By Cassie Sheridan |
The battle has begun for those coveted Intramural champion T-shirts. People wear them with pride, as an emblem of Intramural and athletic excellence. Ask many intramural competitors about their championship story and it involves a fabulously spun epic of blood, sweat and tears easily comparable to a Roman Coliseum tale. However, often the real story lies within the hilarious and heartwarming names these student-athletes dream up. Names tell a story all their own. Here are a few of the most memorable from this fall.
The Featherweights, Badminton.
If you see badminton rackets in the hands of juniors Nathan Schmedake and Ian Averman, be worried. They are 4-0 this season and the defending champions of the badminton title since their freshman year.
“Freshman year, when we came up with the name, I was a really skinny kid,” Schmedake said. “Ian wasn’t so much. That’s kind of where the weight part came from; how opposite we were. Then, badminton is a game of feather birdies so we just agreed to combine the two. The name has served us well.” Both Averman and Schmedake love Intramurals as a great brief escape from academia and hope to continue their badminton winning streak for the remainder of their time on The Bluff.
The Volley Llamas, D2 Coed Volleyball
Junior Chelsea Olivas does not consider herself an extreme volleyball player, but she takes naming a team very seriously.
“I immediately started brainstorming up volleyball puns when we decided to get a team together,” Olivas said. “I gave up on that quick. So then I thought, ‘Okay what rhymes with ‘Volly.’ I just started going through the alphabet like ‘A-doesn’t work. B- Bollie that’s stupid. C-collie. No. D-Dollie. Dalai Llama. Volley Llamas. Perfect.”
The team has only three competitors in D2 coed volleyball and has had multiple scheduling conflicts inhibiting its participation.
“Our whole team is science majors,” Olivas said. “We are so busy in lab we haven’t gotten to represent the Volley Llamas yet. However, we are in it to get that shirt and maybe a tan while the weather is still nice.”
The Derp-Derps, Kickball.
In order to understand the complexity of the Derp-Derps, one must first google a specific breed of frog that originates from northern Australia. This hopelessly romantic tree frog changes its mating call to avoid conversing with other species of frogs. Junior Andrew Belle-Isle and four of his other kickball teammates encountered what they believe to have been this frog on a camping trip in Scaponia, Ore. Belle-Isle recounted the tale that he said may be slightly glorified.
“We were just adventuring, Indiana Jones style, the rain was pouring and the weather was crazy. Pretty sure it snowed too. Then we came upon a cross road and we didn’t know what to do, it was apparently hunting season and we didn’t want to be mistakenly shot at.”
“We were deliberating and then we heard a super weird noise to the right. We followed the sounds and it led us to three frogs. I still don’t know how they were doing this but they weren’t ribbiting. They were ‘derping.’ Afterwards, we just always said ‘derp’ to each other when we didn’t know what to do. It just stuck.”
This epic of biological and athletic proportions led to the establishment of the Derp-Derp kickball team.
“We are in it to win it. We are getting that shirt. We are championship,” Belle-Isle said. “We are 5-1, our loss was a devastation and we are going to rebuild from that during playoffs.”
The Safe Sets, D1 Men’s Volleyball
New image and new identity are the taglines of this D1 men’s volleyball team. Junior Parker Kimball described last year’s championship loss as a “devastation that the entire team was burdened with.” However, the team is coming back stronger with a new name and a new identity, featuring a sloth in an astronaut costume.
“The sloth dressed as an astronaut truly personifies the mission of our team,” Kimball said. “We were sitting at lunch one day and we were just hashing it out. We are not the typical volleyball champions, just as a sloth is not your typical astronaut. It made perfect sense at the time.”
The Safe Sets have high hopes of defeating the only other team participating in the D1 men’s volleyball league and avenging their loss last season.
For information on how to register an Intramural Team: log on to imleagues.com and search for the University of Portland or stop by Howard Hall.
