Now that Krzyzewskiville's tentative constitution has been made public, the town's tent-dwellers are considering the potential effects of the pre-registration period, the Dave Matthews registration and the number of camp-out games.
Perhaps the most contentious aspect of this year's policy is its requirement that, for students setting up camp more than 10 days before a game, seven out of 10 members must be in a given tent from 8 p.m. to 7 a.m. every night. When the official tenting period begins 10 days before a game, then only one person is necessary until personal checks begin.
Pre-registration was designed to prevent an especially long camping season-and tenters said the policy would likely be effective. But that doesn't mean they like it.
"I think it goes against the spirit and the point of tenting. Having seven people sleep over from 8 p.m. to 7 a.m... is ridiculous...," said engineering junior Chris Peretti, who was in tent 11 last year. He added that, with this requirement, he would probably not be able to camp out far in advance. "I don't know of one person that can make the sacrifice of staying at their tent from those times four or five nights a week, let alone seven people in the same tent that can do it."
Another concern about the 8 p.m. to 7 a.m. policy is that it could interfere with academic work-a problem the policy specifically set out to prevent.
"I, for one, am currently enrolled in a class that ends at 9:30 p.m. Also, there are many courses where students must work in groups, and the only convenient hours are in the evening," said Trinity senior Dan Mills, a member of tent four last spring.
Mills offered a solution to this problem: "It would be more fair to set the hours from midnight to 7 a.m. This would not weaken the policy.... I can say that the midnight-to-morning shift is the least-liked."
Trinity senior Brooke Nixon predicted that regardless of the seven-in-a-tent rule, students would still come back early to get prime seats in Cameron.
"If people came back last year during December, people are going to come back early this year. However, not many people are very psyched about living round-the-clock in a tent for two months...," she said. Still, she added, "as it gets closer and closer to the time of regular registration, more and more people are going to pre-register."
The start of the official registration period will be announced online at midnight 10 days before the game, in a style modeled after the distribution of Dave Matthews concert tickets last spring.
"There are plenty of hard-core tenters out there who can not possibly adhere to such a strict requirement. The result will be that mostly everyone will wait and register at 12:02 in the morning 10 days prior to the game," said Trinity sophomore Dave Dial, a member of tent one last year. "Can you even imagine the chaos that will result when hundreds of tenters rush to the designated spot?"
Of course, tent registration will only be an issue for two games, as of now-the Feb. 26 game against St. John's University and, of course, the March 4 match-up with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Many students said they expected this restriction to be lifted for some other choice battles. Indeed, according to the proposal, camp-out games are "subject to change... if major interest in other games is demonstrated as the season progresses."
Nixon said that by shortening the length of the tenting season, perhaps the focus of K-ville will return to Duke basketball itself.
"[In the past,] it became so routine and drawn out that it wasn't really about basketball...," she said. "It would be nice if tenting could actually be about the love of Duke basketball, and not about tenting itself. Maybe this policy will help that."
The proposed tent policy is available online at http://www.duke.edu/dsg/
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