How important is spring football? Bowie State is about to find out.
Sanders Shiver resigned as the Bulldogs' head coach in early March, and athletic director Charles Guilford said that a replacement won't be named until later this month at the earliest.
In the meantime, Broughton Reid is the only full-time coach still on staff, and he'll run the returning players through conditioning and drills later this month. The Bulldogs won't get in pads this spring.
"I don't know what the new coaches' strategies would be, so we're going to restrict the workouts to conditioning and basic drills," Guilford said. "Hopefully, the new coach will be hired in time to be involved in some of the last spring practices."
Sherman Wood, a Virginia Union assistant who previously helped Dave Dolch and Shiver put Bowie State on the Division II map, is a candidate to return to the Bulldogs.
Look for Shiver, who was frustrated by a lack of support and a decline to a 1-10 record last season, to take an assistant's job at Howard.
In other football hiring news, Andre Creamer has been reunited with Jim Ward, his high school coach at Northwestern.
Ward is in his second year as the coach at SUNY-Buffalo, and Creamer will coach Buffalo's running backs. Creamer, an All-Metro quarterback in 1983, played defensive back for Tennessee, and was one of the Morgan State assistants whose contracts weren't renewed last November.
Division I-AA Buffalo lost to Morgan State last fall -- one of the Bears' two wins. Those two won't meet in 1993, but Buffalo will be home against Towson State on Oct. 23.
Pendergist already in NCAAs
It didn't take long for Mount St. Mary's decathlete Rob Pendergist to qualify for the NCAA outdoor track and field championships.
Pendergist defended his title at the Florida Relays with 7,733 points, which earned him a spot in the NCAAs for the third straight year. In the process, Pendergist beat North Carolina's Paul Foxson, the only returnee who beat him at last year's NCAA championships.
Pendergist posted personal bests in the high jump (6-11), pole vault (14-9) and javelin (199-11). An old elbow injury has limited his activity in the throws, and his next decathlon probably will be at the NCAAs in New Orleans on June 2-5. He won't compete at the Penn Relays.
UMBC junior Matt Butts is also multi-talented. One of the Retrievers' top basketball reserves, Butts won the high jump in the rain at the Battleground Relays in Fredericksburg, Va., clearing 6-4. At Hagerstown Junior College last spring, Butts had a state-leading best of 6-10.
Towson gymnasts at regionals
Here's an omen for the Towson State gymnasts: The NCAA championships are at Oregon State, the site when the Tigers made their only NCAA appearance, in 1990.
The Tigers will take hope where they can find it, because they go to the Southeast Regional at Georgia tomorrow seeded last in the seven-team field. Getting to the regionals for the seventh straight year is an accomplishment for a banged-up team that followed senior Gabby Linarducci to another ECAC title.
"We were literally one injury away from being unable to field a complete lineup in several meets," coach Dick Filbert said.