Damon Evans was officially named the full-time athletic director at the University of Maryland after serving as the interim since October 2017, when his predecessor Kevin Anderson announced he was taking a six-month sabbatical before ultimately leaving the school altogether.
Evans was arrested in a drunk-driving incident in 2010 while athletic director at the University of Georgia, an incident that cost him his job.
Some saw it as a collegiate comeback when Maryland president Dr. Wallace Loh introduced Evans at a news conference on Tuesday, saying: “That tells me something about his personal qualities of perseverance of striving forward, of never giving up, and I hope that personal story of redemption is also telling us something about the values of the University of Maryland. We are committed to excellence and we are committed to inclusion.”
Evans said at the news conference: “I always tell people what happened at Georgia, I’m fully culpable for. There’s no one to blame but me. I opened up with the (search) committee. I just opened up and I told them that I made a mistake some eight years ago. My fault, but that’s not who I am. It’s an aberration of who I am.”
Dan Wolken, national college football and basketball columnist for USA TODAY, noted on Twitter that “with Damon Evans getting hired as Maryland’s permanent AD, 11 of the 65 Power 5 programs are led by African-Americans.”
Evans, 48, worked private-sector jobs from 2010 to 2014 before re-entering college athletics as Maryland’s senior associate athletic director and chief financial officer, a position he held until Anderson went on leave last fall.
That’s when Evans, in the interim position as acting athletic director, oversaw all day-to-day operations for Maryland’s athletic department.
