For the past two years, I have worked for all of you as the lead negotiator for our contract with the Athletic Department that provides us with tickets to men’s basketball and football games. It has been a struggle to say the least, and recently it has been as frustrating as ever.
Each year we, the ASUO Athletic Department Finance Committee, try to protect student seats and keep the cost down. Students currently pay about $16 for each ticket in advance and we can pick them up without any extra charge. We pay this through the incidental fee of which about $1 million goes into the sports contract. For the last two years it has been clear that we are not using all of the seats that we pay for, thus we have kept the fee from rising by giving up some of our least desirable basketball seats. Last year we changed the agreement so that the Athletic Department would have a better opportunity to sell any seats that we did not use during pre-season, i.e. games that occurred before the start of the academic year.
While we will pay the same amount to the Athletic Department this year as we did last year, they are asking us to give up our best seats during pre-season, the ones closest to the 50-yard line. They have not offered anything in return and say that they will not make much more money from these seats. We inquired as to why they wanted the seats and were told by the athletic director that those seats would help them cultivate prospective season ticket buyers. This seems fine to me, as anyone would want more season ticket holders, but there is a catch. They can’t sell the seats they already have during pre-season. This begs the question, why do they need our seats when they are giving other ones away?
It is hard for me to be too critical, because the person that we directly deal with, Sandy Walton, senior associate athletic director , is one of the most professional and fair people I have ever known. While I respect her to the fullest, my fellow committee members and I cannot agree to this with a clear conscience. Those seats have been ours ever since we started this system in 1987, which is 13 years of tradition. I feel in a way that we are entitled to those seats, especially since the students here pay more for their sports seats than any other school in the Pacific-10. Yes we get better seats because of that, but at the same time there is a threshold that we are dangerously close to crossing.
That threshold is the point where it is forgotten that the only reason that there was ever a University football team or a University in the first place is that the students are here. That threshold is also the point where we are not the priority anymore and it is more important for the Athletic Department to have some fat-cat donor from Portland in Autzen Stadium than it is to have the people who this University was created for. Those of us who have been trying to negotiate this contract understand the position that the Athletic Department is in. We are small in comparison with the schools that we are trying to compete with, but this does not make treating the students as a source of revenue acceptable.
There is another concern about giving up pre-season seats. We will never get them back and we fear that if we give them up for pre-season then we will be putting them on the table in the near future for the regular season. To solve this dilemma, we have proposed the following: 1) The Athletic Department will sign a contract with the ASUO that says the department will be required to offer us the same seats at a reasonable price for the next 10 years; 2) while the Athletic Department would be required to offer this, we would not be required to accept if we choose to go another route; 3) we proposed that the Athletic Department agree to continue to offer the same scenario for pre-season games for the same period. We hope that these terms will be met. While we are unhappy to give up our best section during pre-season games, we are prepared to make the sacrifice if it means that it will provide us with a guarantee that we will not have to fear losing any football seats for the next decade. We, the Athletic Department Finance Committee, have been elected by you, the students, to look out for your best interests; we hope that this letter will shed some light on our efforts to do so.