Diamondback Online - The University of Maryland's Independent Daily Student Newspaper

Issue date: 3/6/08 Section: Sports

Media Credit: Adam Fried

About 30 hours before the Terrapin men's basketball team faced Clemson, the players were hanging out in the locker room watching the halftime show during a game between Duke and N.C. State.

The show consisted almost entirely of NCAA Tournament talk, specifically about the bubble teams. The Terps were one of those teams in the discussion, and the players started talking about which other teams were in and which other teams were out. But then senior forward James Gist delivered a message to his teammates - a message no one else could have delivered at that moment.

Gist relayed how tough it was not to see "Maryland" pop up on the bracket during his freshman and sophomore years. The Terps did not make the NCAA Tournament those two years, and instead ended up in the NIT.

"Watching Selection Sunday and not seeing your name picked, he said, is an absolutely terrible feeling," senior swingman Jason McAlpin said. "He just reiterated that and wants to make sure everybody leaves it on the court."

Gist is the only four-year senior, and by default at the beginning of the season, he became the Terps' No. 1 leader - on and off the court. It has been his job to deliver those messages during one of the most unusual seasons by a Terp team, and Gist has had to adjust to every twist and turn. Now, though, he may be faced with his most difficult task: getting the Terps focused on Sunday's absolute must-win game at Virginia. But Gist has had a lot of help learning how to be a leader, and it didn't come from coaches or players - it came from his family.

"There was such a heavy expectation for him to be a leader, but you never heard anything about leadership training," Linda Gist, James' mother, said. "So what his father and I had to do was we offered all our experiences. We gave him a lot of ideas when the team was struggling. 'Hey J, what about this, what about that?' He would call us and feed things off of us. So we kind of walked that walk with him as a senior in terms of helping him understand what it was to be a leader and how leaders had to be developed."

*****

Gist, a Silver Spring native, realizes his time with the Terps is coming to a close. He only has a maximum of five weeks left to play college basketball, and all of it is valuable.

Continued...

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