Driving Home Pride

Photo by John T. Consoli

The next time you’re walking into the Xfinity Center for a Maryland basketball game, there’s a good chance you’ll see Diane and John Alahouzos’ GOTERPS plates right out front. A former Terrapin Club president and member of University of Maryland College Park Foundation board of trustees, Alahouzos ’71 helped designate the coveted parking spaces steps from Xfinity’s main entrance for UMD’s most ardent backers. He remembers driving through Duke University’s campus with the plates in 2004 after UMD won the ACC tournament. “It was a half-hour detour, but it was worth it,” he says.

While Fabian ’89 and Eleanor Jimenez ’89 celebrate their all-Terp family (including kids Andrew ’15 and Chris ’23) with ALLTERP on one car, they also snagged the OG OC TERP. They’re not the only Ocean City Terps: Joe ’82 and Mary Wiedorfer M.S. ’95 registered for OCTRP2 and OCTERP3 when they moved three years ago from Washington, D.C. (Joe owned the coveted DC TERP there.) “We really wanted OC TERP,” says Wiedorfer, “but it was taken.” Joe, meet Fabian!

When bioengineering major Scott Regan ’26 was selected to join the Mighty Sound of Maryland, his parents surprised the tuba and sousaphone player with personalized license plates: TERP2BA. “Most of the band parents and students get it,” says his mother, Tiffany. “But a lot of other people have asked if someone got two (bachelor’s) degrees.”

Diehard Terps basketball fan Amelia Todaro ’08 bought a bright red car and has owned TERPUMD for about five years. “I was so excited ‘TERPUMD’ was actually available. One of my biggest pet peeves are plates that are so obscure no one else understands them!”

If Sanjay Tolani ’94, MBA ’01 ever chose a life of crime, he’d never be allowed to drive the getaway car. Tolani is known to friends, family—even strangers on the street—as TERP MAN, the yin to his wife Anita’s yang. (A Berkeley grad, she’s CAL GAL.) “People will say,‘Hey! I saw you at the airport!’ I’ve had them for so long, everyone knows it’s me,” he laughs. He once found a note left on his windshield about the 1953 football championship and frequently gets honks on the road. “Sometimes if I’m driving my wife’s car, I’ll get a honk; and then they pull up next to me and start laughing when they see a man behind the wheel.”

When Mike Wall ’82 and wife Louise ’79 got their first car together, they celebrated their love—and UMD—with custom plates. “You had to submit by mail back then,” says Wall. “I remember I put 2TERPS as my first choice and PROTERPS for my second, because I was going for ‘pair of Terps.’ And that’s the one that was accepted. But a lot of people just think it’s ‘Pro Terps.’” Wall’s more recent plates for his truck, which say FRDTRTL, conjure just as much confusion. “If I see people behind me in traffic pointing and trying to figure it out, I’ll point to the big Maryland decal on my back window. Some people think it stands for ‘Ford,’ but I’m driving a Toyota; that makes no sense.”

Virginia began offering the University of Maryland-branded license plate during Stephanie Casway’s senior year at Maryland. She sat at her computer until midnight the night they were available to snag TERP07. (Her husband, Jason Harris ’05, now has TRPCPA.) After her first child was born in 2016, she went to a new moms’ group at a Northern Virginia church and realized she’d parked next to a car with the plates TERP06. It turned out to belong to one of Casway’s sorority sisters, Sandi Horton ’06, who she hadn’t seen in a decade, and later connected with on Facebook.

David Rothbard’s car already had the UMD-branded Virginia plate and Alumni Association lifetime member frame when the 1993 grad splurged on a vanity plate. He couldn’t fit TESTUDO because of the turtle-branded plate—and “TERP” in all forms was taken. A former journalism major and avid Diamondback reader, he settled on DBACK1. Rothbard often gets the question “What’s a DBACK?” and is sometimes confused with an Arizona Diamondbacks fan. It took a visit to the University of Virginia for someone to recognize it—sort of. “This guy rolls up in a car completely decked out in UVA stuff, and he rolls down his window and says, ‘Hey! Maryland Diamondbacks!’”

Amy ’96 and Scott Beatty ’95 never had vanity plates while in Maryland, but after they moved to Memphis, Tenn., realized they might have better luck. Amy got the coveted TERP while her husband got TERP4LIF. Each time the state updated its plate design, the couple kept the old ones, even repurposing a few into birdhouses (left). “Not many people down here know what a Terp is, and I frequently get questions like, ‘Why does your license plate say Twerp?’”

Tom ’90, M.A. ’96 and Kathy Gray have been representing UMD with MD TERP vanity plates for 15 years, first in Des Moines, Iowa, and now in Charlotte, N.C. In addition to honks and waves from other alums, Gray says the most common reaction is, “What’s a Doctor Terp?”

When Gretchen Reinhardt Ricks ’98 and her family moved to New Hampshire 14 years ago, she kept a piece of Maryland on her car: GO TERPS.

“It’s fun to get a honk now and then when someone sees my plate and knows what it means,” she says. “I even had one woman get out of her car in the CVS pharmacy drive-thru, knock on my window and tell me how much she loved my plate because she and her husband were both Maryland grads. It made my day!”

Noreen Welch ’90 was sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic on University Boulevard en route to a Maryland basketball game with friends Sander Zaben ’85 and Jay Sivulich ’85 when they spotted the Maryland license plate WILLWIN. The insider reference to the final line of the “Maryland Victory Song” was brilliant, they agreed. She and Sivulich went home that night and immediately registered for W1LLWIN and WILLW1N, respectively.

Most letter-number combinations that include UMD or TERP have been exhausted in Maryland, with alums swapping “S” with “5” or “E” for “3” to score their coveted configuration.

If you’re yearning to add a little brag to your bumper, the following tags are still available through the Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration:

Maryland residents can also show their Terp pride with a UMD-branded license plate, available through the Alumni Association for a $15 donation. Visit go.umd.edu/mdlicense.