From the shadows

With his starting point guard in a walking boot and his 7-foot-1 center in eligibility limbo, Terrapins men's basketball coach Mark Turgeon admitted the obvious yesterday: Walk-ons will have to play this season.

After sophomore guard Pe'Shon Howard broke his left foot last week, Turgeon was left with just eight healthy scholarship players entering the season. As of yesterday, he had still not heard from the NCAA regarding the eligibility status of Ukrainian freshman center Alex Len.

"We're just going to have to play some walk-ons. That's the bottom line," Turgeon said in a teleconference. "We're going to get in foul trouble and start preparing that way. Unfortunately, since Pe'Shon has gone down, we've had two scrimmages [and] haven't had a lot of practice time to adjust to him being gone. It showed in one of our scrimmages this weekend."

Turgeon has welcomed the largest group of non-scholarship players he's ever had in his 15 years as a head coach this season. He awarded sophomore forward John Auslander, a transfer from Greensboro College, a scholarship at the beginning of the semester and held open tryouts to fill out the Terps' bench.

In guards Jonathan Thomas, Jacob Susskind, Arnold Richmond and Jon Dillard and forward Spencer Barks, he ended up with enough walk-ons to fill a practice squad, his original intention. But with the uncertainties surrounding Howard and Len, he now might be forced to rely on several in early-season action.

"We couldn't afford an injury to one of our two point guards, and it's happened," Turgeon said. "So we just got to adjust. This is the way it's going to be. This is our team. We'll adjust."

The lack of depth will be first amplified when the Terps play in the Puerto Rico Tip-Off later this month, a three-game, four-day stretch that begins Nov. 17 against No. 19 Alabama.

"We got to just see which walk-on players are most ready to help us and give us a couple minutes here and there in the first and second half," Turgeon said. "That's the only thing you can do when you play three games in four days."

Thomas, a guard from Frederick, Md., has emerged as a walk-on who could possibly receive time this year.

"I like his game," guard Terrell Stoglin said Saturday. "He's real quiet and humble and he just wants to get better. And he is — he showed it today [during the scrimmage]."

The group, though, is still adjusting to the rigors of Division I basketball and joining a team with a cast of highly recruited players.

"I am a freshman, I am a walk-on and they're the big guys on campus," Susskind said at media day. "So they kind of lay into me at times, but I kind of expected it."

Still, the group is simply happy to be where it is.

"It's really unbelievable," Susskind said. "Words cannot describe what this is like."

Senior staff writer Jeremy Schneider contributed to this report.

ceckard@umdbk.com