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Maryland's Midnight symbol
Posted: Friday October 15, 1999 01:02 AM
By Gary Williams for CNN/SI
As far as the coaching staff goes, it is a very anxious time. You know you have to hit it hard the next day in practice with your team. You just want all of the players to get through Midnight Madness with no problems and be ready to start again the next morning. This year, we have a very young team. It will be really interesting to see when their names are introduced and they have to go down and dunk the basketball at the other end of the court. It will be interesting to see just how they react to that. One thing is for certain, I am sure there will be some mixed dunks by our players at about 12:02 a.m. in Cole Field House. The usual things we have been doing in the past couple of years include indoor fireworks, a gymnastics exhibition and a number of other fan friendly activities. All of those things go into making the night a fun one for our students. It's also parents' weekend here on the campus so I'm sure we have a lot of the students' parents who are anxious to get a glimpse of the team on the first night. Midnight Madness is interesting. I really believe Lefty Driesell had a lot to do with the starting phenomena of Midnight Madness here at the University of Maryland. During the early 1970's, he brought cars out to the track in Byrd Stadium and shined their headlights onto the track at 12:01 a.m. He then had the players run a timed-mile and Midnight Madness was born. I really think that was the first Midnight Madness type of event. I'm not sure how much the players enjoyed it, though. What it did do was get a lot of national attention so that the next year a lot more schools began their practices at midnight. It has now grown to be a big thing on college campuses. It's a great night for everyone involved. It is one of the great nights for the players and the students. It will be a lot of fun. But the real work starts the next day.
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Midnight Madness has become the symbolic start of basketball practice at
many schools, including the University of Maryland. It's a great
night for our students and players to really get involved with
basketball again and it's a great showcase for our new players who the
students haven't seen before.
