Tradition: Events such as Oozeball tourney giving UNLV an identity

Jennifer Knight

Monday, Oct. 14, 2002 | 11:13 a.m.

A young woman wearing a homemade Beck T-shirt slept on the grass exhausted and caked in mud.

A dreadlocked and shoeless rock band banged drumsticks on old steel barrels for entertainment.

And all day long, teams of students took turns standing knee-deep in muddy water playing volleyball on a recent weekend in what has become one of the longest-running traditions at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

The 12th annual Oozeball Tournament.

"I like to get dirty," said Erika Stinnette, 21, a communications major. "This event is just fun. The only thing is, I have to wash my hair three times."

Because UNLV is a relatively young institution and because most students don't live on campus, traditions are almost as hard to grow around here as an English garden.

Traditions, however, are beginning to emerge on campus with popular festivals such as the Rebel Ruckus and Rebelpalooza -- and with offbeat events such as the Oozeball Tournament.

"Oozeball has stood the test of time," said Mike Castillo, UNLV's alumni program director. "It's really difficult to put an event on and make it work around here. This has worked."

Teams like the Dirty Dentists, Wacky Kanacys, Much Ado About Mud and Down-n-Dirty compete each year for the oozeball title. The winner gets a large trophy with a pig on top and, more importantly, goes down in oozeball history.

"There's not a lot of campus life around here and this is just a way to get that in," said Jaime Howell, a 21-year-old film major whose team, the Alpha Tau Omegas, competed for prestigious oozeball title.

While jumping around in the mud represents an unusual tradition for UNLV, a 45-year-old university, more established colleges around the nation have developed even stranger rites.

Princeton, for example, has the Nude Olympics, in which sophomores run buck naked through campus after the first snowfall. At Notre Dame seniors bar-hop the night before the Irish's final home football game. And at Ithaca seniors jump into the campus fountain on the last day of spring.

"There are no pranks pulled on campus really," said Tom Flagg, a UNLV spokesman who has been at the school for more than two decades. "There's no bonfires. There aren't the sort of things here that you see in a Mickey Rooney film."

UNLV hosted a bonfire in the desert during a stretch of the 1960s, but that tradition did not get passed on to the following generations, Flagg said.

Other events haven't quite been hits either -- such as annual campus barbecues, Castillo said.

But rather than wait for some impromptu rites like the one at Princeton to pop up, two groups on campus hold regular meetings to find and foster traditions at UNLV.

The Student Alumni Association has set up events such as movie night or a program called "dinner with a stranger" to draw students into campus life.

"We really don't have the traditions other schools have, but we're trying to work on creating new ones," said Alison Woodward, a 22-year-old senior marketing major who is active with the Student Alumni Association.

And a new forum made up of various groups on campus has just started to meet about possible new rituals to get school spirit going. One proposal under consideration is an annual luau.

"We're just trying new things," Castillo said.

And while Sin City's university doesn't seem to be embracing "dressed down" rites of passage like the University of Michigan's Naked Mile or the nude soccer event at Iowa's Luther College, playing in the mud in shorts comes in a close second.

"We actually are pretty good at mud volleyball. We're really bad at regular volleyball, but we're good at this," said Steve Johnson, a 23-year-old commercial advertising senior.