Skip to Content, Navigation, or Footer.
Friday, March 29, 2024
The Observer

Tournament set to begin this weekend

We May Suck At Life, But At Least We Can Play Basketball.We Can't Ball, But More Than Half Of Us Are Going To Med School.Our First Name Got Rejected (It Was Funny).These teams and the other would-be-ballers on the campuses of Notre Dame and Saint Mary's will dust off their Bookstore shoes this weekend for the opening rounds of Bookstore Basketball XXXIII, which begins tonight."There are about 600 teams in this year's tournament," said Colin Harding, head commissioner. "It's pretty high, the highest number I remember in the last few years."Preliminary rounds begin this evening and continue through the weekend."We have so many teams that we sort of have a preliminary to the first round," said Harding. "It's all random for all but the 32 ranked teams." Rankings - for Bookstore Basketball? "The teams that do well in previous years tend to stick together," Harding said. "They come back and we usually rank them - chances are they're pretty good... [but] there's no exact science to it"The team of commissioners also helps decide the lucky 32 who receive a first-round bye."They're typically guys and girls who spend a lot of time playing basketball at Rolf's," Harding said. "They know who's pretty good and who's playing together come Bookstore time ... they're pretty vital when it comes towards ranking teams."The commissioners also have the daunting task of sifting through hundreds of humorous names and picking a "Top 10." Among this year's selections were "We hit it from deep and we're good in the box," "The homeless center and four guys who give him booze," "Less defense than a prom dress" and "Phil Mickelson's man boobs."One of this weekend's match-ups features ""Solitary, Poor, Nasty, Brutish and Short" against "Cheese and Crackers.""That's from Thomas Hobbes' 'Leviathan,'" said team captain Derek Webb, a graduate student with the political science department. "Hobbes says that 'in the state of nature, life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,' so we thought that would be a good name for us.""He's a good resource for bookstore team names," Webb added, noting that his team from Tournament XXXI, Leviathan, went to the third round. He enters the tournament with faculty member Andy Gould and three fellow graduate students, who played together last year.However, not all teams enter with that level of experience or intellectual thought behind their names. Five Fisher freshmen put together "Campus Diversity: a Jew, a Mormon, a Mexican and two guys from Philly.""We formed [the team] about a week before spring break," captain Stephen Friend said. "We talked, went around to each other and asked for suggestions, I came up for the idea for the team name because all of us are different - we all thought it was kind of funny."The team has only practiced once prior to their first-round matchup scheduled for this weekend. Other highlights of the name chart:uWe Came, We Saw, We Lostu5 Hot Girls Who Will Probably Lose In the First Round But Are Hoping To Get LuckyuBring On the Blonde JokesDolly Parton, Boat Club, and Three Other Big BustsuMy Moose Brings All the Girls to the YarduThe Well Hung JuryuMarvin Gaye? Fine By MeuThe NCAA Overlooked Us ToouWill Ferrell Would Have Been a Better Commencement SpeakeruLike Mike Ditka on Levitra, We're Hard to BeatuThis $20 Could Have Bought a Lot of Beeru4 Years and Lots of Beers Ago We'd Have Had a ChanceuRock Chalk du LacuProud of Our PE-nessuMalpractice Waiting to HappenuThe Queens of Benzene