EIGHT YEARS AGO, on a brisk and sunny January afternoon, Nick Addington had a revelation. He was meeting with four fellow University of Washington classmates on campus at the HUB cafeteria to study gender concepts and the history of Western civilization. There, amid screeching chairs, piling porcelain plates, and clanging silverware, and in between the theories of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, a lightbulb went off in Addington’s head: “Let’s start a croquet club!”

Okay, so it was a procrastination-inspired revelation along the lines of “Let’s clean my room!” But the cockamamie idea stuck, and since that fateful day more than 630 people have played in what has come to be known as the University of Washington Honors Croquet League, a deceptively prestigious name for a ragtag gang of computer-science geeks, med students, law pundits in training, math majors, alumni, parents, and anyone else (student or no) with a thing for sending up the time-honored sport of croquet.

On one of last June’s many wet and gloomy afternoons, nine people showed up for the annual match of Blitzcroquet. “Blitz,” as in fast. And “croquet,” as in dash across campus, sending balls over crowded brick plazas, around manicured bushes, down concrete steps, and—hopefully—through nine strategically placed wickets along the way.

Children under three and animals are considered terrain. No running is allowed—although brisk, silly walking is encouraged.

Before the match, league executor Michelle Burce explained the rules. With short, ashy blonde hair and wearing a T-shirt bearing a skull and crossed mallets, she is the leader of the 50 or so croquet scallywags on the active roster. “People at barbecues who are drunk are considered terrain,” she says. “Much like children under three and animals are considered terrain. So if they move your ball, you play it where it lies.” Frequent use of the classic golf warning, fore, is required. No running is allowed—although brisk, silly walking is encouraged.

Outside the castle-esque walls of Denny Hall, the first heat of five players waits for the start like runners at a track meet; mallets in hand, balls at their feet…ready, set, go, thwack! And they’re off, though slowly and haphazardly, crisscrossing one another’s paths like so many drunken putt-putt golfers. “Foooore!!!” cries UW alum Brandon Martin-Anderson, a stocky software engineer, as he winds up and sends his ball bouncing past a couple with a toddler and down a brick pathway outside the engineering building. At 5:30 in the evening the square of Drumheller Fountain is relatively devoid of anything but the THWACK of mallets that echoes out and over the gothic steeples above the square. Suddenly, Burce’s ball emerges from the trees and skips over the pavement like a rock down the side of a steep cliff, then settles in a large puddle. “There we are,” she says a moment later, wading in after her ball and swinging with a loud splooosh of water.

“It’s never been about the croquet,” Addington said a few days earlier by phone from his grad school in Wisconsin. “It could have just as easily been badminton or lawn darts. It’s more about trying to be over the top.” With that as its guiding philosophy, the group holds uniquely themed tournaments that, on paper, read like a passage from Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham: They’ve had Alice in Wonderland–style matches with cookies and tea, matches on the roof of a nuclear physics lab, matches on the beach, and matches in the park, and matches at night dressed like ninjas in the dark. And with their hallowed tradition of dressing in “jaunty chapeaux” (or any excessively formal attire, like traditional all-white outfits, silly hats, vests, ties, and argyles), the club is definitely more about the cliché than the croquet.

After passing a barbecue on the way down Rainier Vista toward Husky Stadium, where the smell of freshly cooked hot dogs wafts through the air, the group arrives at Northeast Pacific Place, off Montlake Boulevard. Opting not to chip up to the final green on top of the Triangle parking garage, Burce picks up her ball and walks it there—where Martin-Anderson has already won the game. So much for a climactic shootout.