Crew Dates

Tonight I was introduced to another unique tradition of the UK university system called a crew date. These are exchange dinners between men’s and women’s sports teams. Usually they involve a dinner at one of the college formal halls or a local restaurant. Fancy dress (i.e. themed costumes) is common, but fortunately for me, was not required on this particular occasion. I envisioned it as an opportunity to socialize with students at other colleges and infuse your Facebook friend circle with a 20 person boost. Silly me. The Oxford women’s water polo club did an exchange dinner with the New College rugby team at New College’s formal hall and so far as I can tell, the objective of the evening was to drink copious amounts of alcohol, brag about one’s sexual exploits and recruit new hook-up buddies. While it was slightly embarrassing to be associated with this debauchery and my decision to refrain from almost all of the shenanigans may have hurt the water polo club’s social reputation, it was a fascinating social study. I assumed that Americans took the cake on organized drinking games- from beer pong, to flip cup and quarters, our competitiveness is hard to beat. But you have to give the English props for developing strategies for getting absolutely smashed at formal hall. Much of the trick involves surreptitiously dropping pennies or golf balls in people’s drink whilst they aren’t paying attention and they then have to chug the entire contents of their class. Pennies can also be dropped into pitchers of water and the golf ball often makes it way into disgusting combinations of ketchup, celery soup and other odd bits. I’ve even heard of people being forced to drink out of a shoe. The other element is publicly ridiculing other people at the table. You stand up, tap your knife against your class and say “I sconce anyone who…” Sometimes it targets classes of people like “anyone who is a club fresher” but more often they are pointed attacks like “anyone who hooked up with someone as a result of their last crew date.” Then there are the traditional punishments for pointing, saying the word “drink,” referring to people by name, etc. One of the boys on the rugby the rugby team doesn’t drink so his penalty for party fouls was holding the plank (ab exercise) on the table of the bar for two minutes while his teammates tickled him. As the night progressed the antics became even more provocative but this is all the exposition that is fit for public consumption. But let’s just say that by 9PM, most of the graduate students decided that the safest way to retain our dignity would be to retire for the evening and leave the undergraduates to their indecorous exploits. Needless to say, I think this is one of those cultural traditions that only needs to be experienced once.