IT DIDN’T MATTER WHAT TOWN Maryland found itself in all season. If the Terps were on the road, there was one thing coach John Tillman could count on happening the morning of every game.
When he went downstairs at the team hotel for breakfast, Brett Makar would already be there talking to his family.
Memorial Day was no different. Tillman woke up before most of his players, allowing them to sleep in late after a weather-delayed semifinal two days earlier against Princeton. But there was Makar, on the phone.
“If you’re looking at the All-American boy, I don’t think I’ve ever heard him swear,” Tillman said.
Well before the season began — and well before images of a New England scoreboard adorned his locker in College Park — Makar emerged as a pivotal leadership figure for Maryland. The Terps graduated Nick Grill after last season, and Makar was heading into his fourth year in the program.
Yet it was more than just his turn. A starter since his first game as a freshman, Makar was clearly the next in a long line of high-end defensemen. He played with Curtis Corley, who earlier was teammates with Tim Muller and Matt Dunn, who played with Casey Ikeda and Michael Ehrhardt, who were part of a defensive unit that featured Bernhardt at long pole.
The lineage matters in a program that’s produced at least one All-American defenseman or long-stick midfielder every year since 1999. And Makar embodies it.
“He bleeds Maryland in everything,” Bernhardt said. “You see that in the way he plays. It’s the way he talks about his teammates, the way he talks about Maryland as a program. He kind of has that all-encompassing Terpness to him.”
“Terpness” covers a lot in Tillman’s program, including a single-minded focus on the immediate task at hand that often seems robotic. Yet as the calendar turned to May, it was hard for anyone in Maryland’s locker room to miss the undergirding force.
It was especially true for Makar and Logan Wisnauskas, the hyper-focused attackman who normally possesses little interest in reflecting on the past. They were the two Terps with postgame media duties after the title game loss in 2021, a chore neither of them forgot.
“Me and Logan all week, all month, have been sending the picture back and forth of us doing media last year with the headline, ‘Maryland loses national title,’” Makar said. “Just that image has been stuck in my head.”
They were hardly the only veterans who carried the end of 2021 with them. There was Matt Rahill, who toggled between long pole and close defense early in his career before finding a place as a glue guy amidst bigger names as a fifth-year senior.
Similarly, John Geppert spent time at close defense before settling at long stick and was in his fourth year in the program. Transfers like Jake Higgins (Cleveland State) and Alex Smith (Hartford) helped Maryland rebuild a short-stick defensive midfield unit that faded after the 2017 championship.
And in a twist unforeseen prior to the fall, offensive mainstay Bubba Fairman chose to use his pandemic bonus year of eligibility as a defensive midfielder. It wasn’t a gimmick. With his athleticism, the Utah native developed into an asset at a position he had played only sparingly before.
And then there’s the guy who proved a little ingenuity, a lot of stubbornness and probably a fair bit of pain tolerance was the right mix for a memorable Memorial Day.