Dodgeball: Tourney thrives in fourth year

Founded in its current form by Freddy Flaxman ’07 and John Boscia ’07 in 2006, the Dodgeball Tournament has exploded in popularity over the last three years.

Flaxman explained that during his sophomore year, the school held an official dodgeball tournament, but he added that it was poorly attended and publicized. He said that after that tournament, the athletics department hired him and Boscia to “think about how to create new interest in intramural events and rec events on campus.”

“People had talked about dodgeball and sports they missed from when they were younger, so we put it together,” Flaxman said.

Boscia explained that the idea of dodgeball was attractive because of its campus-wide appeal.

“We were just bouncing ideas back and forth off of each other,” he said. “[When we came up with dodgeball], we were acting on the belief that everyone can play dodgeball and have a good time doing it.”

Boscia said that because of a successful advertising campaign in which the organizers got students from all walks of campus life to pose with dodgeballs, roughly 1,500 students showed up to the first tournament. By the second year, that number had grown to 3,000.

The two organizers noted that they were proud of the tournament’s setup: They placed the 64 teams into an NCAA basketball tournament-style bracket, with teams facing off against some of their natural rivals.

Flaxman said that because of this system, the first two years featured many memorable matchups.

“I appreciate the Cinderella stories,” he said. “Colonial beat both the football team and Cottage in 2007 to get to the final four. They had gone into overtime, and one guy took out three football players.”

The year before that, the final nearly became stressful to the point of violence, he said.

“I was legitimately afraid a riot was going to break out. In the finals, it was [the Black Students Union] against Cap. It was pretty testy, but I think people were just tense,” he said. “Both teams wanted to win, and it was late at night. Tempers flared a bit.”

But most matches were far more lighthearted because of the rivalries, he noted. He said that one year, for example, the organizers pitted the College Republicans against the College Democrats and the USG against a team of administrators.

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Flaxman also recalled the case of the 2007 men’s ice hockey team, which came to the tournament in “fantastic costumes” the year before the current costume contest was implemented.

“Some administrators tried to throw them out, but it was great,” he said.

When pressed, Flaxman explained, “[They wore] some really short shorts. It’s been scarred in my mind.”

Leading up to the 2007 tournament, current seniors Mark Stefanski and Steve Slovenski became involved in organizing the tournament as officers of the Colosseum Club. For the last two years, the two have been in charge of running the tournament.

Slovenski said that they have only made slight changes to the tournament’s format.

“We added some refereeing to cut down on the rampant cheating in the large group court, and we added a big trophy,” he explained. “We kind of clarified the rules, too. They weren’t well publicized before, and they were up to the individual referees.”

The tournament will also be held on a Saturday this year, as opposed to the customary Thursday.

One original aspect of the tournament that Boscia and Flaxman cherished, though, has been scrapped due to budget restraints.

“The tournament used to have a different colored T-shirt for every team, but with the size of the tournament continually expanding, it became a ridiculous expense,” Slovenski said. “So we changed it to teams providing their own uniforms, and everyone gets their own T-shirt for participating.”

Boscia fondly recalled the buildup to the 2007 tournament.

“I was in charge of distributing the T-shirts to all the teams. We had to get 64 different colors of T-shirts, and I was in the Dillon library for about three hours handing out T-shirts,” he said. “There were more boxes than I could count, with boxes piled high over my head.”

Flaxman said he was unhappy about the lack of free uniform T-shirts over the last two years.

“I would be disappointed to hear about them not getting the necessary funding, because I think it’s one of the few events on campus that brings people from all sorts of walks of life together,” he said.

Boscia agreed, adding, “No other event on campus could pit the chess team against the string ensemble orchestra, or something like that.”

Even with the tournament’s community-building nature, Boscia said one of the all-time highlights for him was in the period leading up to it.

“The ‘Prince’ used to go around campus asking prominent professors for their tournament picks,” he explained. “They [once] asked the lacrosse coach [Bill Tierney], and he said he picked ‘whatever team wouldn’t hurt any of my players, because we have a game against Penn tomorrow.’ ”

Clearly, tournament enthusiasm is all around.