To increase its athletic offerings, Elizabethtown College will pitch Wii Sports Bowling as a new professional sport. The athletics department intended to test the potential of this event at Etown before sending the idea out to other colleges. As such, they organized a makeshift tournament for the popular motion-control-based game.
To iron out any issues before running events, the athletics department held a meeting to determine how they should work. During these meetings, one person asked why it specifically had to be Wii Sports Bowling and not “better” games like Wii Sports Resort sword-fighting. This sentiment went nowhere, as a security guard immediately escorted this person off campus. Confusingly enough, no security guard was hired for this meeting. The final takeaway from these meetings was that they were ultimately useless since all they needed to do was set up some televisions and Wiis.
Once things were in motion, the department began organizing Wii Sports Bowling tournaments for the campus community to determine the sport’s potential success. The moment they made sign-ups available, they immediately received several entries. Once they removed all the joke entries with joke names like “Jimmy John Jalopy Jamboree” and the 74 entries from an anonymous and mysterious “Matt,” the trial event had a respectable 16 entrants.
The audience engagement was through the roof during this initial event. Enough people attended the initial event that organizers were forced to move the event outside to Wolf Field so they had more space for attendees. The event also had to be delayed to find an extension cord long enough to go from the Bowers Center to the center of Wolf Field. There was no cord available on campus, so someone had to drive to the closest Ace Hardware to acquire one. Unfortunately, the person driving did not have a good sense of direction and refused to use Google Maps as they continually insisted “they knew where they were going,” causing the trip to take roughly three hours and 21 minutes.
Attendees were extremely invested in the outcome of the event. Whenever someone scored a strike, the audience cheered loudly enough that a student in Schlosser allegedly filed several noise complaints, thinking the noise was coming from the downstairs lobby. Additionally, whenever someone messed up a throw and launched the ball behind their player character, everyone in the bleachers jumped up and spun around clockwise. Nobody could explain why they felt the need to do this.
However, the league is currently contending with financial issues, mostly focused on damage accrued to school property during Wii Sports bowling events. Most participants either don’t wear the Wii Remote wrist strap or receive a Wii Remote that doesn’t have one. More often than not, this leads to people swinging extremely hard and launching the Wii Remote out of their hands. Out of the 17 times this occurred during the on-campus event, all of them have resulted in a broken television.
The athletic department has tried to alleviate this issue but to no avail. Athletes who tended to accidentally throw Wii Remotes were encouraged to swing away from the television currently in use. However, this plan quickly failed as Wii Remotes would bounce off other objects and ricochet towards the television anyways. Due to this issue, running one of these events costs the athletics department roughly $1,529 in televisions alone.
The athletics department hopes to pitch this event to several colleges involved with Landmark Conference events throughout the rest of the semester. It is unclear whether their current plan of running up to random people from other colleges and asking them about participating in their new league will be successful. Hopefully, they’ll manage to score a strike with the other colleges.
