The morning after I proposed ending Krzyzewskiville, a thread entitled “Blasphemous Article about K-Ville” appeared on the message board of the Blue Devil hoops web site Duke Basketball Report. Predictably, some of the posters agreed with me, and others thought I was out of my mind. But one post stood out more than most.
“[T]his article, like many others by this columnist, wasn't thought through very well other than to calculate the attention it draws,” wrote NovaScotian.
He’s right.
DSG and head line monitor Zach White are doing the right thing by encouraging student input on K-ville policies. They’re inviting discussion. But as long as we’re going to talk about it, I wanted to make sure that we had the right conversation.
If K-ville were a house, it wouldn’t just be a fixer-upper. You can’t toss in some new chrome-plated appliances, slap on some granite countertops, patch a couple of holes in the roof and have something worth living in. K-ville’s a tear-down-and-rebuild job.
To put it in terms that everyone can understand: K-ville isn’t Duke Basketball; it’s Duke Football before David Cutcliffe showed up.
K-ville has two major problems. The first is that the first tenters show up in December and stay for three months. The second is that the students haven’t filled their quota of seats in a good number of games over the last few years.
Essentially, these are inarguable points. The administration makes no secret of the fact that it doesn’t want students camping out for months on end, and head coach Mike Krzyzewski has expressed disappointment with Cameron Indoor Stadium’s atmosphere on several recent occasions.
My solution is to make the waiting process more difficult and more uniform -- more difficult to prevent people from tenting forever, more uniform to remove any confusion about how to get into the games.
Admittedly, I was being glib when I suggested that we replace K-ville with a regular kindergarten line. Obviously, it would be a chaotic disaster when everyone rushed into the stadium at game time. Line monitors need to exist if for no other reason than to make sure that those waiting in line obey the rules (also, as @TomBurr tweeted, “to show us how to dress cool and wear our hair in interesting ways.” Whatever.)
But most of the rules in place exist to make sure that students can camp out for months on end without missing class. Turn what’s now Blue Tenting into something that looks more like a regular walk-up line (groups of two, one person has to be there at all times) and it would be impossible to be out there for more than a couple of days.
To be honest, I had no delusions that DSG would immediately adopt my vision for a lawless waiting process. For one thing, my plan was full of problems. For another, it doesn’t actually matter what I think: I’ll never camp-out again, and K-ville belongs to its residents, not a grumpy grad student.
But here’s my two cents, free of charge.
One set of rules, good for every game (except one). Groups of six, four people there at all times. Miss a check, go to the back of the line. Doors open two hours before game time, and you walk into the stadium in order. To preserve the tenting tradition, relax the rules in the two weeks prior to the UNC game – one person in K-ville at all times. Make no changes to personal checks, because whether you like tenting or not, that’s still the best party at Duke.
Agree with me or disagree – you won’t hurt my feelings. But let’s talk about K-ville, and let’s make it better.
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