Kevin Willard needed just two weeks to transform Maryland men’s basketball
Once upon a time in college basketball, rebuilding meant signing a new core of players and watching them grow up together over two or three years.
Kevin Willard had two weeks.
Two weeks to put a demoralizing 2023-24 season behind him. Two weeks to find shooters and ball handlers to complement his one returning starter, power forward Julian Reese, and super-recruit Derik Queen. Two weeks to design a team from scratch that could win in the brutally competitive Big Ten Conference and return Maryland to the NCAA Tournament.
From the last week in March to the second week in April last spring, Willard signed three transfers: guard Rodney Rice from Virginia Tech, guard Ja’Kobi Gillespie from Belmont and swingman Selton Miguel from South Florida.
“We went into the portal with a really, really specific plan of how we wanted to play,” he said recently.
Last season’s team not only lost, it played ugly basketball, ranking 13th in the Big Ten in scoring and 3-point shooting. Each transfer Willard added was meant to purge the program of that aesthetic nightmare.
What a difference a year makes.
On Friday, Willard’s Terps (25-8) will begin NCAA Tournament play as a No. 4 seed after earning a No. 2 seed in the Big Ten Tournament. They ranked third in the conference in scoring and 3-point shooting while losing none of their defensive bite from the previous year. Rice, Gillespie and Miguel make up part of an elite starting unit dubbed the “Crab Five.”
Willard, 49, is nearing a contract extension that would reportedly make him one of the highest-paid coaches in the sport.
“Unsurprisingly, Kevin has done a fabulous job,” ESPN analyst Jay Bilas said. “He has put together a great roster but has done an even better job of guiding it and developing a cohesive unit.”
Willard and the players he recruited aced their assignment, pulling beautiful order from the chaos of the transfer portal. It’s the blessing and curse of this era that each season presents a nearly blank canvas to coaches at even the most storied programs.
Maryland finished 16-17 and sat out March Madness a year ago. Gloomy fans predicted that Willard, like his predecessor Mark Turgeon, would never lift the program’s ceiling. But he knew that for good or ill, he would put an entirely different team on the court at the start of the 2024-25 season.
“That’s what’s changed about college basketball,” said former Maryland coach Gary Williams, who led a veteran team to a national championship 23 years ago. “You have to try to get the max out of each year. Let’s say 20 years ago, you recruit a very good freshman class, and you do some things to help those guys develop, which you probably can’t afford to do now. You coach for this year rather than two years from now. Trying to maximize this year’s team is the whole focus right now, and then you worry about next year whenever the season is over.”
In that context, Willard’s work over the past 12 months has deeply impressed Williams.
“First of all, I think they did a really good job of recruiting, to bring in the guys they brought in,” he said. “Secondly, they’ve done a really good job of getting guys together. If you watch Maryland play, they look like they’ve been together for more than a year. They look for each other. There’s nobody there not willing to make a pass.”
To Williams’ point, Willard said that he thought carefully about how his players’ personalities would blend, knowing the Terps would have just a few months to achieve symbiosis.
“It’s why we still do official visits,” he said. “Everyone says officials visits are stupid, and technically, they kind of are stupid now because you’re making decisions a lot based on money and fit for these kids. But for coaches, we use official visits. We’ve already done our homework. We’ve already watched 10 games on them. We’ve already made phone calls. But we use visits just to see how we interact with them, how they interact with our players. It’s a personality test more than anything.”
All three key transfers vaulted over this intangible bar.
“Kobi [Gillespie] visited here and right away, I knew that was going to be my guy,” Willard recalled. “There was no BS. Same thing with Selton. When he came in, he didn’t even want to look at the campus. He was like, ‘I like your offense, I know I can help your team win, and I want to get to the NCAA Tournament.’ Rodney was the same way.”
It didn’t hurt that Queen, the Baltimore native with soft hands and dancer’s feet that belie his 6-foot-10, 246-pound frame, met every expectation, ultimately earning All-Big Ten and Big Ten Freshman of the Year honors.
Neither Willard nor his players paid much mind to the preseason media poll that predicted they’d finish 10th in the Big Ten.
“I knew that we were going to have something special,” said Rice, a former DeMatha star who was coming off a lost year at Virginia Tech. “We were going to have a good team.”
“We just had to put it together,” Queen said. “It didn’t happen overnight for us to become a good team. It took work, and then first game, that’s when we became a great team, a good team.”
Not that it was easy. They took their licks on a winless trip to play Washington and Oregon in early January and gritted their teeth through a string of last-shot losses to fellow conference contenders.
Through it all, they cohered.
After Maryland’s NCAA seeding was announced Sunday evening, Willard had no problem saying how proud he felt that it all came together.
“A lot of guys had to sacrifice roles to come together,” he said. “We put this team together in two weeks, and for them to come together and get back in the big dance, it’s exciting.”
There’s a flip side to the spectacular rebuild the Terps pulled off this year: Willard will have to piece together another fresh puzzle as soon as this run is over.
Reese, the program’s greatest constant, will graduate. Miguel is out of eligibility. Queen projects as an NBA first-round draft pick in June.
And Willard isn’t sure reloads will be as easy now that the sport is emerging from its pandemic era, which swelled the pool of talented transfers because of extended eligibility timelines.
“We’re losing a dramatic amount of extra-year guys that had COVID years,” he said. “There’s going to be no more of those guys. In this league alone, I think there were 49 grad transfers. When you take 49 guys off the rosters, that’s a huge, huge change that we’re all going to go through.”
He’s bullish about the program’s future, saying, “I love that there’s so many kids who want to come play for us that we’re turning kids down.”
But Willard knows he’ll get exactly one shot with this version of the team.
All the more reason for the Terps to make the best of what they have going as they prepare to play a do-or-die game against Grand Canyon at Seattle’s Climate Pledge Arena.
“Who knows who will be a part of this team next year?” said former Maryland star and Maryland Sports Radio Network sideline reporter Walt Williams. “Whenever you have these moments where a team is put together and you have this type of versatility in terms of what you can do, you’ve got to take advantage of it. It’s not about, ‘Oh, we can win next year,’ because you don’t know what your team will look like.”
———
Baltimore Sun reporter Edward Lee contributed to this article.
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