Intramural broomball: slipping to a good time

Over the past two months, Baker Rink has been a hub for more than just hockey. During February and March, after the men's and women's hockey teams have cleared the ice, the rink was flooded by a slightly less conventional group of athletes.

Broomball is the name of the game and the intramural season brings intense competition between eating clubs, academic departments, residential colleges and other student groups. The co-rec season came to an end on the night of Monday, March 27, when Ivy Club triumphed over Cap & Gown Club to claim the intramural co-rec championship.

For a newcomer, it is difficult to tell the teams apart — the players don't wear uniforms. They scoot around the ice after an orange rubber ball, roughly the size of a cantaloupe and the construction of a soccer ball. Each player has a stick with a small plastic triangle on one end (only slightly reminiscent of a broom) with which he attempts to swat the ball into the opposing team's goal — an ice hockey goal. Each team has four players and a goalie on the ice — Ivy's goalie, senior G.J. Ligelis, chose not to use a stick in the championship game. In the co-rec league, there must be two girls on the ice for each team at all times.

For the championship game, most players wore t-shirts and sweatpants with sneakers or hiking boots, but a few played in jeans, collared shirts and dress shoes. Many players wore padding of various sorts (borrowed in-line skating or baseball gear) to protect their elbows, knees and shins. In every game, all players wear ice hockey helmets.

Even when the players race for a loose ball, they move cautiously, never committing entirely to a sprint, as if running barefoot on broken glass. Too much inertia would send their feet into the air and their bodies to the ice while the other team whisks the ball away.

There were surprisingly few falls during the championship game, but the few were memorable. With seven minutes left on the clock in the first half — each half is 20 minutes long — a Cap & Gown player slipped in the defensive zone, leaving Ivy senior Carolynn Crabtree alone with the ball in the corner of the rink near the Cap goal. It looked like a promising breakaway for Ivy, but Crabtree lost her footing and fell to the ice alongside her opponent. The scoring opportunity was lost.

With just under two minutes left in the first half, the first goal of the game was scored for Cap by junior Lev Berlin, who tapped in the rebound from his teammate's shot that had gotten away from the Ivy goalie. The championship game went into halftime with Cap leading 1-0.

"Lev and [junior] Todd [Ebe] are probably our two best players, but everyone contributes a lot to the team," senior Cap player Dan Pugliese said. In the second half of the game, Berlin and Ebe, who is an executive editor for sports at The Daily Princetonian, controlled the Cap offense. They threaded the Ivy defense with give-and-gos between them, but could not put the ball in the net. Their teammates on the ice for most of the second half were seniors Lauren Ehrlichman and Maren Ford, both members of the field hockey team. Not surprisingly, they both had excellent stick skills and helped the Cap team on both offense and defense.

The Cap & Gown team, however, could not score in the second half. For Ivy, it was a different story. Senior Xander Djerassi scored Ivy's first goal five minutes into the second half, and just two minutes later he scored another goal on an assist from teammate senior Pete Forsberg. Ivy led 2-1 for the rest of the game, despite several offensive opportunities for Cap in the end of the second half.

Forsberg was a strong member of the Ivy team. He was quick, however, to give credit to his teammates. "G.J. Ligelis played an incredible game in goal," he said, "and our two girls, Carolynn Crabtree and [senior] Gayle Love, were the stars of the game. They played 40 minutes in a game where everyone else played just 15 minutes."

The playing time was even more divided for the Cap team, which had nine players on the sideline, ready to hit the ice; Ivy had three subs.

The championship game provided a dramatic end to the IM season, as the two eating clubs went head to head. Even Ivy player Forsberg seemed surprised at the outcome; after the match, he said, "Cap outplayed us for all but two minutes of the game."

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The Cap team banded together after the loss, visibly distraught. Junior Dent Wilkens articulated the team's emotion: "After eating, drinking and sleeping broomball for three months, the pain of our bruises is nowhere near the agony of defeat."