, they say, ‘Go Terps,'” Mote added. “People all over the world were watching this event, millions and millions. … Everyone wants to celebrate the winners.”
After the game in Atlanta, Mote had the honor of cutting down a piece of the net after the men’s victory – as well as after the Terrapins women’s basketball team’s championship win in 2006. He said the pieces of net still hang on a bulletin board in his home.
Seniors that year also decided to commemorate the major dates of their year, including the national championship, in their class gift. The gift, located in the Memorial Chapel Garden, is set to be unveiled for the first time at Maryland Day on April 28.
Popat, who was an R.A. in 2002, said he watched the game with his residents in Centreville, many of whom had spent their first semester on the campus coping with more common concerns, such as a rash of thefts in the first weeks of school, and the unprecedented Sept. 11 attacks and the deadly tornado. However, when the game finished, he let his residents disperse and then stayed out on the campus “into the wee hours of the night,” absorbing the moment.
“We gave them the spiel, to be careful and be safe, but we knew there was no way we could contain them,” Popat said. “And we were students, too. How could we contain our own excitement?”
lurye@umdbk.com
