Basketball season starts Sunday, and it won't be long until Krzyzewskiville springs to life outside Cameron Indoor Stadium. I'm personally a big fan of K-Ville, but it's time to give it a facelift and install artificial turf to replace the natural grass that is annually destroyed in the winter.
Yes, K-Ville needs to continue to be a test of will and determination against rival tents and the elements, but the mud pit that forms just days into the tenting season is simply disgusting and unsanitary.
The wind and cold are great. If you want to see the biggest rivalry in college basketball in the sport's most storied venue, you should have to endure some reasonable hardships.
You should have to endure frozen hands while playing Beer Pong and shots that start off looking good but wind up three feet from the table. You should have to endure the miserable task of getting out of your warm sleeping bag when the temperature hovers around freezing. You should have to endure standing out in the cold while the line monitors check every resident's Duke Card at the nightly tent checks.
But I don't see the point in having to watch every step to avoid mud puddles while already negotiating through the maze of ropes that hold up the tents and seem to come out of nowhere when the sun goes down.
Coach K always maintains that the Cameron Crazies are the team's sixth man. Do you really think Coach K would want one of the other players on his team, like Josh McRoberts, sleeping in the mud?
For the record, Coach K said at a press conference last spring that the school should make better drainage in K-Ville a priority. He also did not dismiss a reporter's suggestion of installing AstroTurf.
With artificial turf and a new drainage system, there would be no mud, no puddles and no need for the groundskeepers to repair the whole lawn every year. And I'm not talking cheap, uncomfortable carpet like Williams Field on East Campus. My vision has the soft FieldTurf like on the West Campus fields.
It would certainly be extremely expensive to install, but the cost of yearly maintenance would be lowered dramatically, and I don't think it would be all that difficult to find a rich person willing to pay for naming rights. Just think of the possibilities: "The Dick Vitale Grounds at Krzyzewskiville."
While it's possible that turf would take away from the spirit of tenting, it's not as if K-Ville is a truly natural camping experience anyway. I don't consider myself to be "roughing it" when I can get a pizza delivered to my tent, and I can go use the bathroom at Wilson Gym. So who really cares if there's ersatz grass? K-Ville should be all about getting pumped for Duke basketball-with reasonable challenges-and not be about cleaning out the mud that gets tracked into your tent.
There is the potential problem of staking down the tents in the artificial turf, although I'm sure Duke students are clever enough to figure something out. And if not, it's hilarious watching a tent get destroyed by the wind with its owners trying in vain to save it. But seriously, it seems anchors could be installed in the turf or cinder blocks could be used in lieu of the ground.
Obviously, it's too close to the start of K-Ville to get the artificial turf in for the upcoming season. But if Duke can place an order with FieldTurf-the primary company that uses new technology that looks like real grass and not the original green-carpet like AstroTurf-it would be very nice to be free of mud and filth in Krzyzewskiville in 2008.
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