Finally, Trabuco Hills Can Be Proud of Its Track Record : High school: After practicing among ruts and rocks, athletes get a state-of-the-art facility.

What Jack Recla needs now is a race of his own. An all-out mile, maybe. Or a 100-meter dash. Something to burn the ocean of adrenaline inside him, something to commemorate a six-year dream come true.

As meet director and chief organizer of today’s inaugural Trabuco Hills Invitational, Recla certainly knows how it feels to be on a race pace. When the meet begins at 8:30 a.m., it will signal the end of one full year of sponsor-seeking, booster-organizing, telephone-ringing hysteria.

It will also mark a new beginning--for Recla, for his Trabuco Hills track and field program, and, strange as it may sound, for the Trabuco Hills track.

The meet, which includes more than 2,000 athletes from 60 high schools, is being billed as a first-class extravaganza, on par, Recla hopes, with the prestigious Arcadia Invitational, now entering its 25th year at Arcadia High School.

Officials from The Athletics Congress--you’ll know them by their blue blazers--will preside over each event. Local Olympic stars Florence Griffith Joyner and Al Joyner will participate in opening ceremonies. Winners of invitational events will receive commemorative watches.

But most of the attention is centered on Trabuco Hills’ new $300,000 all-weather track, considered to be the best in Orange County. Its surface is the same as those at Mt. San Antonio and Cerritos colleges.

The track, which will be used for the Southern Section 3-A and 2-A preliminaries May 15-16, was part of Trabuco Hills’ new $3,897,000 athletic facility, funded by the state’s Mello-Roos money, a fee charged to new homeowners that is indented to pay for the impact of housing development.

The red, white and blue track has nine lanes, a solid-pour urethane construction, and a galvanized steel rail, unusual but stronger than the conventional aluminum, its makers say.

The facility includes two high jump areas, two long jump runways, two pole vault runways, two shot put rings and a discus area. A top-of-the-line electronic scoreboard, integrated with an Accutrack timing system, was delivered Wednesday and should be on line by this morning, Recla said.

“Coaches who come into our stadium take a look at the track and they’re envious,” Recla said, laughing. “They hate our guts.”

Recla, 43, laughs only because he knows the other side of it all too well. When he started the track program in 1986, he had about 40 athletes, no budget and no equipment. The school was only six months old, and Recla was told the athletic department’s start-up funds were exhausted.

The next year, money for equipment was fairly plentiful. But the Mustangs were not. Only eight athletes came out for the team, thanks to the dire conditions. Conditions that, until this season, were the norm.

The field event facilities were bad, but everyone did their best to make do. Shot putters used chalk to draw a circle on a block of concrete to make their “ring,” then practiced heaving the shot into a pile of dirt.

Discus throwers stood at the edge of the asphalt of the school’s outdoor basketball courts, and launched their discuses onto the field below. Only problem was the field below was covered with large piles of dirt--the after effects of the campus’ on-going construction. And so came the challenge: He who throws highest over the dirt pile wins.

“A much better workout,” Recla said.

Pole vaulters and long, triple and high jumpers had it best. They practiced at Saddleback College. “Well, one year we did try to dig a hole in the ground for a kid to pole vault,” Recla said. “We made a dirt runway, and dug a hole for the box. We said, ‘OK, now go stand down there, run over here and pole vault.’ Then we said, ‘ Naahhhhh .’ ”

And the former Trabuco Hills track? Recla says it was hard as rock, but made of dirt. If anyone wanted to know why the Mustangs never had a home meet, they simply needed to take a lap around the track.

“It was pretty crummy,” Will Magner, a senior sprinter, says. “Especially when it rained. People brought their four-wheel drive trucks out there. Turned it into the Grand Canyon.”

And sometimes, the rockies.

Recla said when it rained, the runoff from a nearby hillside would wash out on the track, depositing rocks, twigs and other debris. For two hours every afternoon, Recla would cruise the track in a golf cart picking up rocks.

“Every time it rained, it took three weeks for that track to dry out,” Recla says. “Guys would go out there and motorcycle on it and four-wheel over it and play mud football . . . it was just horrible. All ruts and potholes. And there we were, driving our golf cart around and around. Moving rocks from the inside lanes to the outside lanes.

“I just look back and say, ‘How did we survive that?’ ”

Many times, the team would ride a school bus to neighboring intermediate or elementary schools or even other high schools in search of better facilities. But not even that went smoothly.

“We sat around waiting at Woodbridge once until 8:30 at night,” Recla says. “The bus driver forgot us. They’d forget us every other day. That’s why we couldn’t keep kids out. It was always something.”

Still, the Mustangs managed surprising success. In 1987, the eight-member squad placed second at the Pacific Coast League finals. And, despite the dirt-pile training, discus thrower/shot putter Jim Farbaniec placed third in the Southern Section 2A in both his events.

“It was a flying circus,” says Recla, who now has a squad of 140. “But you know, it was really great. If you have athletes, it doesn’t matter what facility you have. It’s the kids. If they got it in their heart, they can do it.”

Which is why today means so much. Not just for Recla--whose wife described him this week as “a walking zombie who’s floating on air but could drop any minute”--but for all the Mustang athletes, boosters and fans who survived the lean years. One former athlete is flying in from St. Louis just to help out.

Magner, the only Mustang who stayed with the program for four years, says the new track is a great source of pride. Opposing teams like it, too, he said.

“But they keep telling us we’re spoiled.”