April 11, 2024 | NEWS | By Max McKee
After a decade-long history at Colorado College, The Crooz, a student-led bike party held on the full moon, faced a major challenge from school authorities late last spring.
During the end of a Crooz, Colorado College’s Emergency Management team blockaded the entrance to the Ed Robson Arena parking garage, preventing students from entering as they had planned.
The Crooz, which follows a pre-planned route of party locations around the Springs, used the Ed Robson parking garage as one of its usual stops. The surprise blockade firmly shut down any idea of partying in the garage, forcing students to adapt, innovate, and overcome (find another place to go.)
The blockade wasn’t new for the Crooz, however. In the months leading up to the shutdown at Ed Robson, Croozers saw another location lost to security teams.
The 127 East Kiowa St. parking garage had been a staple of Crooz parties until Citadel Security began interrupting them and forcing students out. Croozers finally abandoned the garage after a car blockade prevented any students from entering.
Losing the parking garage was a big blow for Croozers. The downtown garage had been a part of Crooz since at least 2017, according to one Catalyst article, and this was the first time in years that the Crooz had faced such strong opposition.
“When we started to lose the parking garage, I was fucking pissed,” said AJ Fabbri ‘25. He, Nicole Pierson ‘25, and Pierce Sullivan ‘25 are all dedicated Croozers and have helped lead the Crooz following the shutdowns last year.
The parking garage had served as the apex of each Crooz, and organizers feared that without it, the Crooz would lose much of its energy.
In August of 2023, an anonymous student wrote an opinion piece to The Catalyst following the closure of both parking garages. The letter highlights the importance of the Crooz to the entire CC community and heavily criticizes campus safety’s actions.
The article “reflected a good chunk of the community’s opinion,” says Fabbri. The core message of the article is that any attack on the Crooz is an attack on the very freedoms that CC holds dear, the values of “proud tradition” and “progressive culture.”
Cathy Buckley, a former Colorado Springs police lieutenant who now oversees campus safety at CC, led the team that blocked the garage. Buckley’s concerns arose after she obtained video footage of a previous Crooz in which a large group of students partied and danced on the top floor of the garage.
Concerned with the safety of having Crooz in the parking garage, Buckley showed the video to facilities staff in an attempt to understand the risk.
“Their faces blanched,” she said in an email.
Staff warned Buckley that the parking garage wasn’t built to handle anything near the number of people that were seen in the video and that a party like that could lead to a collapse.
In an interview, Buckley said that campus safety was obligated to respond once they were “aware of the fact that the behavior could cause a structural failure of the garage…and that’s what we did.”
The Croozers maintain that they have never been at odds with Campo.
“They’re really just there to keep us safe,” says Pierson. “There’s no desire to get people in trouble.”
The response from campus security has always been “super understanding,” says Sullivan.
Campus safety and Croozers have a record of good communication. Despite being an unsanctioned event, campus safety had met plenty of times with Crooz organizers to discuss how Crooz can work best for everyone.
“I thought it was amazing, I thought it was good that they reached out to us,” said Buckley.
Much of the conversations focused on getting students to wear helmets and brightly colored clothing to help with visibility, as well as avoiding roads that get a lot of heavy traffic.
Safety is a big priority for the Croozers too, they mandate helmets and remind riders to wear them frequently. Although bright clothing is not required, many students take matters into their own hands with their “Flair,” CC slang for whimsical costumes.
That’s not to say that the Crooz doesn’t have inherent risk and that Crooz leaders aren’t acutely aware of how dangerous it can be. Last semester, a Croozer had to go to the hospital after biking straight into a parked car. He was okay in the morning.
For some, all the chaos of Crooz can be overwhelming. Student Lenny Lorenz has stayed away simply because it happens so late at night. That, and the fact that she’s known people who have “crashed into people” and got “cuts and scrapes and whatnot.”
Even without injury, the Crooz can be intimidating.
“In that setting, in that time, it was definitely a turn off,” said one Crooz hater, who didn’t want to give their name for fear of getting hate from friends and other students. “But I can see how it could be really fun for some people who can drink and bike.”
Crooz always happening on a weekday complicates things too.
“It’s really hard,” says Annabelle Swenson ‘25, a microbial biology major who is going pre-med. To her, spending a night drinking and partying is a hard sell when you have afternoon labs throughout the week.
There are no illusions of the difficulties of Croozing.
Sullivan is adamant that there is absolutely a safe way to Crooz. “I think the danger is very easily mitigatable.” He says that most of the time when things go wrong, it’s because people either drink too much or don’t wear a helmet.
“A big thing about Crooz is that drinking isn’t mandatory,” Sullivan says.
Despite its reputation, students are always welcome sober, and some prefer it that way. “It’s a big exercise in personal responsibility,” says Fabbri.
That freedom is a big reason why the Crooz has never been officially recognized by the school. “I think it would take away from some very rooted aspect of Crooz,” says Pierson.
The Crooz is fundamentally communal and spontaneous, and CC’s disapproval of certain aspects could cause conflict, says Fabbri. Bureaucracy could risk killing the whole event, he says, and it already runs pretty well without it.
As the 2023-24 school year started up, students quickly realized that losing the parking garages did not spell doom for the Crooz. What had once seemed like a critical part of the night was now just something that, simply enough, doesn’t happen anymore.
“Maybe it also marks a shift to quality over quantity,” Fabbri says.
By cutting down on the number of stops, the Crooz is able to spend more time enjoying the stops that remain. There has been plenty of talk about finding replacements or new alternatives to the parking garages, but the consensus so far is that they don’t really need it.
Despite whatever fears there may have been initially, the Crooz is just as much fun now as it was years prior, says Sullivan, “You can’t stop friends from riding around on their bicycles.”
At the Block 5 Crooz this year, despite the cold weather, about 50 students managed to make it out for the first Crooz of the new year. Although the cold isn’t often enough to stop dedicated students from Croozing, ice on the roads can. Experienced bikers reminded others to wear helmets and ride safely and slowly.
As the Crooz sped downtown, those in the lead shouted out “Crooz don’t stop for no-one” as they raced through red lights and over the bridge to America the Beautiful Park.
At the park playground, students summited the play structures and sang Taylor Swift’s “Love Story” around the boombox. A few students even scaled a giant, umbrella-shaped, metal structure in the center of the grounds.
Despite the metal being slick and wet, they made it to the top, helped up by Croozers that they had never even met before. After a quick dance atop the umbrella, they jumped, slipped, and backflipped off, all landing unharmed in the wood chips below.
Eventually, students filtered back to campus to bring that month’s Crooz to an end. Max Dunham ‘25 arrived pulling Griffin Silver ‘25 on a slowly dying PikeRide, making sure his friend got back to Yampa.
Students dismounted and disrobed, whooping as they ran naked through the snow. A first-time Croozer remarked on the strangeness of it all. “I was hesitant, but this guy Griffin told me it was a once-in-a-lifetime thing,” he said. Seeing others run around naked had given him the confidence to try it himself.
Clothed again, the Croozers gathered around the boombox, swaying arm in arm, singing along to “Dixieland Delight” by Alabama, before heading home to rest until the next Crooz.