It takes a pretty extreme college sports fan to realize that Rhode Island School of Design, one of the most prestigious art schools in the world, even has sports teams. It’s not something art schools are generally known for. But if you’ve heard of RISD’s hockey team, the Nads, you’ve likely found at least the name memorable. Their hockey team, the Pricks, sailing team, the Seamen and basketball team, the Balls are all tied together by the enthusiastic support of both a small group of fans, and the unofficial but widely loved RISD mascot, Scrotie.
As the one-time director of web editorial at RISD, way back in 2013-14, I received the assignment to, “Kill Scrotie.” At that time (no longer), if you googled RISD, the first image most people would be served was one of the giant foam phallus, along with his title as the official school mascot. But RISD the institution has never officially recognized his mascotry, and didn’t feel that he made an appropriate first impression or represented the school’s character. They asked me to remove all online evidence of Scrotie’s existence, which at the time was not possible through Google. Search Engine results pages have changed a lot since then, and you won’t find him featured in information about RISD, or on the RISD site itself (although searching specifically for “RISD mascot” will still get you an expansive body of content). Ever since then, Scrotie has been an underdog, outsider hero to me.
RISD Mascot Documentary
Filmmakers Zoe Lee and Lindsay Chu, along with co-director Ryan Lettieri, students at RISD, premiered a documentary about the Nads and the Scrotie experience. At the start of the summer, they premiered a 30-minute sampler of the project, using five years of gathered footage. Narragansett Brewery in PVD hosted the event, which culminated in a live MMA showdown between Scrotie and Gansett mascot Tallboy, a spirited, if bizarre, confrontation across the Brewery in which Tallboy was ultimately shafted as Scrotie claimed the win.
The footage shown was still very much in-progress, and the standing-room-only crowd was so excited and responsive that it was often hard to hear the film, but it came across as lighthearted and bizarre, while poking into bigger issues like the role of athletics in college, and where inappropriate humor fits in modern society.
“When I came to my first game, I didn’t realize RISD had any kind of a real team,” Lee explains of the origin of the project. Looking at the sparse collection of people in the stands, Lee thought, “Who are these fans? We definitely wanted to answer that question – the community around the Nads. They are the only team with deep community connections; there are random people connected to the team, much more than to the school.”
The Nads are a sort of hybrid-club team, so they have alumni and even professors on the team, who may remain much longer than the typical 4-year college tenure. They play against club teams at regional colleges not so well known for their hockey, including Brown, Tufts and MIT. As the filmmakers documented this community, they also became a part of it, forming relationships of all sorts. “I would drag this huge boombox and be the unofficial commentator [there was no official commentator]. The whole experience was so silly. Games and practice take place in the super-official, formal-looking Brown Ice Arena. The team really supported what we were doing, and got used to me and Lindsay being in the locker room every week. [The project] morphed from capturing clips into a real documentary. We took a minute to pause, and realized we were both the auteurs and really involved with our subjects. All these weird projects like merch sprang out of this.”
The filmmakers credit Seven Days in Hell, a 2015 mockumentary about a (fictional) 7-day long tennis match, with their tonal inspiration. “We were obsessed with that film,” Lee adds. A background in actual sports documentation had shown Lee the other end of the spectrum. “I have seen a lot of the harm that comes from elite athletics… This is the antithesis to typical college athletics. About training, but also having fun and developing community loyalty.”
The filmmakers have full-time jobs now, but they haven’t abandoned the project. What’s next for the film? “We are trying to find a way to release this story into the world in a way that is exciting and truthful,” says Lee, who is wrestling with over 90 hours of footage the team shot as well as archival footage. The makers are debating between a feature-length, a chaptered web series, or perhaps another format they haven’t fully conceived yet. They have long used an array of artistic talents to hone their fandom by creating merch, posters and multi-sensory experiences. Whatever this project evolves into, it’s sure to be different, and you can expect Scrotie to be there.
RISD did not officially respond to our inquiries for this story.
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