The ASUO’s Athletic Department Finance Committee is set to recover a large sum of money from the Athletic Department next week in compensation for 1,820 student tickets that were never given out for basketball home games this year.
ADFC Chair Kate Kranzush said the glitch was not intentional, and that the Athletic Department has been fully cooperative in getting the money back.
The 1,820 tickets, or 140 seats per game, come from section 13, where the band was moved this year because of NCAA regulations that bands can’t be too close to an opponent’s bench. The switch exposed a glitch; The tickets from the section were never distributed and the ADFC ended up with fewer tickets than stated in its 2002-03 ticket contract.
Associate Athletic Director Steve McBride found out about the discrepancy when counting stubs after a basketball game, and presented it to the ADFC in a Feb. 19 meeting.
“He was as surprised to learn about it as we were,” Kranzush said. “Steve had no idea about it.”
After it discovered the discrepancy, the ADFC hammered out an agreement to recover $33,989 in compensation. The figure is the total cost of the lost tickets minus almost $11,000 that the ADFC owes the Athletic Department for an upgrade this year in the computer ticketing system.
McBride was presented with the ADFC’s final plan Wednesday morning and still has to present it to Athletic Director Bill Moos, who is out of town. But McBride said he doesn’t think the plan will hit any speed bumps.
“I think it’s fair to say that they haven’t been getting all the tickets they paid for,” McBride said.
Most of the money will go into the McArthur Court Subsidy Fund, which helps student groups rent Mac Court for events. Some of the money will go into the Incidental Fee Clearing Account, which helps fund student groups, or the Student Senate Surplus Account.
Kranzush said this isn’t the first time a glitch like this has happened.
“It happened four or five years ago in football,” Kranzush said. “The Athletic Department did the same thing, they refunded the money, then they said that it would never happen in basketball. Well, here it is five years later, and it happened.”
McBride explained that the Athletic Department learned of the discrepancy in football when the band was moved out of the student section entirely, and the Athletic Department was forced to re-calculate the number of student seats. He said the basketball seating should have been re-calculated at that time, but, obviously, it wasn’t.
“I would describe it as an evolutionary thing,” McBride said.
McBride said next year’s basketball contract will likely be altered to exclude some of the band’s seats, but not all of them. He explained that extra seats have traditionally been given out because not everybody who picks up a ticket shows up for the game.
“The analogy everybody will understand is what airlines do, they over-book,” McBride said. “Most of the time they get it right and nobody knows the difference. It’s only when it’s your seat that you notice.”
Kranzush said the ADFC doesn’t know how many seasons the 140 tickets have gone to waste.
“We thought about looking into past years, but thought we’d have a better chance to recover our money from this season if we just focused on that,” Kranzush said.