Buzz Williams and Scott Monarch had been driving all night, returning from a recruiting trip in Jacksonville, when they pulled up outside their University of New Orleans basketball offices to find the National Guard pointing M-16s at 20 civilians face down in the parking lot.

Williams turned to his assistant coach, “How in the hell are we supposed to recruit like this?”

New Orleans had been devastated by Hurricane Katrina the previous year. The university’s basketball team was playing in a glorified high school gym. Players had to change under the bleachers. Williams had less than half a roster to work with. And the rebuilding city was being looted for survival’s sake. “It was pure chaos,” Monarch said.

That was Williams’ first head coaching job. He won 14 games, more road contests than the Privateers had the previous three seasons combined, and featured the Sun Belt Conference Player of the Year. Williams made it work.

Maryland’s new men’s basketball coach has always made it work.At Marquette (2008-2014), Williams was a low-profile hire a week after Tom Crean’s shocking exit for Indiana. He made the NCAA Tournament five of the next six seasons. At Virginia Tech (2014-2019), he inherited a program that missed the tournament seven years running, then won 20 games by Year 2. Texas A&M (2019-2025) was a disaster before Williams piloted the Aggies into March Madness thrice.

Williams, 52, is complicated and methodical. He’s a tireless recruiter and, historically, a remedy for directionless programs. With junior college roots and a me-vs-the-world mentality, Monarch, who coached beside Williams for five seasons, said Maryland is getting “the energy of a rookie head coach with the savvy of a veteran.”

The job of reconfiguring Maryland hoops post-Kevin Willard’s scorched-earth exit isn’t nearly as strenuous as his year in New Orleans. Rebounding the Terps from a Sweet 16 run on a late start, having to build a roster from scratch, is a project nonetheless.

This all started the day before the NCAA Tournament when Willard held a flame against the feet of his athletic department, publicly calling out the veracity of considering itself a top program in the country, bringing specific receipts, and revealing his athletic director was halfway out the door. Willard’s team won anyway. He stuck to his guns, called himself an a-hole, and they still advanced to the program’s first Sweet 16 in a decade.

Days after Maryland lost to Florida, Willard left for Villanova. What remained of the roster (expectedly) entered the transfer portal, leaving the Terps with no players and looming questions about financial commitment from the powers that be.

Williams, who said he’s “at peace” with the available resources and was “somewhat removed from civilization in general,” didn’t know much about what transpired until interviewing for the job at Maryland. It’s now his mess to clean up.

‘There is always a plan’

Last week, Williams was officially introduced to College Park.

With two massive Maryland state flags filling the Xfinity Center’s wall of seats behind him, and a prominent 2002 national championship banner hanging above his head, University of Maryland president Darryll J. Pines spoke briefly about the due diligence of a quick-turnaround men’s basketball coaching hire.

“We watched a lot of video,” Pines said. “A lot of video. A lot of video.”

The public interviews Williams has given, sidelines he roamed and lectures delivered paled in comparison with one moment, Pines said. He pointed up toward the gym’s year-old scoreboard. This short clip momentarily sucked the air out of the gym. It was Texas A&M senior Manny Obaseki, right after a second-round exit in the NCAA Tournament, effusing praise for the coach “who changed each and every one of our lives.”

Williams wiped clean the fog filling his glasses, reliving that touching moment. Obaseki represents the type of player who found success under, and paid homage to, the maniacally Type A coach.

“He’s incredibly organized. From practice to team travel to meals to his staff to recruiting, there is a plan. There is always a plan,” said Virginia Tech play-by-play voice Bill Roth. “Buzz is so cerebral.”

He’s been that way his entire coaching career. Maybe even before then.

Williams is the son of divorced parents, meaning he bounced around the Dallas-Fort Worth area at an early age. He spent most of his childhood in Van Alstyne, Texas, a small rural town north of Dallas, and graduated from Van Alstyne High School, where he was no more than an average player on the basketball team.

In 1990, he left home for Navarro College, a two-year community college in Corsicana, Texas. The hoops-loving freshman started sneaking into the gym for Lewis Orr’s practices, finding a quiet seat in the corner. Then Orr walked in.

“Can I help you?” the future first-ballot NJCAA Hall of Fame coach asked.

Williams wanted sit and watch. Navarro was a powerhouse at that time, regularly sending players to Division I programs, and Orr ran a tight ship behind closed doors. The answer was no.

“Well, what do I have to do?” an eager Williams asked.

“You can take that broom over there,” Orr said, “and you can go sweep the floors.”

Williams obliged and came back a few minutes later, “What else, coach?”

Orr liked what he saw. He made Williams team manager, a title that holds more weight at the JUCO level, and nicknamed him “Buzz” for his endless motor. Williams was 18 years old acting as an assistant coach. “I treated him like I was paying him $1 million to work at Navarro College,” Orr said. “I expected him to go pick up players, go scout. I just treated him like he’d been doing these things all his life and he didn’t ever say, ‘I can’t do that.’”

Where such work ethic comes from, Orr isn’t sure. “As far as I know, he might’ve come out the womb that way.” The 88-year-old coach refutes any credit. But he’ll concede one idiosyncrasy. That Williams must make a connection with anyone who walks through that gym door. Get their name, contact information and learn something about them. Then keep that connection alive.

To this day, Williams writes about 120 handwritten notes per month. He keeps a rotating list of folks in his life to stay connected to. There’s more. Orr joked that Williams plans his life out at least 30 days in advance — he’s intentional with how he spends every day. The three-piece suits that fill his closet are all perfectly neat and folded like an untouched rack at Brooks Brothers.

“He’s an unusual person,” Orr said, “in a good way.”

Williams reads four books simultaneously and finishes one each week. He dedicates roughly an hour when he first wakes up. Another before he falls asleep. Then some more before and after basketball practice. The voracious reader tackles genres ranging from Oprah Winfrey’s memoir, “What I Know for Sure”; to the novel, “Camino Winds” by John Grisham; and “Attack the Day,” Seth Emerson’s book about Georgia football under Kirby Smart. His book shelf is so full he could organize it using the Dewey Decimal System.

Williams takes notes, too. He jots down plot line annotations or maybe a lesson to be learned. It’s not unusual for Williams to conjure up a basketball play while buried between pages.

“He’s inquisitive,” said legendary Terps coach Gary Williams. “He’s always asking questions, and he’s always trying to find things that will help him and his teams get better. I was the same way when I coached. I never thought I had all of the answers. I was fortunate to be around some great coaches, but in this business, you steal ideas and see how you can fit them into your philosophy and what you believe in.”

What Williams believes in is his squeezing every ounce of potential out of his players. His “boot camp” practices are legendary. But they’re not everyone’s cup of tea.

During the month of September, for example, practice starts at 4:45 a.m. “That’s half the battle,” Obaseki told The Baltimore Sun. Williams’ practices begin with drill work like it were merely a ploy to get to the good stuff. Basketball stations start once guys reach exhaustion. And when Williams sees you can’t go anymore, “he’s gonna give you a reason why you should keep going,” Obaseki said.

When prodded for details of what those workouts feel like, Monarch just laughed.

“They’re overwhelming,” he said. “You’re sitting there, gasping for air, and Buzz is just harping on you, harping on you. What happens is the more tired and fatigued you get, the more asinine he gets on the details.”

Williams’ best teams are full of players who learn to embrace that style. Learn to love it.

It overwhelmed a freshman Jimmy Butler. But he dominated those workouts by Year 3, cussing everybody else out instead of being the one under duress. Jae Crowder showed up at Marquette with a tendency to take a few plays off. Monarch said Williams would “just make him miserable” until Crowder gave his all. He was named Big East Player of the Year as a senior in 2012. Thirteen years later, the NBA veteran texted Monarch because he woke up from a nightmare that his old coaches were chasing him around a gym.

Marquette once had a player who tore his ACL. When he didn’t show up to practice, Williams was pissed.

“I was like, ‘Buzz, what the hell’s wrong with you? He had surgery this morning. You were at the procedure! You thought he was just gonna get off the table and come to practice today?” Monarch said. “’Where the hell is he?’ ‘What are you talking about? He’s back at the hospital!’”

It’s been a decade since those Marquette teams. He’s lightened up some. But the boot camp practices are still a famous tenet of a Williams-led program. They’re intense and they’re tough. Not everyone makes it through.

“I’ll be honest, I enjoyed it,” Obaseki said.

It’s helped Williams win at every stop, with vastly unique rosters in varying circumstances. He’s a successful coaching chameleon. Williams’ teams have won slowing the tempo to a meditative pace, turning it up to a track meet, and everything in between.

The constants are his tenacious defenses and ability to recruit that can revive a program out of a period of uncertainty.

That brings him to College Park. The Crab Five fading in the rearview mirror. Willard’s photo ripped off the walls. And Williams already knee deep in the transfer portal to build his debut Terps “team” — a word he uttered 35 times in his first address since the hiring became official, leaving no doubts about his goals. Even if some don’t appreciate his approach.

‘Like clockwork’

Williams fielded only four questions from reporters while the pageantry and cameras of an introductory news conference were still flicked on. Shortly after, he was whisked off to meet with boosters and alumni, rather than indulge local reporters any further. Perhaps the afternoon ceremony ran long and he was adhering to a strict schedule, but Williams has a reputation of being adversarial and dismissive in that part of his job description.

When asked about Obaseki’s second half playing time in a Jan. 25 loss to Texas, Williams’ news conference abruptly ended as he deflected the question by only saying, “yes, sir.” At Virginia Tech, he’d routinely show up 30-plus minutes late to his postgame news conference, deadlines be damned. He was once two hours tardy to a 2016 postgame news conference, later apologizing for the situation but also revealing his honest insights into his media philosophy.

“I apologize for being late, and I mean that genuinely,” Williams said at the time. “But if you ever think that being here is more important than talking to my children or my responsibility to the guy who offered me the job, unequivocally the answer is no. And I hope that doesn’t offend you or the other media around the world who are watching this, but it’s just in my heart what I believe to be right.”

He’s also shared lighthearted interactions with reporters, as passion for his team and mentoring young people shines through his disdain for regularly scheduled media obligations. In 2022, he passed out a nine-page manifesto to reporters laying out why it “defies logic” that his team missed the NCAA Tournament. He even passed along some of that Orr wisdom to Missouri student journalists in February.

The Virginian-Pilot columnist David Teel covered the entirety of Williams’ Hokies tenure, from 2014 to 2019. In that time, Teel watched Williams win 100 games and coach in three consecutive NCAA Tournaments, a first in that program’s history. Hokies athletic director Whit Babcock called Williams’ success “dramatic and noticeable on a national level.”

But Williams’ Virginia Tech tenure, for Teel at least, began on a strange note.

It was April 2014 and the new men’s basketball coach — before ever coaching a game — granted a few local reporters one-on-one meetings. Each about 30 minutes, Williams fielded a car wash of questions in a conference room adjacent to his new Blacksburg, Virginia office. Teel remembers his vividly. Partially because it was the only one-on-one Williams sat for in five years. But more so because having been a sports journalist in Virginia since 1984, Teel has never experienced anything like it.

“During our conversation, and I don’t know if he did this with any of the others,” Teel said, “he literally, unprompted, etched out how it would end for him at Virginia Tech. That’s how self aware he is. He knows that he wears on people.”

So would the Texas native who shuffled through three programs, fleeing after building success for five to six seasons at each, be comfortable settling in at a program 1,300 miles north of his hometown? One that was just discarded by Willard after three seasons and a Sweet 16 run. One now itching for stability in new-age college basketball.

This was the murky cloud already hanging over Xfinity Center 4 1/2 hours into Williams’ time on campus.

“He wins so much he’s not gonna get fired,” Teel said. “But he has this innate understanding that, ‘It’s time for me to go.’ And you see it in his history. Marquette, six; Virginia Tech, five; Texas A&M, six. It’s like clockwork.”

Baltimore Sun reporter Edward Lee contributed to this article. Have a news tip? Contact Sam Cohn at scohn@baltsun.com, 410-332-6200 and x.com/samdcohn.