COLLEGE PARK -- Maryland students gathered in all the normal places to watch their Terps open the ACC tournament against Florida State yesterday. Some huddled over burgers and beers at campus-area pubs. Some crowded around televisions in their dorm rooms.
For the first time, Terps fans had another option -- the Internet. The ACC tournament, being held in Charlotte, N.C., is making its World Wide Web debut this year.
The interactive site allows fans to listen to games live and to access up-to-the-minute statistics, discussion groups and video clips of postgame news conferences as they take place.
Following sporting events online is not exactly a new phenomenon, but many students at College Park had no idea the tournament could be accessed on the Internet. Others said they planned to watch the game and saw no reason to follow it on the Web.
In the university's main computer labs yesterday, screens showed students checking e-mail, writing papers or just surfing. The "All-ACCess" site did not appear on a single monitor at the beginning of the Terps' game.
Tracking games at www.theacc.com is not comparable to watching on television.
On Thursday night, for example, a fan logged on to a computer could not feel Clemson guard Terrell McIntyre's desperate energy as he lunged forward to fire a final three-point attempt, or see Virginia sag as Duke pulled away in another blowout.
Some day, maybe a happy combination of television and the Web will allow fans to watch the game and call up the career statistics of the fourth player off Clemson's bench, all on the same big screen. But not yet.
For now, the Internet is a handy substitute for fans who can't escape work or class, and it offers a nice complement to television.
Fans who followed the Maryland game on the Web yesterday praised the speed of the game updates.
"Other sites, like the ESPN site, take longer and give you less information," said a fan named Steve, who dropped into one of the site's chat rooms Friday afternoon.
But others complained that they had trouble getting on the server.
Keeping up with the early rounds of the ACC tournament used to pose a challenge to working fans, said several Maryland graduates who showed up on the site Friday. But the new Web broadcasts allow fans to check on games at the office.
One man named Paul, who showed up in a chat room during the Maryland game, admitted he used to play hooky from his Baltimore law office to watch the first round of the tournament.
"But now, I don't have to waste a vacation day," he said.
While it's hard to get a sense of how the tournament looks by logging on, it's easy to find almost any piece of statistical information.
The "Live Stats" section offers both individual and game statistics, and if, for example, you want to know how many shots Steve Francis has missed midway through the first half, the Web is more helpful than any television broadcaster.
There also is a handy section on the site that has team and player statistics for the entire season. And clicking on a team name, the site offers a long list of facts and brief anecdotes about the program.
The site also delivers thorough coverage of practices. A sound bite from Thursday, for example, featured Terps coach Gary Williams talking about how hard it is to prepare for the winner of a game that hadn't yet been played.
However, many of the interactive elements on a site sound more exciting than they turn out to be. It takes at least an hour for most computers to download the software needed to listen to the games, and the sound bites from coaches are hard to hear if the computer does not have a good sound system.
And postgame news conferences appear small and blurry on an average-sized computer screen.
Fans who enjoy the Webcast, however, will also be able to follow the NCAA tournament on the Web at www.thefinalfour.net.
Pub Date: 3/06/99