Voices

Blue Tenting

The most extreme form of tenting. The one you do to get front row seats. A pastime that -- I'll say it -- borders on extremely stupid.

Basically, you live in a tent for months A dozen people in the tent group. One person there at all times. Eight! people there at night (so you're sleeping in a tent two out of every three nights in addition to being there a number of hours during the daytime). All so you can be five rows closer for two hours of basketball.

At UNC, I think a lot of freshmen (myself included) get roped into doing Dance Marathon their freshman year and, after the experience of not sleeping or sitting for 24-hours, say "never again." It's the same here with blue tenting -- it's Duke's freshman experience, something that most never do again.

Of course, there are exceptions. Tent One is all seniors, including my friends Kaylene (Duke's Basketball Marathon director) and Cameron (my partner in our soon-to-be- champion PhysEd golf putting team, "Team Big Stick.") In fact, Tent One was out in K-ville the day exams ended first semester, making them the earliest "pre-blue-tenters" ever. Read about them (and other true Crazies -- and yes, I mean that in both uses of the word) here.

This year's February 7 UNC-Duke date made the 2007 tenting season a comparably short one. But it was cold. Too cold though, and the line monitors call "Grace," which means everyone gets to go home for the night.

Who are the line monitors you ask? Well, they're elected! officials who look after K-ville. Yes, there are elected officials to look after a tent city. And pages of regulations about how post-game "spontaneous" bonfires on the quad can be conducted if Duke gets lucky and beats UNC. Duke likes regulation.

Back to the line monitors. They call tent checks: they carry a siren around K-ville to announce the check, seal the perimeter, and verify that members from all tents are present by checking the members' DukeCards. (Ours say "Robertson Scholar," so this is one way they could enforce the tenting ban.)

Tent checks can happen at any hour and often do happen at obscene times. (A friend living in the nearest dorm says he can hear the siren at night). Miss a check you get a warning. Miss two and you're relegated to being the last blue tent. Which means you can't get that front row seat and be "Leader of the Cameron Crazies." (Just to be clear, the link's a faux diary, not a real one.)

So that's one-third of the equation.

White tenting

White tenting is fun, quite sane, and a darn good way to build anticipation for a big game. White tenting is a scaled-down version of blue tenting. Most importantly, it only lasts a week and only two people have to sleep in the tent per night (except for the weekends, when everyone has to be there for "personal checks" -- but that just means its one, big, cold party. White tenting is what we did last year. A picture is below, complete with me in my white shirt (I was too excited to notice that I hadn't taken it off) and without my wig (it had been ripped off and was long gone).

Actually, the hardest part of white tenting is registration. Because the number of tents is capped at a hundred and there are already fifty blue tents, there are only fifty white tenting spaces. So you have to be fast. The line monitors post the random registration location on the white tenting website at a designated time and the first fifty representatives from white tent hopefuls to get there get a spot for their tent.

The best strategy is to have one person at a computer, waiting for the location to be posted. Then have the other eleven people dispersed throughout West, Central, and East campus, ready to sprint if they get the call from the person at the computer. It's intense. This year, I think registration filled up in 12 minutes. Last year, it was in the Duke Gardens and filled up in eight.

Waiting for registration is a hoot. You have stories of people trailing line monitors for hours, hoping to be led to the registration location. Even funnier, since every other group is also dispersed, you often end up in the same area as two dozen other tenting hopefuls.

When someone answers their phone and starts to sprint, everyone follows them like a herd of cattle, assuming the sprinting person has been told the location. It's quite funny. It's also often a false alarm. If the registration hadn't been at 8 a.m. on a Monday morning this year, I might have gone outside just to have my own private "Punk'd" episode.

White tenters are guaranteed to get into the games, though they don't get as good seats as blue-tenters. But it's all relative. All Duke student seats are better than all UNC student seats (except the risers -- but as a counter to my complaining, read the question by Michael Cowherd and Lucas' response in the Feb. 13 UNC Basketball Mailbag

Anyway, if any tents miss two checks during white tenting, they're out of K-ville and a tent on the waitlist gets in. Not missing checks is crucial.

Walk-Up Line

For those who can't tent(or weren't fast enough at registration time), there's the walk-up line. You're not guaranteed to get in, but you probably will since the line monitors pack the tenting Crazies in, making everyone stand sideways to let walk-up people in the stands.

Walk-up rules: You line up in pairs on the Cameron-side sidewalk perpendicular to K-ville. One person must be there at all times. No tents, so your sleeping bag better be warm and you better pray hard for no rain.

So that's how you legally get into Duke-UNC as a normal undergraduate student. (Band members, line monitors, student government officers, students with rich alumni parents or grandparents, students being honored at halftime, students in the color guard or singing the national anthem, and imposter band members get in as well.) Graduate students have their own abbreviated tenting process.

Another aside -- there are always a number of Carolina graduate students who attend the game and get good natured ribbing and the occasional experience of being a mural for dark blue paint (so I hear from this year's TV watchers). It's considered part of the atmosphere. Hmm...

Less than 6 hours until my Policy midterm...i.e. the Duke-Carolina story will be continued at a later date. G'night.