Joe Wheeler knows the right way to play intramural basketball. The first-year team captain says his team’s games will feature plays drawn on a whiteboard and coach Andrew Hess in a tie.

“There’s also been rumors of cheerleaders,” said Wheeler. “We’ll see.”

Wheeler’s team, Off in the Woods, is one of 17 Division II teams this season. The IM Committee divided D-II teams arbitrarily into two squads to facilitate making a game schedule.

“Playing D-II seems to be a general trend this year,” said senior Claudia Yeung, IM Committee co-chair. “We also had to split up the D-II league for soccer, because there were way too many teams for one league.”

There are several first-year teams, including Off in the Woods, which makes basketball a more first-year-heavy sport than either football or soccer.
“First-year teams will have to compete with a lot of returning D-II teams this year,” said sophomore Ben Kron from Fire and Spice. “They’ll have less experience, so they’re in for a battle.”

In contrast, the Division I league has five teams and the Women’s league has four.

“It makes the game schedule really simple, plus every team has a good shot at playing in the championships,” said senior Max Weber, captain of D-I team Kaman’s Krew. “There should be some really good competition within the league.”

Weber is the only returning member of last year’s D-I champion team, after his other team members graduated.

“It seems like most of the teams this year are formed at random,” said Weber. “I don’t think there’s a lot of returning teams from last season.”

Weber said he expected his team to meet Scientologists for Jesus in the championships. The sophomore-heavy team, captained by Matt Solomon, includes several players who played varsity basketball for Whitman last winter.

In comparison to the detailed –– and often hotly contested –– rules of IM football, Yeung said the IM Committee has never officially established a set of rules for basketball.

“People pretty much know what they’re doing on the basketball court,” said Yeung. “There aren’t many rule differences from a normal basketball game.”

Yeung also said that there will be no IM volleyball this year, since renovations on Sherwood will start during spring break.

“We’re trying to come up with a substitute sport,” said Yeung. “We’ve come up with some possibilities, but we’re still trying to chose the most appropriate one.”