Malik Washington, players clear the air on Maryland football's 'player-only' meeting

Ahmed Ghafir
Oct 14
3 min read

Maryland football true freshman quarterback Malik Washington raised eyebrows during his Nebraska postgame press conference when he mentioned “we’re just going to have to come back as a team on Monday and have a kind of a player meeting maybe,” leading to questions about what was viewed as a players-only following a two-game road trip.

That meeting was an informal one inside the locker room – and a byproduct of the adjusted prep schedule with the team scheduled to fly out to UCLA on Thursday.

“When I was talking about it was more just because we had a short week coming up and most [of the] time we do it on Thursday, something we do weekly anyway, is have our players only meeting. So it's really just my idea in my brain to maybe have it earlier in the week, just because we traveled on Thursday,” Washington clarified after Tuesday’s practice, adding it’s a discussion “within the locker room.”

“It wasn't like a formal thing, like everybody sat down in one area and, like, had a meeting. It was just like we're talking among the leaders in each position group about what we see moving forward and how to keep the team energized and going,” he added.

Inside the program, those types of meetings have become standardized with a leadership council a staple in the building ever since head coach Mike Locksley took over as head coach ahead of the 2019 season.

“Every Thursday, I meet with my leadership group, find out anything going on in the house that we need to talk about and then they go down and have a players-only meeting with the messaging of what we need to do,” Locksley said on Tuesday. “So when I asked them about the players-only meetings, we always have players only meetings on Thursday. So we're not there yet. If they are, it's mostly to make sure everybody's aligned on the same page of, hey, what do we need to do better? But not one of those players-only meetings that that you typically think of because we have them quite often as part of our development of our chemistry of our team.”

But there are benefits to those informal discussions among the players whether individually among teammates or collectively as a team with linebacker Daniel Wingate looking to guide the defense after consecutive inconsistent performances at home.

“Just to not let one continue to go into two and continue to go to three, just letting that week be last week and moving onto the next week because we don’t worry about last week or the next week, worry about the week that’s on right now,” he added.

“Nobody’s panicking. We still know what kind of team we are,” running back Nolan Ray added. “We know the work we put in. Guys still have high spirits and still high hopes and everything we want is right in front of us for the season so nobody’s worried.”

For Wingate, leading a defense after a season-high 24 missed tackles vs. Nebraska, per PFF, is paramount against a UCLA team averaging over 250 rushing yards and five yards per carry during their two-game win streak.

“We went over things that we already talked about as a team, just finishing [in] the fourth quarter, giving it our all, having guys step up from younger guys stepping into bigger roles. Just having guys be able to be ready for that opportunity when it’s called.”

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