Dormitories earn race-day glory

For the first time ever, the men's and women's Little 500 trophies will be in display cases on Tenth Street.\nOnly Campbell Street separates Dodds House, which is in Wright Quad, and Teter. But the two teams, along with many of the other dorms, train together in each team's effort to win the Little 500. That effort between Dodds House and Briscoe was evident as both teams were together on the lead lap at the end of Saturday's race.\nThe two teams also marked the first time two dorms took the top prize in both races.\nDodds House has rode 53 times in the Little 500 race, and the team's only other title came in 1998. Last year the team finished 10th.\nThe final lap of the men's race was a battle between Dodds House senior Craig Luekens and senior Matt Davis of Phi Gamma Delta. Davis took the lead at the beginning of the lap, but Luekens sprinted ahead on the back straightaway and maintained the lead to take the checkered flag.\n"'Dorm Storm 2k5' is what we've been calling it," Dodds House sophomore Christopher Chartier said. "It's really just a joke. We're friends with the guys on Briscoe, we ride with them quite a bit, and we like to represent the dorms."\nThere were five men's dorm teams entered in this year's race: Briscoe, Collins, Dodds House, Forest and Wright, Collins, Teter and team Stellar were the only three dorm teams entered in the women's race.\nAt Qualifications, Briscoe took the pole in the middle of the day, and it looked as though it was set to wear the green jersey on race day until they lost the spot to Phi Kappa Psi on the last run of the day.\nBriscoe finished Saturday's race in fourth place and will lose three of its riders to graduation.\nBriscoe senior Matt Kubal rode Saturday's race with a broken collar bone sustained two weeks ago in a race at Purdue. Another cyclist in the race cut Kubal off. He fell off his bike and broke the bone. He was not sure he would ride Saturday since he had not been able to practice outside much since the injury.\n"I was kind of nervous coming into the race, but it felt OK," Kubal said. "It's just the adrenaline of the race and it's just such an event that I just couldn't miss it. I've been doing this for long enough and I've been riding for long enough that it's just not something that I could miss, even with the injury."\nTeter improved its finishes the last four years as the team went from finishing No. 27 in 2002, to fifth in 2003 and second in last year's race.\nTeter freshman rider Sarah Rieke and Briscoe junior Michael Carey plan to keep their respective teams' momentum going for next year, even though both know their teams will be young because of graduating riders.\n"What I've heard is sororities and frats are the big thing here and I think its great that two dorms won," Rieke said. "I'm a freshman, its a start of a new era, we're going to get better over the years and it's just going to emerge out of that."\nEven though Hollywood could script another movie about the Little 500 from this weekend's events, the movie already made about the Little 500 -- "Breaking Away" -- does not depict the current state of mind between teams.\n"It's just a real tight bond with the dorms," Chartier said. "We love to go battle it out with the frats, but there's no bad blood. Fiji's a great team. We loved to fight it against them."\n-- Contact Staff Writer Steve Slivka at smslivka@indiana.edu.