SAN MARCOS - The contrast was so striking that, when Steve Nichols arrived at Cal State San Marcos in 1995, it was as if he were leaving civilization and setting up camp in the untamed wilderness, a Henry David Thoreau of academia.

Hired as a political science professor, Nichols had come from Ohio State University, where he had received his master's degree and doctorate. He had come, in other words, from one of the nation's largest public universities with one of its largest athletic departments, a program recently profiled in a Sports Illustrated cover story and which generated a staggering $104.7 million in revenue last year.

And where had Nichols gone? To the youngest member of the Cal State system, a 6-year-old campus with "three stark buildings" -- to borrow Nichols' description -- and vast expanses of undeveloped terrain. To a university that was still three years away from having its first intercollegiate sport and almost a decade away from having its first full-time athletic director, who turned out to be Nichols himself.

"My experience with universities is that athletics are part of the whole culture of the place," Nichols says. "And I don't mean the big-time stuff. I never went to a football game at Ohio State. But on an afternoon when I was stressed out, I would walk out and watch the field hockey team play or go see a swim meet -- whatever. Whether you played or not, it was neat from a spectator and cultural standpoint.

"It was tough to leave that environment and come here and have nothing. It was kind of a sacrifice."

Nichols, a decidedly new-age AD who sports a ponytail, has run two-dozen marathons and moonlights as a guitarist in a rock band, is speaking from his office in the M. Gordon Clarke Field House. The athletic building, which features a half-court gym and a stocked weight room, was completed in 2003 at a cost of $7.4 million. Before its construction, the athletic department -- such as it was -- was housed in three small, windowless rooms in a first-floor nook of the administration building.

"You felt like you were in a bunker," recalls Steve Scott, the coach of the cross country and track programs and one of two original coaches at the school. "It was the crappiest place that no one wanted in Craven Hall. I think it had been used for storage."

Now Nichols and Scott both have windows, and both look out upon a 25-acre swath of dirt and weeds that school officials have nicknamed the "front yard." Their vision is to transform that land bordering the intersection of Twin Oaks Valley Road and Barham Drive into an athletic complex featuring baseball and softball diamonds, an aquatics center, multipurpose fields for soccer and other sports, and a gymnasium for basketball and volleyball.

Their vision is to leave behind the challenging existence of an NAIA independent for the more natural institutional fit of NCAA Division II.

Their vision is a future in which hosting national events like the NAIA women's golf championships, which will take place May 15-18 at Lake San Marcos Country Club, is commonplace.

Their vision is a bustling campus where athletics is an integral part of student life.

That's still a far cry from The Program, as SI dubbed Ohio State's revenue-generating monster. But it's also a far cry from the Walden Pond that Nichols discovered as a Cal State San Marcos pioneer.

"If you look at where this department was five years ago and where we are now," he says, "it's night and day."

Sports at Cal State San Marcos nearly died on the vine. The initial offerings of golf, cross country and track were successful almost from inception, even while subsisting on shoestring budgets necessitated by statewide cuts.

The on-campus track, a gift from longtime university donor Bob Mangrum, was state-of-the-art, but there was almost literally nothing else. Scott, one of the best milers in American history, used to joke that the locker room for his athletes was the portable toilet lining the track. Injured runners needing a trainer had to depend on the generosity of local physical therapists.

In 2004, six years after sports debuted, Scott and golf coach Fred Hanover approached newly appointed university president Karen Haynes with hats in hand.

"They said they would have to close shop if they didn't get some money," Haynes says. "When I heard that, I thought, 'Not only do we need to stop sports from going under, but we need to see how we can make them move forward.' "

Haynes allotted $40,000 from her discretionary fund to bail out the fledgling department, then named Nichols as the interim AD. The following year, the future of sports at the school was secured when students -- by a nearly three-to-one margin in the largest voting turnout in university history -- approved a referendum to add $40 to their semester fees for the funding of athletics.

"The student fee was huge," Nichols says. "It was a big turning point."

Courtesy of the cash infusion from the student body of about 7,500, Cal State San Marcos saw its athletic budget more than double to $1.2 million in fall 2005. The following school year, the department finally added its first team sports: men's and women's soccer, baseball and softball.

The soccer teams played their inaugural seasons last fall, with the men's squad finishing a surprising 12-3-1 behind senior defender Ben Crouse, who transferred from Notre Dame to play with his younger brother, Brett.

The softball team, coached by former San Diego State assistant Jennifer Milo, struggled in posting a 10-31 record. Milo left her post last week after the growing department created the position of associate athletic director for development.

The baseball team, which scored a coup by luring highly regarded coach Dennis Pugh from his longtime home at Mission Bay High, recovered from an 0-7 start to finish 18-23.

Along with those bumps in the road came one big pothole: Unlike the soccer program, which hosted games on the field ringed by the Mangrum Track, the baseball and softball teams had coaches, players and equipment, but no on-campus diamond. Pugh's crew was forced to share the baseball field at San Marcos High. Milo's bunch had to trek over to Mission Hills.

"We're doing it backwards," says Ruth Mangrum, Bob's wife. "We have the teams, and now we need the fields."

The need for fields prompted the Mangrums, an elderly Rancho Santa Fe couple with no direct connection to the university, to donate $200,000 to the cause and prompted almost 300 people to squeeze into the Clarke Field House on April 14 for the university's annual fund-raiser. This year's theme: "Fields of Dreams."

When the fields will become reality is anybody's guess. The school's master plan calls for not only baseball and softball facilities, but also venues for sports that don't even exist yet (basketball, volleyball, swimming). The total price tag for such an ambitious athletic center would far exceed $20 million, according to Haynes, and she's not exactly holding her breath waiting for a donor to drop a check of that size on her desk.

"It would be ideal to do it all at once," she says, "but it's unreasonable to expect that to happen."

Instead, Cal State San Marcos likely will proceed in phases, with the pace of construction tied to the pace of the nascent fund-raising drive. Phase 1 was the batting cages that have already been built near the field house. Phase 2 involves basic practice fields for baseball and softball. Phase 3 could include game-ready facilities for both sports, complete with seating, press boxes and concession stands.

Haynes also has held discussions with the city of San Marcos and the San Marcos Unified School District on the possibility of teaming up to build an aquatics center on the Cal State San Marcos campus using a combination of public and private funds. City manager Paul Malone described the talks as exploratory, adding that San Marcos is interested in the idea.

"We have the land, which sometimes is the hardest thing," says Milo, who, in her new job, will focus on planning and raising funds for the facilities. "It's just a matter of finding some special donors who want to see their names on the field. Whether that happens in two years or three years or four years depends on money."

Pugh says if his program doesn't at least have a practice field by 2009, he'll be "very disappointed." In the meantime, he does his best to lay a solid foundation despite structural flaws beyond his control.

Cal State San Marcos' scholarship budget remained fixed at $120,000 -- the money comes from the interest on a $2.57 million endowment given by the late Helene Clarke of Oceanside in 2002 -- even after the number of athletes nearly tripled, from about 80 to 208. As a result, Scott now has the equivalent of four full scholarships (down from eight) to spread across the four teams he coaches. For her first season, Milo chose to distribute less than one full scholarship among seven players.

"It's going to affect our competitiveness," says Scott, whose squads have become a fixture at the NAIA national meet. "But hopefully it's just for the short term. The more exposure that the school gets, the more likely we are to get donations."

The coaches' cause is aided by the fact that tuition for in-state students at Cal State San Marcos is relatively inexpensive ($3,092 per year), which makes the walk-on route a reasonable alternative. But when Point Loma Nazarene University, a recruiting rival and a fellow member of the NAIA, can offer $10,000 and a beautiful baseball field overlooking the Pacific Ocean, what's a guy like Pugh to do?

"It's a challenge," Pugh admits. "The facility thing is the major obstacle to this program taking off, even more than scholarships."

Last year, the Cal State system provided its schools the opportunity to solicit the expertise of retired NCAA president Cedric Dempsey as a consultant. Cal State San Marcos jumped at the offer.

In October, Dempsey -- a La Jolla resident who was San Diego State's athletic director in 1979 before presiding over the NCAA from 1993 to 2002 -- visited the campus along with former Cal AD John Kasser. The two men spent half a day touring the grounds and examining the athletic department's budget and old strategic plan.

"It felt weird to be sitting with the former president of the NCAA, looking at our little operation," Nichols says.

Two months later, Dempsey came back to Nichols with a series of recommendations on the direction of the program. Dempsey declined to comment until he submits an official report, probably this month, but Nichols says the thrust is that the school should add the sports necessary to join Division II as soon as possible.

The Cougars compete as a Region II independent, one of 34 independents in the 287-school NAIA. Scheduling is no issue for golf, track or cross country -- which can enter tournaments or meets with schools ranging from NAIA to Division I -- but it's a serious one for the new team sports, which are largely at the mercy of their opponents from conferences.

Dempsey recommended the university push for membership in the California Collegiate Athletic Association, a Division II conference that includes 11 Cal State schools along with UC San Diego and which has won a record 145 NCAA titles since its founding in 1938. Cal State Bakersfield will move up to Division I this summer, leaving the conference on the lookout for a new 12th member.

Commissioner Robert Hiegert says the CCAA has "definite interest" in adding Cal State San Marcos. The hangup? Not only does every school in the conference participate in basketball, but according to Hiegert, so does every school in Division II.

"The concern for us is that they don't have a facility to host basketball in," Hiegert says. "We almost require a school to have a basketball program."

And basketball isn't on the immediate horizon at Cal State San Marcos, not with prospects for an arena dim and no revenue to support any teams beyond the existing ones.

As a short-term option, Nichols has floated the idea of finding a temporary home in the Golden State Athletic Conference, an NAIA league composed of schools (including Point Loma Nazarene and San Diego Christian) that already dot the Cougars' schedules. But the GSAC members are all private Christian colleges, and their presidents have shown no inclination to alter the composition.

"I think it's highly unlikely that Cal State San Marcos would be a member of our conference," GSAC commissioner Cliff Hamlow says.

Nichols is in the process of forming a campus task force of administrators, professors and students who will weigh Dempsey's report and choose the best course of action.

"A lot depends on how these plans are embraced," Nichols says. "If people are resistant, we may have to put the brakes on."

If you have a mental picture of Cal State San Marcos facing San Diego State in football in, say, 2050, you'll have to put the brakes on. The word "football" is never uttered in the halls of the athletic offices, and Nichols doubts that enrollment -- projected to top out at 20,000 -- will ever be large enough to support a Division I program.

Scott envisions Cal State San Marcos settling into Division II and becoming a North County cousin of UCSD. At that level, sports are more likely to be a money drain than a Ohio State-like cash cow.

"The value of athletics to a place like Cal State San Marcos is not in direct dollar amounts," says Robert Brown, an economics professor at the school who studies big-time college sports. "It's in other things that are more difficult to quantify."

It's in, for example, the sight of athletes strolling around campus in their team-specific T-shirts and getting recognized for their achievements.

It's in a Facebook group called Cougar Crew that serves as an online hub for the school's underground fan base.

"We're trying to get athletics here to be bigger than they are," says Malarie Barnard, a freshman softball player and Cougar Crew founder.

It's in the scene during the first games that were held on campus, men's and women's soccer matches against Cal Poly Pomona last Aug. 25. To Nichols' surprise, about 300 people packed the temporary bleachers, a modest number until you consider that four times fewer attended the average Cougars road game.

Barnard and her roommates showed up wearing shorts and sports bras, their bodies painted in the school colors of blue and white. President Haynes showed up in a Cal State San Marcos soccer jersey, with her name and No. 1 emblazoned on the back. Drunk on long-dormant school spirit -- if not spirits -- students did the wave, chanted "Ole!" in the manner of crazed South Americans, and rushed the field after the men's team won 2-1 on a last-minute goal.

"A writer for the student newspaper came up to me and said, 'Now this feels like a real university,' " Nichols says. "It was really remarkable."

In that moment, as a late-summer sun set on the green hills of San Marcos while athletes and students cavorted on the field, the possibilities seemed limitless.

- Contact staff writer Brian Hiro at b_hiro@hotmail.com. Comment at sports.nctimes.com.

Cal State San Marcos at a glance

Founded: 1989

Enrollment: 7,622

Size: 304 acres

President: Karen Haynes

Athletic director: Steve Nichols

Sports: Baseball, softball, men's and women's soccer, men's and women's golf, men's and women's track, men's and women's cross country

Affiliation: NAIA

Nickname: Cougars

Colors: Royal blue, white

Cal State San Marcos is making a concerted effort to expand its athletic menu, but the NAIA operation is and will likely remain miniscule in comparison with the average Division I department, much less a major-conference behemoth. Here's a look at how the Cougars are dwarfed by a school like Ohio State, which boasts the nation's largest athletic department by most statistical measures.

CSUSM OSU

Sports 10 36

Athletes 208 926

Employees 24 300

Athletic acreage 25 377

Building space (square feet) 32,000 16.9 million

Budget (millions) $1.2 $101.8

Revenue (millions) N/A* $104.7

Profit (millions) N/A* $2.9

* Athletics at Cal State San Marcos is not a money-making venture. The department doesn't charge admission for events or sell merchandise.

Sources: Cal State San Marcos athletic department, Sports Illustrated, USA Today

A NEW HOME?

School officials predict that the Cougars, currently an NAIA independent, will eventually join the Division II California Collegiate Athletic Association. The list of the conference's 12 members:

+ Cal Poly Pomona

+ Cal State Bakersfield

+ Cal State Dominguez Hills

+ Cal State Los Angeles

+ Cal State Monterey Bay

+ Cal State San Bernardino

+ Cal State Stanislaus

+ Chico State

+ Humboldt State

+ San Francisco State

+ Sonoma State

+ UC San Diego

Note: Cal State Bakersfield will leave the conference and move up to Division I this summer.