To Mike Bellotti and the University of Oregon Athletic Department:
There’s no other way to put it, so I’ll just go out and say it: Pull the plug on the electronic
ticketing system.
Students have given it just more than a year of patience, but it isn’t working and it doesn’t appear that any amount of tweaking will solve the real problems. Bring back the paper tickets and let us line up for them, just like old times.
Intentions were noble when you, along with the ASUO, introduced electronic ticketing before the 2008 season. You didn’t like hearing the complaints from professors who held Monday morning classes, frequently skipped by students as they waited in line for their football tickets. The lines themselves turned into haphazard tent cities that, for lack of better phrasing, clogged the campus. On the business end, you wanted a piece of that elusive secondary ticket market, where you could receive a cut any time the ticket changed hands for monetary compensation. This is respectable.
Instead, we have full allotments of tickets being snatched up 30 seconds after being made available. There are technical problems, and too many students who follow the rules are being left out in the cold. What could you possibly say to students who could reasonably verify that they were logged onto goducks.com at the appropriate time, all information entered and accepted, who still come away empty-handed?
Tough luck?
There is no such thing as luck in the business of ticket sales. Students who want football and basketball tickets will go out of their way to get them. And at this school, where demand exceeds supply, there will always be students who fail to receive them no matter what form the tickets come in. Nevertheless, you have failed at the most basic tenet of student tickets: Get them into the hands of those who want them.
It’s true, of course, that the ASUO pays a healthy advance for the slice of student section Oregon students receive at Autzen Stadium. It’s also true that many students will obtain tickets for the exclusive purpose of selling them. But since the ASUO has already written out the check, can you really say you’re getting more of students’ money?
More of their time, maybe. More frustration, more headaches, more useless obstacles.
You have sucked the fun out of the rite of passage that is a student ticket. I derived meaning from the experience of waiting it out in the bitter cold of night for a scrap of paper with embossed letters and a bar code. It was glorious to see students lining outside of and around the EMU, waiting patiently for morning to come while watching videos, chatting with other students or participating in contests of varying levels of amusement and embarrassment. As a freshman, I once stripped to my boxers and ran a lap around the EMU at 3 a.m. for a free T-shirt. It was a good night.
Are you so worried about students missing class that they can’t feel secure about obtaining a student ticket by following your rules? Just give the tickets out on Sunday! That might even cut down on student partying. (Note: That will not cut down on student partying whatsoever. But Sunday would be a good day.)
Don’t forget about the people. I personally have met several very good friends from standing or sitting in a seemingly endless line, and my relationships with others have been strengthened by the mutual act of camping out. Something about the bitter cold and starvation drawing people together. Participation in these gatherings used to be a point of campus pride. Students care about athletics here. You have stripped them of their most public interface to express that.
There’s no way I’ll ever forget my favorite camp out experience — freshman year, at Autzen Stadium, after a friend convinced me to wait until Monday morning for $120 tickets to the men’s basketball NCAA regional in Spokane, Wash., where the Ducks had just been assigned. After a night of video games, movies, hotel reservations and general freezing, Ernie Kent pulled up to us at the ticket window with coffee and doughnuts. Ray Schafer came next, with some additional food and support for us. Finally, an athletic department intern came out to deliver the best news of all — the tickets would be paid for in full by then-athletic director Pat Kilkenny. The cheers could have been heard on the campus side of the river.
That’s the kind of experience I’d love to share with future classes of students. I worry, however, that you’ll be too set on your broken system to revert back to the days when students were happier and the act of obtaining a student ticket meant so much more.
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Bellotti: Please fix the ticket system
Daily Emerald
October 1, 2009
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