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The first test of the great experiment was a rousing success Thursday night as Davidson throttled UNCG 75-54 before 11,687 fans in Greensboro Coliseum. OK, so maybe the basketball part of it didn't work out.

A plan hatched by city and university officials to take the old Women's College into a modern era of athletics and marketing will be studied for years to come, but for one night at least, the Spartans made a triumphant march from campus to coliseum. Ultimately, it wasn't even about basketball.

The sprawling campus one mile in the distance was deserted before sundown, and the parking lots of the big coliseum on Lee Street were filled with blue and gold parties not seen in these parts since the old Spring Flings of the last century. In those days, local beer trucks would simply back up to the university quad, and the suitcase college would look and feel like any other major university in North Carolina.

Davidson, a school with its own history of athletic identity crises, rolled into town with the kind of basketball team UNCG can only dream of having one day. The Wildcats scored 16 straight points to end any doubts of the outcome in the first few minutes of the game. But thousands of fans, students and professors, some of whom had never seen a UNCG sporting event, stayed to the end of the litmus test.

"This was great to see," athletics director Nelson Bobb said. "Every journey has a first step."

There was an electricity in the air and woodsmoke on the breeze as UNCG held a coming-out party that a lot of people, alumni included, had never imagined. Music played and cheerleaders swayed and more than 11,000 people went to see the Spartans play basketball.

UNCG's new chancellor, Linda Brady, promoted the partnership between the school and the city in an attempt to raise the community's awareness of the 17,000-student university in the center of Greensboro. A four-year contract drawn up between the coliseum and the college will ultimately be judged by money, something the arena has never been able to sustain and the school has never worried much about. At least not on any grand scale.

The school is still a nice place for English majors, not far removed from the days when it was joked that the most popular field of study led to the MRS degree. Sports, or activities as they were known then, were an afterthought at best, and the entire athletics department was run out of a log cabin on the corner of Walker and Aycock. The quaint facilities included several gyms and a few fields for intramurals and a pitiful little golf course that wound around the foggy bottom of campus.

The old log cabin's long gone now, and the golf course is down to two and half holes. The tennis courts are squeezed into an area between the soccer stadium and the dormitories surrounding the campus quad. A baseball stadium looms across the street, and a massive student activities center lines one side of Walker Ave. with more playing fields for softball and soccer in the distance.

It is, for all intents and purposes, a wonderful athletics compound.

The current structure was built slowly over time, students paying increased activities fees and the college making incremental changes from the days of WC to the current climate. In the old days, there were fights over the simplest of things. For years, egged on by the student newspaper, The Carolinian, an effort to do away with the hyphen was among the biggest issues. UNC-Greensboro , or UNC-G in the official parlance, was reduced to "The G" by some and not by others.

There were times in those days when nights like Thursday were thought impossible. The old Division-III designation seemed perfect for a school that eventually would win national titles in soccer, move to Division I athletics and into the venerable Southern Conference.

It hasn't been easy, and it hasn't always been smooth. But enough people at UNCG wanted to grow, and now a small group of people have decided it didn't grow fast enough. To get to the next level, whatever that is, the school will need its own students to notice and will need the city that surrounds it to care.

Not everyone was enthralled with the idea of moving basketball games into the cavernous coliseum, and a lot of people assume this idea will fade away in four years. But it deserves a chance to make it on its own merits, basketball success aside. And it's not like it's a bunch of yahoos studying the feasibility of starting a football program.

The tiny gym on campus holds about 1,800 fans. On a cold Thursday in February, 1,800 people walked up to the Greensboro Coliseum and bought tickets for a UNCG basketball game. The conservative former women's college has taken another giant leap forward, and this time more than 11,000 people came to watch.

Contact Ed Hardin at 373-7069 or ed.hardin@news-record.com