Basketball camp-out goes into overtime (2/15/98, The N&O)

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February 15, 1998

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RELATED: 'Spring Tenting Policy'

Basketball camp-out goes into overtime

By MARY E. MILLER, Staff Writer

Staff Photo by Chuck Liddy

Andrew Elliston of Asheville, left, and Luis Villa of Miami enjoy one of the rare pleasant days they've had since starting their semester in a tent in the hope of seeing Duke men's basketball live. It's been an unusually long camping season, with damp, cold weather.

     DURHAM -- For nearly a decade, parents of Duke students have heard tales of their children spending a few days in a tent city to get into home basketball games. It's part of the Duke experience, after all.
     But when a few days have stretched to nearly half a semester and a few hundred "Cameron Crazies" have expanded to nearly a fourth of the undergraduate enrollment, the situation can give a parent pause.
     "It's a little harrowing, when you put it that way," Norman Kelley says with a laugh. His daughter, Lisalynn, has camped out with the same friends all four years of her Duke career. For the past two, her dad has driven over from Raleigh to help her set up camp. "But it's become a tradition. It's something the kids enjoy, that Coach K supports, and the kids will have good memories."
     The camp-outs have become a fixture at Duke, where undergraduates get free admission to home games in Cameron Indoor Stadium. In a season like this, when Duke and North Carolina are the top two teams in the country, and when the final home game Feb. 28 is a rematch of the recent 97-73 Carolina victory, those student seats are more precious than gold.
     So over the winter semester break, a few Cameron Crazies pitched their tents in what is known as Krzyzewski Ville, for coach Mike Krzyzewski, simply disregarding a standing rule that nobody could camp out more than 10 days before a game. They started on Jan. 3, they gambled, and they won.
     When leaders of the Duke student government, which manages K-Ville under the eyes of the administration, returned and saw that nearly 80 tents had been pitched, they just scrapped the rule.
     Rajeev Chopra, a senior who is one of two head line monitors who police K-Ville, says the student government had long used a 10-tent standard -- if more than 10 tents were set up, K-Ville could open and the ticket countdown could begin. This time, to avoid more confusion, they began registering the 80 prematurely pitched tents. The decision caused an uproar among students who could not return to campus early.
     "All the tents were up by like, the second day of the semester," says Adam Brod, a junior from Boulder, Colo. "It was a total mob mentality."
     One hundred tents -- the maximum allowed -- and nearly 1,500 students populate K-Ville this season. Tents from the tiniest pup to camper-size are packed together on a stretch of mud near the tennis courts and next to a student parking lot full of brand-new expensive cars.
     Students don't live in the tents full time. Someone must be there at all times, and all tent dwellers must be present beginning 48 hours before each game. If a tent misses two checks, the group is bumped to the bottom of the game admission list. If a tent is bumped twice, it moves to the bottom of a waiting list to pitch a tent.
     For most of the previous home games, students say, they could get in without camping out. But this Duke-Carolina game is different.
     "I've been sitting in the mud for six weeks, so I'd better get into that game!" says Mackenzie Steele, a 20-year-old junior from Seattle who is in Brod's tent.
     The weather this winter has been particularly damp and dreary, and many students admit they've caught colds or flu from camping out. Their shelters have no heat, and although a few are built on plywood foundations, most sit directly on the ground, which is to say, the mud.
     "I'd say 12 of the 15 of our tent have gotten sick," says Andy Elders, a junior from St. Louis, whose tent is actually an insulated plywood shack.
     On Thursday afternoon, with a break in the weather, students sat around the tents in T-shirts; some wore shorts. A few were working on lap-top computers. Duke's Office of Information Technology coordinated a project this week with Akom, a Connecticut-based computer company, to provide 25 students in K-Ville with wireless communications equipment, so they could access e-mail and surf the Web while they waited for tickets.
     But many students say it's hard to juggle classes from a tent.
     Duke's administration met with the student government a few weeks ago to review the policy. One student submitted a proposal for a much shorter camp-out, but that was rejected. The administration could have forced the student government to stop the students from camping out so early but did not, says Sue Wasiolek, assistant vice president of student affairs.
     "We could have intervened administratively, but we chose to give advice and suggestions," she says. "The people who have devised the plan have said that they think they have been quite reasonable in what they expect of the students. The word 'sacrifice' is used by the students to describe what they think is fair and necessary -- and that getting tickets to that game has to be a significant sacrifice."
     Some students think it's a little too significant.
     Brod and Steele's group tent is located in what they call "the flood zone," a small dip near a tree decorated with beer bottles. After the first heavy rains, water began to pool on the floor of the tent, and they had to pitch a tiny tent inside the large one to stay dry. Steele, a computer science major, says she has missed work and some classes from camping out. And most of her work requires her to be in the computer lab.
     "I don't think it's fair. It's hard to study out here, and it's really cold at night. But I don't know another way. I don't think a lottery would work, because you couldn't ensure that the hard-core fans got tickets."
     Wasiolek says she has mixed emotions about the students' spending so much time camping out for tickets.
     "I worry about their health and safety," she said. "I also think the students make choices about how they are going to spend their time and what's of significance to them."
     Some parents don't mind having their children camp out. The Kelleys say that as long as their daughter's grades are good at the end of the semester, it's OK. Other students don't tell their parents.
     On Thursday, Luis Villa sat in a camping chair munching the Valentine's Day chocolate-chip cookies his mother sent and studying notes for an upcoming exam in electrical engineering. This tent, which he shares with 14 friends, has become home away from home for the semester. His mom knows all about the tent business and is supportive.
     His father, however ...
     "Oh, my brother almost slipped up the other day in front of my father," Villa says. "He definitely would not be into it. He's got these really high expectations."

Mary E. Miller can be reached at 829-4818 or mmiller@nando.com

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