COLLEGE PARK — Most wouldn’t peg Long Island-born Maryland men’s basketball coach Kevin Willard as someone with experience operating industrial equipment.
Surprisingly, that assessment would be wrong.
“Oh, I lived in Kentucky for 10 years,” he said, recalling his high school and early college days in the Bluegrass State. “I baled hay in the summer for a summer job. So that’s not my first time on a backhoe.”
“Do I remember how to work it? Would you want me working it in your backyard? No, but it’s not the first time I’ve been on one.”
The university broke ground in front of donors and supporters Thursday on a new practice facility — the Barry P. Gossett Basketball Performance Center — that will be the home for the Terrapins’ men’s and women’s basketball teams. It did so in spectacular fashion, with ESPN anchor and Maryland alum Scott Van Pelt emceeing and a screen-printed image of the facility dropping out of view to reveal Willard and women’s coach Brenda Frese manning dueling backhoes to move the first bucketfuls of dirt.
Frese said she got “a quick run-through on the equipment,” but that “I don’t think I’ll ever have that experience again, nor do I need to.”
She’ll keep her focus instead on a long-time dream for her program finally becoming a reality. Maryland was previously the only school in the Big Ten Conference and one of only a handful across major college basketball without a dedicated basketball facility.
“We’re one of the last programs in the country to not have a facility,” Athletic director Damon Evans said. “I mean, when you look at the rich history and tradition of these programs, our women’s basketball and men’s basketball programs, this is well deserved.”
The void amid an arms race among college facilities nationwide has been a rumbling issue for years on the College Park campus, with Frese long advocating for a remedy across her two decades leading the Terrapins.
“I mean, you had different athletic directors, COVID had hit when we were really serious about the plans being built, and then construction prices skyrocketed six times the amount,” Frese said. “So there’s been some hurdles we’ve had to get through.”
The 44,000-square foot $52 million facility will be built on the south side of Xfinity Center near the Gate A entrance and should be completed in time for the 2025-26 basketball season.
Much like similar facilities that have now become the norm across college athletics, it will feature a dedicated oversized practice court, strength and conditioning facility, expanded locker rooms, film and game study areas as well as large lounge, dining and office spaces for both teams and staffs.
“We wanted to assess what our needs were,” Evans said. “I did a lot of talking with Brenda, Kevin. We looked at other facilities across the country, because every time you build something you want to try to see how can you make it better? What are you missing? And that’s what we did here, and we feel like we’ve met the needs that we have as a program. And this is going to be a first-class, first-rate facility.”
The building originally was slated to have two courts and 60,000 square feet of space when it was announced last year, but was trimmed to just one — “financially probably a great decision for us,” Willard said.
“Damon was great. I don’t think Brenda and I, we can complain about anything that we’ve got. Everything we asked for, we got,” Willard said. “The original design was two courts. We went down to one court just because we have a court right there [in Xfinity Center] that we practice on.”
It finally puts Maryland on equal footing with its peers in and out of the conference. More than just having the latest in tricked-out specs for locker rooms and player comforts, Willard said there are intangible benefits for program development just from everything being centralized and convenient.
“The interaction with your players when you have your own facility, having one, working in one, it’s amazing how much more you get to interact with your players because you’re all under one roof,” Willard said.
• George Gerbo can be reached at ggerbo@washingtontimes.com.
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