With the football season more than halfway complete and the upcoming game against UNC-Chapel Hill during Thanksgiving break, the Athletics Commission for the executive branch of Student Government is working on suggestions for next year’s ticketing.
According to Athletics Commission Chairman Jeffrey Johnson, one of the changes the commission discussed was in regards to group lottery points.
“Some students feel groups place an unfair advantage, so the solution to that would be to average the lottery points,” Johnson, a junior in business management, said.
The way group tickets work right now is if everyone in the group’s chance of receiving a ticket to the game is dependent on the group leader’s lottery points. However, the commission is suggesting that everyone in the group’s lottery points be averaged together to determine whether the entire group gets tickets to the game.
“So even if you had a freshman piggybacking on a senior group, the points will be averaged together,” Johnson said.
Additionally, Johnson said, the lottery points system caused some miscommunication between Athletics and Student Government and the student body at the beginning of the season.
“With the South Carolina game, with it being such a huge game opening up, there was a little bit of lack of communication,” he said.
Freshmen start the season with one loyalty point, whereas seniors start with five.
“Students didn’t exactly understand it, and once they started understanding it, they got frustrated because they didn’t know earlier how it worked,” Johnson said.
And according to Johnson, the commission discussed some of the ticketing changes planned for the game against UNC, which Senior Class President Jay Dawkins is spearheading.
Because the game is during Thanksgiving break and games during breaks usually have lower attendance rates, Dawkins said Athletics is working with Student Government and the Senior Class Council to make sure people fill the stands.
Dawkins said when attendance is low, Athletics has to work to spread students out in the stands.
But, because the game is versus UNC, Dawkins said the expectation for attendance is more than regular games during break.
“So, this year, Athletics allotted 6,400 tickets for student seats, which is nearly double the highest turnout for a Thanksgiving break game,” he said.
He said Student Government and the Senior Class Council is trying to hype students up to attend this game.
In a further effort to make sure the stands are filled and to help out with the Senior Class gift — a 2010 bell in the Bell Tower — Athletics is selling the rest of the student seats, about 1,500 seats, as individual tickets, open to the public, with some of the proceeds going to helping the Finish the Bell Tower campaign.
According to Dawkins, the last time Athletics helped the senior class with its gift was in 1947, “when ironically enough, they were fundraising to put bells in the tower.”
During that year, Dawkins said, the student body gave up their tickets for the game against Davidson to fundraise for the tower.
Both Johnson and Dawkins stressed the importance of student involvement in pre-game prep whether it’s guarding the Free Expression Tunnel or attending the pep rally or just requesting tickets to the UNC game.
“Athletics has given us more seats than usual with the expectation that we hype this up and drive attendance,” Dawkins said.
The available tickets will be in the north end zone, according to Dawkins.
