As a graduate assistant at Kansas, Mark Turgeon drove from Lawrence to Bloomington, Ind., with former Jayhawks teammate Tad Boyle for a coaching clinic run by the legendary Bob Knight.
Turgeon, whose Terps will play No. 23 Indiana Thursday at 9 p.m., recalled Knight running a drill involving the motion offense using one of his players.
"They had a player named (Matt) Nover on the team, they ran the motion offense and Nover was just standing around and he [Knight] said, 'Nover, do you know what a statue is?' And he [Nover] says, 'Yessir, it's a stationary object.' And Bobby Knight says, 'Do you know what pigeons do to statues, Nover? So get your butt moving.'"
Turgeon said he wasn't that wide-eyed back then, having played on a Kansas team that reached the Final Four when he was a junior and won the national championship in 1988 when he and Boyle, now the coach at Colorado, were graduate assistants.
"I've seen a lot of banners, it's a lot different," Turgeon said. "I was coming from Kansas and we had some banners of our own. I'm just excited for the opportunity, it's great to see Indiana's having the kind of year they are and the game means so much."
It will mark Maryland's first appearance at Assembly Hall since 2010, when Greivis Vasquez was a senior and led the Terps to victory.
"All road games are hard," Turgeon said. "There's a reason we went and played at Oklahoma State [in December] so you get used to being on the road. The students are back, it's a passionate fan base, they just got ranked for the first time in a couple of years. So it's going to be a big-time environment, which is fun. As coaches and players you look forward to that."