Within the last hour, it’s been confirmed the university will be closed for the seventh straight day tomorrow.
To be sure, that puts an untimely damper on any sense of normalcy for Gary Williams’ squad at the midway point of a so-far successful ACC season. And there’s no doubt we will hear about the measures the team has taken this week in the coming days.
The local media will be spending a lot of time with Williams and Co. in the next two weeks thanks to tonight’s scheduled game against Virginia being postponed to Monday. Starting with Saturday’s game at Duke, the Terps will play four games in eight days.
To that end, the Athletics Department announced today that the match-up with the Cavaliers has been rescheduled for Monday at 8 p.m. It will be broadcast on ESPN360.com and all tickets for tonight’s game will be honored.
But anyone who has looked out their window on campus or spent their snow day looking for a sledding hill, knows that Tuesday’s pre-emptive decision to postpone was exactly the right decision.
I’ve been exchanging messages with Senior Associate Athletics Director Brian Ullmann and he said that the Washington Post’s account of the events that led up to the ultimate decision to postpone was accurate, so I’ll direct you there, rather than taking up space to detail it.
In the grander scheme of things, the team has handled its snow business well, thus far. Gary Williams spent the days leading up to the team’s Sunday win against North Carolina at Comcast Center in a local hotel to make sure he was in the area. Then university personnel did a bang up job to make sure the parking lots were clear enough to have the game.
“We didn’t let [the snow affect us;] that was the key thing,” Williams said afterward. “The players were really good. On a college campus when there’s a snowstorm, for those of you who can remember, there’s a lot going on, and to a man, our guys stayed tough.”
It’s obvious Mother Nature has dealt the Terps a pretty raw hand in the last week with the two unprecedented winter blasts at College Park. But they’ll have a few extra days to prepare for Saturday’s battle for ACC first place at Cameron Indoor Stadium, which probably isn’t a bad thing.
So enjoy the snow and the days off school for now-because in a few days there will be a lot of Terp basketball to discuss.
Eric Detweiler is The Diamondback’s Terrapin Men’s Basketball Team beat writer. He can be reached at edetweilerdbk@gmail.com. You can follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/edetweiler.