Barry P. Gossett Performance Center gives Maryland men's, women's basketball "a more refreshed mindset"

Ahmed Ghafir
Oct 1
3 min read

Transfer guard David Coit got his first taste of high major basketball after transferring from Northern Illinois to Kansas for the 2024-25 season, but now with Maryland men’s basketball on a team with 15 new pieces looking to gel together, the new Barry P. Gossett Basketball Performance Center gives head coach Buzz Williams and his staff a new, modern environment for his team to do exactly that.

“I think it just allows you to be more appreciative and come in with a better and a more refreshed mindset and a different type of perspective,” Coit told local media on Tuesday. “You know that perspective drives performance. So when you come in here with a high-level perspective and in a high-level building, you kind of want to make sure that you do everything right.”

Maryland officially unveiled its 44,000 square foot facility adjacent to the Xfinity Center, featuring several of Maryland's Under Armour uniforms at the entrance, along with a hallway spotlighting all former Terps in the NBA and WNBA, including the international careers from the women’s team. The new weight room also features its own hoop inside, while the charging stations inside each locker may be a player favorite, but each team was able to add its own twist to the design of the team room.

That includes a ‘Road Game Pics’ wall inside the Maryland men’s basketball team room, designed for team pictures ahead of road trips through the 2025-26 season as head coach Buzz Williams putting an emphasis on team chemistry through his first offseason.

Maryland women’s basketball includes a dedicated film room along with a spacious lounge, a favorite for senior guard Saylor Poffenbarger. “We spend a lot of time in there as a team. We get meals after practice and after different things. And I think we utilize that couch in there. We utilize the space and just hang out.

But the biggest perk may be the dedicated practice floor as head coach Breda Frese noted “we have not had one conflict” with other teams through offseason practices.

“In my time we’ve always been great team players but that has been challenging and we’re always going to be great team players,” Frese added. “But when you’ve had both sports wanting to do things at the same time and recruiting now, you have a lot of visits – official visits, unofficial visits and rightly so. Both coaches want to show their best facilities and so for me, now the fact that we have this facility as well as Xfinity and we really have three courts that our players can utilize is a game-changer.”

“I think just having our own space, it allows you to come in if you want to get shots up at any point in time,” Poffenberger said of the benefit of the practice facility. “There’s hoops up, there’s anything. And I think it just kind of alleviates the no, it wasn’t a stress, but like now we kind of have the freedom to come in here whenever we want.”

Coit noted the new practice facility is “very similar” to the one he trained in while at Kansas, but it also gives him room for imagination ahead of his first game inside the Xfinity Center.

“I was just thinking about the fans, thinking about the games. That was probably the first thing that I was thinking about - hitting shots.”

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