COLLEGE PARK - It's the good and the bad of it. The bigger women's college basketball gets, the more cutthroat the enterprise becomes, which is why it might be fair to ask how long first-year Maryland coach Brenda Frese will stick around.
She is 32. She is an Iowa native (Cedar Rapids) with deep Midwest roots (assistant coach at Kent State and Iowa State and head coach at Ball State and Minnesota). Also worth mentioning, Frese, unlike her counterpart, Gary Williams, is not a Maryland alum. Williams' newly minted contract extension seems to guarantee the championship coach's retirement - like his pot of gold - will come in College Park.
Frese might even expect a little suspicion. After all, she's well aware of the criticism hurled at her after she left Minnesota in April after a stellar one-year stint with the Gophers.
"I know they took it really hard, that people were saying, `She was here one year and she leaves.' I could sit here and dwell on it, but I moved on. I said: `Hey, these people felt passionate about women's basketball. We turned it around so that people wanted to get involved,' " Frese said.
She wants to do that here, with the bonus of a deep recruiting base (Baltimore and Washington alone are rich fodder) and thicker resources, courtesy, in part, of the increased revenues to be generated by the new, luxury suite-ringed Comcast Center. Just to give you an idea, it cost as much as $30,000 for Frese and her staff to bang on recruits' doors this past August. She got good results from the cash flow.
But now that women's roundball has turned hardball in Division I circles, Maryland has protected itself against losing what it considers it newest, best athletic department asset. Athletic director Debbie Yow may have attracted Frese with a lucrative, six-year deal, but she also attached a hefty buyout clause that should force any potential raiders to think twice about luring Frese.
Here's why, courtesy of an astounding stat: Fifty-seven Division I schools across America hired new women's basketball coaches before the start of this season. Only one of them got the reigning Associated Press Coach of the Year. That would be Maryland. She would be Frese.
Everyone should feel very happy ... except maybe Minnesota, where, last season, Frese conducted a Big Ten-record one-year turnaround.
