Athletic Director

Vernon E. Seibert, a former athletic director and coach at Glenelg High School who had been an outstanding football player during the 1940s at College Park, died Saturday of cancer at Union Hospital in Elkton. The longtime Columbia resident was 88. "You could write a book about Vernon Seibert. What a character. The stories about him are legend," said Dennis P. Cole, who was head football coach at Glenelg in the 1980s and retired five years ago. "He was always held in high esteem but was not the kind of buddy-buddy type of football coach when it came to the kids," he said.

During Kelly Coppedge's final conversation with her grandfather last Sunday, she says he was still thinking about Navy's football team. "He asked, 'When's Navy playing and who are they playing?" Kelly Coppedge recalled Thursday. J.O. "Bo" Coppedge, a former Navy football player and wrestler who ran Navy's athletic department from 1968 until his retirement in 1988, died Wednesday night - less than three days before the Midshipmen were scheduled to play Arizona State in the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl in San Francisco.

Maryland has yet to respond to the Atlantic Coast Conference's pre-emptive lawsuit seeking to force the school to pay a $52 million exit fee as it prepares to join the Big Ten Conference. Not that university president Wallace D. Loh has ever wavered in his belief that the increased fee would be interpreted as a punishment by the courts and therefore an illegal restraint of trade. He was one of two ACC presidents who voted against its implementation in September. He's got an ally in that belief.

Maryland athletic director Kevin Anderson said Friday that he has faith in the direction and leadership of the Terps' football program and that he was encouraged by the team's performance in the final game of a difficult, injury-ravaged 4-8 season. “I feel confident that we're moving this program in the right direction,” Anderson said. Maryland lost its last six games. Anderson, who likes to take the pulse of the team on road trips, traveled to the University of North Carolina for the final game.

The NCAA Division II and III women's lacrosse committees have selected Stevenson as the new host of the 2013 Division II and Division III championships after they were moved from Montclair State (N.J.) because of a new state law allowing sports wagering on professional and college games. The semifinals for both divisions will be held Saturday, May 18 with the championship games May 19. "The Baltimore area is such a hotbed for lacrosse, so going to this area for our championships is such a natural fit," said Susan Hoffman, chairwoman of the Division III Women's Lacrosse Committee and associate athletic director and senior woman administrator at SUNY-Brockport.

College lacrosse Scott to receive Spirit of Tewaaraton Award The Tewaaraton Foundation has named former Johns Hopkins lacrosse player, coach, and athletic director Bob Scott as the recipient of the 2013 Spirit of Tewaaraton Award. Scott, a National Lacrosse Hall of Famer, will be honored at the Tewaaraton Award Ceremony on May 30 at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian in Washington. As a player, Scott was an All-America midfielder on the 1952 Johns Hopkins team and also played on the 1950 national championship team.

The University of the District of Columbia has announced the hiring of Scott Urick as its first-ever men's lacrosse coach. Urick, the son of longtime Georgetown men's coach Dave Urick, comes to the university after 11 years as an assistant coach at Georgetown, where he helped lead the Hoyas to six NCAA quarterfinal appearances. The Firebirds will compete in the East Coast Conference beginning in the 2014 season. "Scott Urick is an outstanding leader for the first men's lacrosse program at the University of the District of Columbia," athletic director Patricia Thomas said.

Kevin Anderson has taken his share of criticism since coming from Army to Maryland 27 months ago. The athletic director got off to a rocky start with Maryland fans - and many in the local media - for the clumsy way he handled the firing of Ralph Friedgen in December 2010 and the subsequent hiring a few days later of Randy Edsall as the school's football coach. And that was before the Terps were a disastrous 2-10 in Edsall's first season. Then there was the cutting of seven sports to help trim a multi-million dollar deficit Anderson inherited from his predecessor, Debbie Yow. Given the timing of the announcement - in the middle of that nightmarish 2011 football season - Anderson became something of an easy target.

Days after Towson University's athletic director recommended cutting two men's sports to make the remaining programs more competitive and comply with federal law requiring athletics opportunities for women, parents of the baseball team's players raised thousands of dollars to launch a public relations blitz. They paid $1,600 for a plane to fly over a Ravens game trailing a banner that read, "HELP SAVE TOWSON BASEBALL," and planted fans holding #saveTUbaseball signs behind home plate — where they could be seen by television viewers — during the Orioles-Yankees series.

Randy Monroe was looking forward all spring and summer to getting back on the court with his UMBC men's basketball team. The Retrievers, coming off three consecutive single-digit-win seasons, had much to prove in 2012-13, but the veteran coach said in August that he was “ very confident and optimistic about this year's bunch .” But “a couple weeks” ago, Monroe said he started thinking about his future and what was best for UMBC...