Some students will wait hours in line to see a Carolina-Duke basketball game. And others spend weeks camping in a tent.
Krzyzewskiville hosts some of the craziest college basketball fans out there, the Cameron Crazies.
Since 1986, Duke students have pitched tents outside Cameron Indoor Stadium months before the game.
Senior Anand Raghuraman wasn’t always a Blue Devils fan, but the Seattle native was quickly drawn into the UNC-Duke rivalry.
“There’s so much history to it and you look at all these pump-up, hype-up videos and the crowds just jumping around and people making last minute, game-winning shots,” Raghuraman says.
Kville has hosted tenting ticket hopefuls for nearly 30 years (Duke Chronicle)
Raghuraman has tented for three of the four years he’s been a student at Duke. And it’s not until temperatures dive below 25 degrees that the Cameron Crazies are permitted to leave their tents.
“When it’s hovered around 26 or 25… that’s really miserable. You’re just kind of looking at your iPhone and thinking… Oh man… please for the love of God… go below 25. And sometimes it doesn’t and it sucks,” Raghuraman says.
The freezing cold isn’t the only element the Cameron Crazies have to deal with, and sometimes it takes more than just blankets and sleeping bags to protect them from the weather.
“This one day there was a huge wind storm and basically the tent felt like it was going to fall over. And so, we’re all in there and we’re all laughing at the fact that if this thing, we have also this battery in there, and so if the tent catches fire or somehow the battery explodes, we’re all going to die and that would be the saddest thing ever,” Raghuraman says.
The Seattle native wasn’t always a Blue Devils basketball fanatic, so what does his family think about all this?
“My mom tells me everyday… like… what are you doing? I’ve Skyped her a couple times in the tent and she immediately just clicks the off button. She just doesn’t even want to see me in there,” Raghuraman says.
Duke faces off against Carolina Wednesday night and leading up to that game, per tradition, one hundred tents will be lined up outside Cameron Stadium in hopes of punching a ticket to the game.
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