By Nora Coghlan

coghlann17@grinnell.edu

Four years ago, Julia Broeker, Olivia Caro, Carly Macdonald and Linnea Schurig (all ’17) joined Grinnell’s newest Ultimate Frisbee team, the Grinneleanor Roosevelts. Now, they are the only founding members left on campus and they have decided to commemorate their time on the team with matching tattoos.

“We’re the last people that remember the beginning,” Caro said.

After naming the team after the activist and diplomat, the team felt they needed a cheer to represent the spirit of the team and the spirit of the woman they named themselves after.

“Eleanor Roosevelt has this quote that we made up a cheer from,” Caro said.

“It goes ‘women are like tea bags. You never know how strong they are until you put them in hot water,” Schurig explained.

Even with their signature cheer in mind when the senior members sought to commemorate their time on the team, they had trouble coming up with a tattoo-able symbol.

“We’ve been talking about this for two years,” Broeker said. 

“But we couldn’t come up with anything to get until spring break,” Schurig added.

“When we were brainstorming tattoos to get, the first thing we thought of was a portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt, but that is unreasonable to tattoo on our bodies,” Schurig said. “So we tried to think of alternate symbolism, like the tea bag thing.”

After they landed on tea bags, each of the athletes drew their own tea bag design for their own tattoos.

“[Broeker, Schurig and Caro] are all artists and I’m not really … and so they all drew their own tea bags and they were going to get theirs and I was going to pick one, but then I ended up just drawing my own so we all have our own drawing,” Macdonald said.

Schurig, Broeker, Caro and Macdonald can all look to their new tattoos to remember their time at Grinnell and the Grinneleanor Roosevelts.