Concerned about safety and vandalism at football tailgating after a fall season of rousing Saturdays for undergraduates in the Blue Zone parking lot, student affairs administrators sat down with officials from the athletic department this summer for a "comprehensive discussion" of the pre-game brouhahas.
The meeting was more of an inquiry than a crackdown by Vice President for Student Affairs Larry Moneta and Dean of Students Sue Wasiolek, but Athletic Director Joe Alleva and head football coach Ted Roof stood firm on the importance of student tailgating as a support to the football program. The only change enacted was the shifting of visitor parking out of the back of the parking lot, a move that opens up an exclusive space for students.
"We want to try to do this in a manner that is a win-win for everybody: Kids can have a good time, we can have a football game without having anybody get hurt," said Alleva, who added that the options that were seriously pursued never included the elimination of tailgates. "I think it is one of the few outlets that students have left where they can do something on campus and have some fun. We just have to keep it under a bit of control."
Wasiolek said the Office of Student Affairs had received complaints during this past season from fans of visiting teams whose cars had been vandalized and who had been the subject of verbal "exchanges which were not particularly positive or productive." Visitor parking will subsequently be mixed in with the rest of the Wallace Wade Stadium crowd, and administrators and Duke University Police Department officers will continue to monitor, though not interfere with, the beer-heavy clusters of students who invade the lot for the better part of game day.
"It's pretty much the same as last year, with sort of removing the non-Duke people out of there so they don't feel like they're trapped," said Moneta, who can often be seen wandering through the Blue Zone with Wasiolek. He also said his department would continue to look at ways "to deal with excesses, working with student leaders to try to balance the tailgating experience."
Roof made clear during the meeting that the most important part of the experience is that even if undergraduates are partying in the parking lot, they are still serving as a legitimate boon to his program. But both Alleva and Roof stressed a strong desire for more students to come to Wallace Wade at game time; most tailgaters don't actually get into the stadium until around halftime, and the last beer can usually doesn't hit the pavement until after the game.
"I think people will leave on time if they start winning. We have our little travel radios in the parking lot and we go in when they're ahead," junior Ashley Martens said. "[The relatively unchanged tailgating policy is] a step in the right direction, I guess, but they've gotten really strict with everything on campus, which tends to force kids off campus and drink and drive. But even at tailgates they send too many cops."
Even Alleva acknowledged the protean nature in a social atmosphere, but he appreciated the openness to letting even the least ardent of fans run their own course.
"I think that tailgating is going to take place somewhere anyway," he said. "We say 'You can't do it over there,' they're going to go somewhere else and do it. I'd rather not control it but have it under our auspices, so to speak, where at least we can control it a little bit but it is not really controlled."
Jake Poses contributed to this story.
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