USC ready to make splash with gleaming new track facility

Curtis Frye doesn’t look back. The coach of South Carolina’s first team national champion could have said this was long overdue, that maybe he deserved this much sooner than he actually got it.

It’s here now, ready to be unveiled to the world, and Frye has no bitterness.

“If you can’t run, then you crawl, walk, whatever you can do, to keep moving forward,” the Gamecocks’ longtime track and field coach said. “Granted, we ran into the future. We got an administration that saw all of our athletes given an opportunity to compete on a high level. Now we’re looking to how many great things can happen from this day forward.”

The Gamecocks’ gleaming new facility, the Sheila and Morris Cregger Track, has been in operation during the outdoor track season but will be shown off to the rest of the SEC and the country this week. The SEC Outdoor Championships are being hosted by USC Thursday-Saturday and many athletes who ran on the Olympic track in Rio de Janeiro will try their luck on the Gamecocks’ turf.

The state-of-the-art surface and wide lanes have already resulted in 31 personal-best times among the Gamecocks’ 60 athletes. There’s an area specifically for throws (hammer, discus, javelin, shot) and another within the track’s ring. The oval can be run on either way, depending on the wind, and the new support building can shelter athletes between races.

The roughly $10.5 million project has put one of the final touches on USC’s Athletics Village, which encompassed a sweeping change among all facilities. Frye, who led the women’s track and field squad to the 2002 national title, has already seen some results and can’t wait for more.

“We’ve been down a little bit in recruiting because we didn’t have the facility,” Frye said. “Right now our recruitment’s going awesome. As they say, ‘You build it, they will come.’ ”

“We’ve had a lot of success historically in track and field, and to be honest, we’ve fallen a little bit behind in facilities,” said senior associate athletic director/administration Chris Rogers, who helped design the project. “To be able to hold the championship event on a facility that truly is state of the art, that’s a big deal.”

Weems-Baskin track was shoehorned between the left field fence of the softball stadium and the Roundhouse bordering Rosewood Drive, with scarce room to expand or renovate. The master plan was to build an entirely new one, but other sports and facilities came first.

Yet once the athletics village began to expand, the footprint needed a heel. Now as one drives past the site of the Roundhouse, they see the green-curtained throwing cage – quite a switch from the days when USC’s throwers practiced in a gravel lot off Key Road.

There’s space to store equipment during the offseason. There are 300 permanent seats and 2,200 others are being brought in this week, supplied by the same company that supplies temporary seating at the Masters.

“It’s been a long time coming. As you know, over the years, we have worked hard to improve our facilities to put our student-athletes to put in position to compete at a high level nationally,” athletics director Ray Tanner said. “Track and field was one of those sports that had not gotten the attention it needed. Now we’re able to present a track that coach Frye has told me is fast and very quick.”

Frye was consulted every step of the way, about what he wanted and what was best for elite results. His lengthy experience with Team USA guided his efforts, and paid off in a track suited for everybody, but mostly USC.

“Nothing left, not a stone turned that I didn’t have involvement in,” Frye said. “Nobody tried to talk me out of anything. Ray allowed us to step up to the developers and the powers that be to make sure we weren’t doing minimums.”

Tanner, Rogers and Frye each had the same way to describe the current feeling. “I’m excited,” they said.

“The timing is perfect, the fact that we have just this spring finished out new outdoor track and be able to showcase our facility, the University of South Carolina, and hosting the SEC championships is great for us,” Tanner said. “The track and field athletes in this conference are world-class and many of these athletes, you’re likely to see in Toyko in 2020.”

“I think our track is as fast as the one they ran on in Rio,” Frye said. “Everything about this facility is championship-caliber. Very few people have a pro complex, but we’re one of them.”

This story was originally published May 10, 2017 at 12:18 PM with the headline "USC ready to make splash with gleaming new track facility."