Terps' Weatherly Stresses Positives Before Last Game

Senior wide receiver Drew Weatherly plans to be in uniform when Maryland takes the field against Purdue at the Champs Sports Bowl on Friday. He doesn't know how many catches he'll have, how many passes will be thrown his way or even if he'll get in the game at all.

But a season of battling a foot injury has conditioned Weatherly to focus on what he believes is most important.

"My last college game as a win. That's all I'm going to remember," he said.

Weatherly's crowning moment in a Maryland uniform came last season when he caught a game-winning touchdown pass against Navy. At the start of this season, he was Maryland's most experienced wide receiver. He oversaw the team's young wideouts during volunteer workouts, when NCAA rules prohibit coaches from practicing with players. Coaches looked for Weatherly to provide leadership and develop into a starter.

Instead, Weatherly suffered a right foot injury at the end of fall camp, which deprived him of a chance to finally emerge after three years as a backup.

Weatherly fell into a steady decline that started on Sept. 7, the day he had surgery to insert a screw into his foot. He returned against Georgia Tech a month later, when he caught one pass for one yard, then suited up the next week against Virginia. He didn't dress again until Nov. 11 against Miami.

He has yet to catch another pass.

Weatherly said the foot injury made it too painful to run. He thought of playing through the injury, but he called the pain "unbearable."

"When you actually can't be out there, it's so different," he said. "It's just something inside eating you alive. You've got to believe you're going to get back out there, that you can overcome this."

But since the layoff between the Virginia and Miami games, he said the foot has completely healed.

"For what it is, Weatherly's been better than he's been all season," Maryland Coach Ralph Friedgen said yesterday.

Weatherly managed to play in the regular season finale against Wake Forest. His biggest contribution in that game was throwing a big block on a screen pass.

"I just saw a big smile on his face," teammate and fellow wideout Darrius Heyward-Bey said about the play. "He could have just easily gave up. He's out there working hard like everybody else. That's what a leader is supposed to do."

Weatherly said he felt fortunate just be able to play in front of his family.

"Senior Night, walking out and seeing my mother crying happy tears, it was a blessing," he said. "Regardless of how many snaps I got, it was a blessing."

He said the injury was another blessing of sorts because not being able to play most of the season made him focus more on his academics. He plans to graduate in the summer with a degree in family studies.

"This is God's plan, not mine," Weatherly said. "Things may not have worked out as I would have liked them to, but it boils down to this being God's plan. Basically it's like another page in my book, another chapter. Life moves on."

Terrapins Notes: Friedgen turned his friendship with Central Florida Coach George O'Leary to his advantage yesterday. With a threat of rain in Orlando, O'Leary allowed Friedgen and the Terrapins to use his program's indoor practice facility.

"He probably wouldn't have loaned the indoor place to anybody but me," Friedgen said of O'Leary, whom he met during their time as coordinators at Georgia Tech. "I probably put him in a bind. I know there will be a thousand people who'll want to use it now."

Meanwhile, Purdue practiced outdoors on a field adjacent to the Florida Citrus Bowl Stadium. The Terrapins had been scheduled to practice on a field near the stadium.

"I knew the field was pretty saturated," Friedgen said. "I thought in the best-case scenario we could practice. But I didn't want to take a chance of anybody slipping and pull a groin or a hamstring." . . .

Starting cornerback Josh Wilson is expected to play after food poisoning forced him to miss a practice. He said eating a combination of different meats caused him to fall ill on Friday night.