​Jim Smith has only been Maryland’s athletic director for one year. It was enough to distance himself from his predecessor, prominent donors say.Harry Geller, who assists Smith with drafting name, image and likeness contracts on a volunteer basis, left the AD’s office after a four-hour meeting around 5 p.m. on a Friday earlier this year. He expected it to be cleared out by then.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisement“Everyone was still there, meeting and working,” Geller said. “Had that been a couple years ago, that place would have been empty.”Another longtime Terps supporter who worked closely with Smith and former AD Damon Evans put the disparity more bluntly.“Damon was all talk. Jim is all action,” said Rick Jaklitsch, the former president of the Terrapin Club. “Jim’s a leader. Damon wasn’t.”Maryland athletics collected $43.7 million in donations in the 2025-26 fiscal year from more than 10,000 individual donors, both department records, the Terps announced Tuesday. Ticket and sponsorship revenue have also jumped under Smith, Kirby Mills, who reports directly to Smith and has overseen the department’s fundraising endeavors for the last four years, told The Baltimore Sun.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementWhile some of that was in place before Smith’s arrival and came from preexisting relationships, donors say he has reinvigorated and expanded what became a flatlining booster base under Evans, who left for the same role at SMU in March 2025 after a chaotic falling out with former men’s basketball coach Kevin Willard.“It was sort of stale,” Geller said. “People were willing to help, but you could see the fatigue.”Smith has turned that attitude around with a simple approach: meeting donors one-on-one for dinner or coffee, hosting NIL fundraising events in cities with large alumni bases and giving coaches a platform to voice their needs and relay those requests to donors.It’s simple, yet effective. Those who saw both Smith and Evans at work say Maryland’s finances are on a promising trajectory after years of stagnation.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisement“He’s not the typical athletic director,” said Barry Gossett, perhaps the school’s most prominent booster who gave a seven-figure donation last month. “I think that was something we needed.”Most of Gossett’s gift was unrestricted, meaning how to use it is up to Smith’s discretion.That’s the preferred method of donating, Mills said, while some gifts come with agreements on what to do with the money, like facilities and scholarships for a non-revenue sport or academic initiatives. Gossett, in a phone interview with The Sun, recalled a conversation with Mills, Maryland’s senior associate AD/chief development officer, just after Smith took over, in which he urged Mills to set a goal of gathering $40 million in unrestricted funds this year. They got there.“The good part is, we’re balancing revenue and expenses while being competit