Not only is it time for Coach Lowe to go back to the drawing board, but students and administrators also need to take a serious look at revising the ticketing policy before next year’s season. While it’s encouraging to see preliminary meetings taking place, too many times all these meetings turn into is nothing more than talk. Student attendance needs to improve for all games, not just the big conference games, and that’s as much a product of the quality of the team as it is the procedures around getting tickets.
As much as I hate general admission for football games, I think it’s the answer for basketball. With football comes tailgating, but with basketball there’s no reason any student should be at the game late. General Admission will ensure that as many students as possible get into the game and sit as close to the court as possible. This will provide the necessary energy at tip off. It will also eliminate inconsistencies in the “on-demand” phase of the system and ensure that large swaths of seats aren’t empty for games.
General admission will ensure a packed house on the lower levels and encourage students to get into the game even earlier. If we want to encourage an overall boost in attendance at all games, there needs to be a reward system similar to the one used by the Student Wolfpack Club — the more nonconference games he or she attends as a student earlier in the year, the better chance a student should have to get a prime ticket to the UNC-Chapel Hill or Duke games later in the season.
We obviously have the software in place to make this practical, since we can be penalized and have our chance diminished for missing games. Why not add points using the online system and give better chances to students who watched us blow out a cupcake in November?
Campouts need to be without size limitations. If 3,000 students are passionate enough to camp out to get a ticket and there are only 3,000 tickets, then there is no reason we should cull that number just to reserve tickets for students that didn’t care enough to give up a Saturday night for the game. Camping out for tickets is slowly becoming a tradition at N.C. State, and we should foster this event and reward dedicated students rather than limit it.
The “On-Demand” phase needs to run right up until tip-off of the game so those that didn’t plan on going to an early nonconference game a week in advance can log on, print a ticket and attend. It’s frustrating when it’s obvious tickets are left, but the system won’t let anyone print a ticket off because the window expired. Money aside, students should be able to go into any gate in the arena with the ticket. With all the money that NCSU has, it’s ridiculous to think that we can’t find a few thousand more dollars to pay for bar code scanners at every entrance for football and basketball. Would you like to see changes in the ticket distribution system? E-mail Benton your thoughts at [email protected]
