The crowd will be in their favor. Friends and family will be nearby. The Maryland Terrapins, though, hope to treat their NCAA Tournament games at Washington's MCI Center just like any other road trip.
They'll sleep in a hotel and have their meals catered in a meeting room. They'll gather nightly at 10:30 in Coach Gary Williams' room to watch videotape of their opponents and go over last-minute preparations. The standard 11:30 p.m. curfew, with lights out, is expected to apply to players, and team managers might get hall duty to make sure the players aren't disturbed by autograph seekers.
In short, Williams hopes to isolate his team from the furor around them and make this trip'except for a 20-minute bus ride replacing a cross-country flight'similar to last season's NCAA tournament jaunt to Boise, Idaho and Southern California.
\There are some positives and there are some negatives, too,' guard Drew Nicholas said, evaluating the merits of playing so close to home as opposed to the Terrapins' recent trend of playing at least halfway across the nation. ""Going out West kind of drains you a little, flying five hours and playing a team 20 minutes from here (when Maryland played George Mason University in Boise) gets a little exhausting. Playing close to home sometimes can be a distraction, but I think everybody is going to do a good job making sure that doesn't occur.'
The biggest distraction, some players said, will be having relatives and a lot of friends in town. In recent years, Maryland's closest NCAA tournament games were in Memphis, Tenn. and most of their games were in the western part of the country, making the Terrapins somewhat inaccessible. This week, though, as the No. 1 seed in the East Region, the team will be just a few miles down the road from campus.
There will be requests for tickets, which are scarce, and more demands on the players' time.
""I figure we're a mature team,' center Lonny Baxter said. ""We know what we have to do. I don't think we're going to let any of these distractions get to us.'
""Guys need to be more committed and focus on basketball the next two or three weeks,' guard Juan Dixon said. ""This is college; guys like to have fun. I'm not saying guys go out every night, but you're in college, you're supposed to have fun. Now, we need to focus.'
Maryland (26-4) begins what it hopes will be a return trip to the Final Four with a first-round game Friday.
In a season that has the potential to go down as the best in school history, the awards continued to pile in Monday with the announcement that Williams was named ACC Coach of the Year by the Atlantic Coast Sports Writers Association. It's the first time in his 24 seasons as a head coach that Williams has been named a conference coach of the year.
""It's a great honor in this league,' Williams said. ""Everybody should feel a part of it 'the players, the assistant coaches and the fans.'
