Playing in paradise

More than 1,500 miles away from the campus yesterday morning, Terrapins men's basketball guards Sean Mosley and Nick Faust tweeted pictures from the balcony of their hotel rooms that might as well have been postcards.

Far in the distance were ocean waves lapping against the rocky outcropping of a shore, palm trees blowing in the wind.

The Terps are on a basketball sabbatical on the island paradise of San Juan, Puerto Rico, where they will compete in the annual Puerto Rico Tip-Off. For a stretch of six days, they will be spending ample time together, eating side by side and playing lots of basketball.

Before departing for those warm beaches Tuesday, coach Mark Turgeon stressed the importance of the early-season trip — even if the team, as expected, struggles on the court.

The Terps (1-0) kick their trip off with tonight's nationally televised game against No. 16 Alabama. It will begin a grueling stretch of three games in four days for one of the thinnest teams in the country.

But maybe even more important than on-court success, according to Turgeon, is the time the team will spend together. Since he took over the program nearly six months ago, Turgeon's window to get to know his players has been limited to workouts, practice sessions and one-on-one time in his office.

The first-year coach feels he doesn't know his players the way he should. After all, he didn't recruit them. And before this season, he didn't coach them, either. But Turgeon, who continually stresses the importance of family, knows his team's cohesion will be crucial this season.

Which is why this week's long-distance trip is significant even though the Terps could very well return home with a losing record.

"You've got to get away to bond," Turgeon said. "Just to see them in a different setting will be great and get to understand them a little bit better and them to understand me."

It starts tonight with the Crimson Tide (2-0), the Terps' first ranked opponent of the season and most likely their stiffest nonconference test of the year. Alabama started the season with double-digit wins against North Florida and Oakland and is the favorite to win this year's Tip-Off.

"It's going to be a test to see how good we really are," guard Terrell Stoglin said after the team's win against UNC-Wilmington on Sunday. "I mean, that was a good team we just played right now, but they're most definitely not Alabama. It's going to be a test, but we're up for it. We'll be all right."

Key for the Terps is how their offense, which is still learning Turgeon's new system, fares against the variety of defensive looks the Crimson Tide figure to offer.

"Well, we've got to handle the press and if we can do that, then we have to handle their half-court pressure, which hopefully we'll be able to do," Turgeon said. "Then they play a really nice zone and if you guys were at the game the other night, we were not good against the zone."

Win or lose, the Terps will play again tomorrow against either Colorado, which is coached by Tad Boyle, a former assistant under Turgeon; or Wichita State, a program Turgeon resurrected in the early 2000s.

Personal ties aside, Turgeon is understandably concerned with his team's ability to handle the rigors of back-to-back games. The real test will be how he handles games tomorrow and Sunday with just eight healthy scholarship players to lean on. Turgeon said walk-ons will enter into his rotation.

"We all feel together that our conditioning is way better than last year because we put in so much work this offseason running," Stoglin said. "A couple of players were just talking about how we weren't even tired at the end of the [UNC-Wilmington] game and we feel that we could still play."

Despite all the concerns surrounding the Terps, their coach just couldn't wait to get away.

Said Turgeon: "These trips are awesome."

ceckard@umdbk.com