Some say there has been too much grace in Krzyzewskiville, and others assert too little.
Head line monitor Zach White is stuck in the middle, shouldering the burden of overseeing the tenting experience while keeping students—and the Duke Department of Athletics—satisfied.
“There has been a positive response overall from tenters,” White, a senior, said of K-ville this year. “The single largest complaint has been that there’s too much grace. I guess my response would be that I can’t dictate how the weather is and I’m certainly not going to jeopardize anyone’s health or safety just to keep people out there.”
After discussions between Duke officials and White’s staff of line monitors before the season, K-ville policies were changed this year to lessen what many students considered unbearable rigor. Blue tenting, which makes up the bulk of the K-ville experience and lasted this year from Jan. 30 until Feb. 22, not only started later than it has in recent years, but also required just six members of each tent to spend each night in K-ville instead of the traditional eight.
For the most enthusiastic, hardcore tenters with sights on front-row seats to the March 6 matchup against rival North Carolina, the changes have taken away from parts of the experience that they enjoyed most.
Senior Amanda Marchese has not only tented all four years she has been at Duke, but is also a member of the first tent—technically, her tent is No. 2, but only because No. 1 is reserved for the basketball players themselves. Still, she will be one of the first 12 students to walk through the doors of Cameron Indoor Stadium.
This year more than in years past, Marchese admitted, grace has been granted as a mixed result of bad weather and new tenting policies.
“From our freshmen year, I’d say it’s been double, easily double,” Marchese said of the number of nights off this year. “It’s actually really messed up the community of K-ville, I think. In years past, Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, K-ville was the place to be. Everyone [was] out here. People [were] just outside their tents partying, talking, hanging out. This year it has been more come to your tent, get in your tent, go to sleep, wake up in the morning.”
It’s a difficult balance that White is forced to constantly keep in mind. Call too much grace, and students who remember the way K-ville once was think the whole concept has been destroyed. Call too little grace, and White runs the risk of getting students too sick to attend classes or even the basketball games themselves.
Tenters looking for the ultimate challenge had another more intense option: black tenting.
From the week of Jan. 23 until K-ville turned over to the more lenient blue tenting rules, all 12 members of tents needed to sleep in K-ville each night and each group needed two students on the grounds at all times during the day instead of the usual one. And perhaps most importantly, black tenters couldn’t even sleep under a physical tent: Nothing more than an overhead tarp was allowed.
Marchese and 11 of her friends earned the top spot in K-ville after winning a day-long competition during which the eight black tents were ranked based on their ability to race to a secret spot on campus, perform on a Duke Basketball trivia challenge and submit dirt on players of opposing teams. (After all, knowing things like Virginia Tech’s Jeff Allen flipping off Maryland fans last season is valuable information for cheers.)
“Black tenting was a lot of fun,” Marchese said. “We really had a lot of community in black tenting since we were all signed up for something so absurd, sleeping under tarps. Since blue tenting started... it’s been a lot different.”
On the other extreme, there are first-year tenters like freshmen Jeanette Cheng and Kara Karpman, who have found K-ville to be a far more enjoyable place than they could have imagined as a result of the lessened rigor. The two enjoyed the talent contest that the line monitors organized (and which all of K-ville later got the night off for) and have been relieved by their experience instead of being overwhelmed as they had originally expected to be.
“It feels like every other day,” Cheng said about getting grace at night.
Karpman added that of the 13 nights he was expected to be in K-ville for blue tenting, he only spent four nights in the tent city.
Ultimately, it isn’t just the tenters whom Zach White is forced to answer to.
Before the season started, White worked with everyone from Dean of Students Sue Wasiolek to Duke Basketball External Relations Director Debbie Krzyzewski Savarino, and from assistant coach Steve Wojciechowski to Director of Marketing and Promotions Bart Smith.
Smith was involved as a representative of the athletic program and sought to work with White and the other line monitors to structure K-ville in a way that would maximize consistent attendance to Duke games throughout the season—not just the home matchup against rival North Carolina.
“From athletics’ perspective, we just felt like the length of time [in K-ville] can affect the quality of the students’ cheering, or if they’re healthy, and all those types of things,” Smith said. “We thought it was very important to come up with new ideas to get new people into the stadium. That’s why we did the Greek night, the freshman night, the sophomore night, the club sports night. I think that Zach has maintained the integrity of K-ville while also recognizing that there were some aspects of it that were unnecessary.”
The divided feelings on the rigor of K-ville will soon become a discussion of the past.
In just more than a week’s time, Cameron’s doors will open once again to host college basketball’s most famed rivalry. Suddenly, White will return to being senior math major Zach White, another Cameron Crazie squeezed into the student section.
Once inside the game, the tenters’ discomfort from sleeping in the cold will be at once forgotten. And the future of K-ville—and whether the changes made this year should become permanent—will be a conversation for another day.
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