Teams from more than 50 schools across the United States will go head-to-head in front of audiences at Virginia Commonwealth University. But they won’t be vying for the ball — they’ll be duking it out with words.

The Binghamton Slam Poetry Club is raising money through online crowdfunding site Indiegogo to attend the 15th annual College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational (CUPSI), a performance poetry competition among groups from colleges across the U.S. from March 25-28. This is the first year the club plans to attend. As of Thursday night, it had reached its $1,000 goal.

At a slam, poets from each team perform an original piece individually or in a group. To eliminate bias, performances are scored by judges picked randomly from the audience. For slam poet Lindsay Young, a junior majoring in psychology, the randomness of the judging creates a challenge for performers.

“When it’s random people, you have to work more on the performance aspect to grab the average person’s attention,” Young said.

During a slam competition last semester at Late Nite Binghamton, Young, Daniel Roman, Maryam Haque, Tom Costello and Anna Szilagyi won the five spots to represent the dozens of members of BU’s Slam Poetry Club at the competition.

Poems at CUPSI are limited to three minutes, with judges scoring performances from 1-10 based on their physical presence, voice, articulation and writing. Performers cannot use music, props or costumes while performing. Teams with the most points move on to the next round of competition.

The Binghamton Slam Poetry Club has competed against other schools at smaller slams and plans to attend others, such as the Wade-Lewis Poetry Slam Invitational at SUNY New Paltz in March, to prepare for CUPSI.

For the five poets representing the club at CUPSI, preparation entails more than just memorizing poems. Roman, the president and founder of the club, stressed the importance of conveying the message of the poem to the audience.

“The audience is such a huge part of the slam,” said Roman, a senior majoring in English. “We love it when people let us know that they like something, they think a part is sad or if they think it’s funny. It’s all about being noisy and participating.”

Though nervous about the scale of the competition, Roman said the opportunity to share their poetry and learn from other performances will be a great experience for the team.

To help the poets develop, members have been attending weekly writing and performance workshops. According to Roman, the CUPSI team wants to work on more group pieces together during the semester.

“We’re all really close already, but it takes a special kind of bond to be comfortable sharing your personal work with someone, let alone having them make suggestions of how to change it,” Roman said.

Members like Anthony Pereira, a junior majoring in biomedical engineering, are confident that the team will represent Binghamton well in the competition due to its ability to connect with audiences.

“One of our team’s strong points is how varied as individuals they are,” Pereira said. “They’re all capable of giving the audience all of themselves.”

Editor’s note: Release writer Anna Szilagyi was not involved in editing this story.