COLLEGE PARK -- For the past five years, the glory of LTC Maryland track and field's 26 Atlantic Coast Conference team championships and three NCAA individual titles has become darkened by "the 13-minute commute."
Bill Goodman, the Terps' current coach and ACC long jump champion in 1973, has every minute from College Park to the track at Parkdale High School stuck in his memory. Since the building of the football facility at the end zone of Byrd Stadium overtook a quarter of the track, the Terps track and field team has trained at a local high school.
The wait soon will be over. Next spring, Maryland opens its $2.5 million complex for track and field, soccer and lacrosse.
And Goodman is not the only one affected.
"I took a recruit out there yesterday, and he was ready to pass out," Goodman said. "You now can sell the dream and don't have to say that much. It's right there. It makes our job much more fun."
The track and field team moved practices off campus a few years ago, but the other non-revenue teams played their games at Denton Field, an upgraded intramural field with no scoreboard until two years ago, temporary bleachers and no lights.
The unnamed facility, about a quarter-mile west of Cole Field House, features 5,000 bleacher seats, a newly sodded Bermuda grass surface and a state-of-the-art, all-weather, 400-meter track. The track meets ACC and International Amateur Athletic Federation specifications and could draw world-class events.
Teams that will use the grass field for games include men's and women's soccer and women's lacrosse. The men's lacrosse team will play only its nontraditional rivals at the new complex.
Last year marked the first time that all those teams were nationally ranked in the same season. With the combination of an emerging winning tradition and the new stadium, Gothard Lane, Maryland assistant athletic director, said that admission will be charged at men's and women's soccer games for the first time next fall.
"We have successful nonrevenue programs, and it's just a matter of successful teams deserving good facilities," said Lane. "It's a standard stadium that is comparable to many schools' in the ACC."
By raising itself to conference standards, Maryland is in line to play host to three ACC tournaments after being bypassed in recent years. Maryland never has played host to an ACC soccer tournament and last was host to the track and field championships in 1964.
The Terps have the women's soccer tournament next fall and the conference's track and field championships in 1997. Maryland also is tentatively scheduled as the site for the men's soccer tournament in 1996.
In addition to attracting conference tournaments, the Terps want to draw more fans. The nonrevenue teams average fewer than 1,000 fans per game but predict an increase in attendance with the newly installed lights.
"We're trying to get as many fans as we can to our games," women's soccer coach April Heinrichs said. "I think we can do that with night games."