After many student complaints, the oft-lamented online student athletic ticket distribution system will switch back to a tiered distribution system. The change goes into effect Sunday, when ticket distribution is scheduled for the Arizona State game.
Come Sunday, student tickets to the football game will become available online at 9 a.m. to graduate students, 10 a.m. to seniors, and so on, becoming available to the next level of academic standing every hour until freshmen gain access at 1 p.m.
The change was prompted by ASUO President Emma Kallaway after heeding complaints from students in several forms.
“It was the phone calls to the ASUO office, it was the e-mails to my personal e-mail account, it was really the students saying ‘This isn’t working for me,’” she said.
She said the creation of Facebook groups in opposition to the ticketing system was also an effective way to make clear the extent of students’ frustration.
The reason the change is coming now, with only two home games left in the Ducks’ season, is because Kallaway said she was taking time to fully evaluate the issue and approach the solution with a level head.
“It was important that we collected all appropriate forms of information — that I felt like I heard from enough students,” she said. “This is the first game where we really had the ability to act upon because everything takes a little while to change, especially in the middle of the year and in the middle of a contract.”
Kallaway added, “This is the fastest that we could get it done, and we wanted to make sure that we didn’t let the football season go by without recognizing that students were frustrated.”
Kallaway met with Duck Athletic Fund Executive Director Garrett Klassy on Monday to discuss the issue, and she announced the product at that meeting at Wednesday’s Senate meeting.
“Emma felt pretty strongly about going back to the staggered system of last year,” Klassy said.
Kallaway noted the “Wi-Fi bog down,” which she believes is causing the trouble. By staggering the distribution times, the hope is that the Internet-use overload will not occur.
Klassy said students claim all of the tickets each week, and graduate student and senior tickets last the longest. With the new system, the leftover tickets from the previous time slot will become available to students in the following time slot.
Alex McCafferty, ASUO senator and chairman of the Athletics and Contracts Finance Committee, was surprised by the announcement and upset that he was not included in the action taken by the ASUO.
In his third year working with the Athletic Department, McCafferty, the architect of the 2009 ticketing policy, said he was not pleased with the way Kallaway bypassed his position as ACFC chairman.
“I think that it’s really good that the executive took charge and took initiative. One of the responsibilities and privileges of exec is that they can use their title and authority to get things done quickly,” he said. “At the same time, given my knowledge and insight and historical perspective with the ticketing system, it would have been beneficial to include me in this process.”
Even though the process for the change was not his ideal, McCafferty thinks the new system will aid in students’ ease in obtaining tickets.
“This will help in central campus locations — those servers might get crowded with student use,” he said. “This will give more breathing room in terms of bandwidth.”
Also discussed were options for distribution of tickets to the Civil War game.
“It’s a game that everyone wants to go to; it’s really important that as a University of Oregon student and as a Duck to make sure that we show up en masse to that game and students feel like they got the opportunity to at least try to get a ticket,” Kallaway said. She is exploring everything from camping out to using the same system as this season as options for Civil War ticket distribution.
Sophomore Gregg Abernathy was pleased to hear the news, saying that with the most recent system, “I could never get logged on and it was pretty frustrating.” Although the waiting-in-line system was before his time, Abernathy said that method seemed like the best idea.
“If someone wants to get a ticket, they would put forth the effort,” he said of the former system.
The plan for spreading word of the change includes e-mailing students and “doing the best we possibly can to make sure students know,” Kallaway said. “It’s either not a great time or not at all.”
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